HUMAN ECHO.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 28, 13 November 1939, Page 8

HUMAN ECHO.

EXPERTS NONPLUSSED. Francis Magner, a human echo who simultaneously duplicates another’s speech, has natural science puzzled with his involuntary knack of taking words out of people’s mouths, says the “Christian Science Monitor.’’ “I’m stumped,” admitted Dr. Carleton F. Scofield, professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo, after testing the 19-year-old youth with - classic quotations, scientific tongue twisters and even foreign languages. “This boy reproduces the talk of others without a perceptible time interval between words of the speaker and his own,” Dr. Scofield, added. Dr. Scofield began his experiment by putting the youth through a series of tests involving complicated neurological terms. The youth responded immediately. “I’ll now recite a few lines of poetry,” the psychologist said. He began: “Hence loathed melancholy,” and Magner, picking him up with the first syllable, recited with him: “Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born in stygian cave forlorn. ’Mongst horrid shapes and sights and Sounds unholy. ’A’lim . . .” Word for word, the speech emerged a duet on the lips of his subject, even to the “A’hrn.” “I can do this without looking at a person,” Magner said, “just as long as 1 can hear him.” “The boy has such a great capacity of highly-skilled attention to the variation of sounds as they appear -in speech, that is phenomenal,” Dr. Scofield declared.