Evil Spock conducts a mind-meld with Good Dr. McCoy in the Star Trek: TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror.”
5 February 2025
Science fiction is a productive source of neologisms. Sometimes what is envisioned in fiction enters the lexicon before science makes it a reality, and sometimes futuristic and fantastic concepts that can never be real enter the language through the genre. When we talk of the intersection between science fiction and popular culture, conversation inevitably turns to Star Trek. The original television series ran from 1966–69 and bequeathed to us any number of spin-off series, movies, cartoons, and books, but it also left us with an enriched vocabulary. Alongside phasers and warp speed, the TV show gave us the mind-meld.
In the TV series, mind-melding is an ability possessed by the telepathic race of Vulcans to join the thoughts of two individuals. The 1968 book The Making of Star Trek describes the ability thusly:
Another unique Vulcan ability exhibited by Spock is a type of ESP that the Vulcans refer to as “mind-melding.” He can merge his mind with that of another intelligence and read its thoughts. While he will use this ability when circumstances make it absolutely necessary, he dislikes doing so because the process requires emotional contact as well, thus robbing him of his stoic mask and revealing too much of his inner self. The physical cost of this process is also quite high.
In the series Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–05), set several generations before the original series, mind-melding is portrayed as an ability that is forbidden, practiced only by a cult considered to be subversive. Evidently in the intervening generations its use became permitted, although still not widespread.
The term first appears in the script for the episode “Elaan of Troyius.” The script for the episode was penned by J. M. Lucas on 23 May 1968, before The Making of Star Trek was published. The episode aired on 20 December:
Mr. Spock, […] he refuses to talk. I’ll need you for the Vulcan mind-meld.
Ironically, while it is named in the episode, Spock does not actually conduct a mind-meld in it.
While the script for “Elaan of Troyius” is the earliest known use of the term, the episode “Spectre of the Gun” (aired 25 October 1968) was the first on-air use of the term, when Kirk refers to it as the Vulcan mind-meld.
These were the first uses of mind-meld, but it wasn’t the first use of the concept in the series, which went by a variety of names. Spock’s telepathic ability appears without a name several times in the series’s first season. It is dubbed the Vulcan mind probe in the second-season episode “The Changeling” (aired 29 September 1967). In the episode “Patterns of Force” (aired 16 February 1968), Kirk also refers to it as the Vulcan mind probe. And in “By Any Other Name” (aired 23 February 1968), Kirk repeats Vulcan mind probe, while Dr. McCoy calls it a mind touch. Spock calls it the Vulcan mind fusion in the third-season episode “The Paradise Syndrome” (aired 4 October 1968). And In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” (aired 18 October 1968) Spock refers to it as a mind link eleven times, more uses than all the other names for the ability in the original series, the movies starring the cast of the original series, and the series Star Trek: The Next Generation put together. The ability is featured twice in the animated series (1973–75), both times called the Vulcan mind touch. It is not until Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) does mind-meld become cemented in the Star Trek universe as the name for the ability. No other names for the ability are used in the Star Trek universe after this.
While the word mind-meld is original to Star Trek, the TV series did not invent the concept. In his 1954 short story The Censors, J. F. Burke uses the term mind link to describe a similar ability. Other writers have used the phrase mind link since, but it was Star Trek that brought the concept to and cemented it in the public consciousness.
Within a decade after its appearance in the TV series, mind-meld was being used to refer to a deep understanding or non-verbal communication between two people. It appears in the pages of the Washington Star on 21 November 1976:
On Broadway, “Equus”—they highly stylized dramatization of the mind meld between a psychiatrist and his young patient—is the artistic and commercial dramatic success of the year.
One of the signs that a word has caught on and become a permanent part of the lexicon is when it becomes another part of speech. Mind-meld has become a verb, appearing as early as 1976 in a cartoon parody of a science fiction fan convention, Phil Foglio’s, And Then ... New York:
We’re backstage still waiting for Leonard Nimoy, who has gone thru 3 albums, mind-melded with 4 Trekkies and a Wells Fargo guard, faith healed a sick cat, and is halfway thru his current book.
The verb appears in a science-fiction-but-non-Star Trek context in Sharyn McCrumb’s 1988 superbly named Bimbos of the Death Sun, a mystery novel set at a sci-fi convention. In the passage in question an organizer of a sci-fi convention has to appease a famous sci-fi writer who has asked for a particular type of British candy:
“We need some British candy, folks! Anybody got any? All help will be appreciated.”
A wave of shrugs passed through the clumps of people, but after a few moments of silence, a blonde girl in a green tunic and blue body-paint approached them. “British,” she said shyly to Diefenbaker. “Like . . . does that include Scotland?”
Diefenbaker hastily changed a snicker into an encouraging smile. “Yes, Kathy. Indeed it does. Why?”
She twisted her yellow sash and shifted from one foot to the other in an effort of concentration. “Well . . . like I met this guy today, you know, in the elevator, and he said he was from Scotland, but he wasn’t dressed up or anything. He was just in regular old jeans. I’d say he was a mundane. But he might like candy!”
“I’ll find him if I have to mind-meld the desk clerk!” cried Miles, hurrying away.
And you know a pop culture reference has come of age when a major politician flubs it. At a press conference on 1 March 2013 US President Barack Obama melded two different strains of science fiction when he said:
Most people agree that I’m presenting a fair deal. The fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a “Jedi mind-meld” with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.
He, of course, meant Jedi mind trick, which is another thing altogether and from Star Wars, not Star Trek.
What is most curious about mind-meld, however, is how it became the standard term in fan discourse before the writers of the Star Trek universe had settled on the term. Mind-meld is not the favored term in the original series, yet it is the one that fans adopted. It was only at the end of the 1970s, with the first of the Star Trek movies, that mind meld became the dominant term in the universe’s canon. It may be that the book The Making of Star Trek had an influence on fans more than on the series’s writers, or it may be that the alliterative mind-meld is simply more pleasing to the ear than mind link or mind probe.
Sources:
Burke, J. F. “The Censors.” Authentic Science Fiction, 41, 15 January 1954, 98–112 at 105. Archive.org.
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 18 February 2021, s.v. mind-meld, n.; 17 November 2024, s.v. mindmeld, v., mindlink, n.
McCollum, Charlie. “A Series of Movies that Can Blow Your Mind.” Washington Star (Washington, DC), 21 November 1976, G-7/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
McCrumb, Sharyn. Bimbos of the Death Sun. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: TSR, 1988, 19–21. Archive.org.
Meta Trek. “A Mind Meld by any Other Name | Star Trek: TOS.” YouTube, 2022.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 1999, mind-meld, n.; 2006, mind-meld, v.
Whitfield, Stephen E. and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 227. Archive.org.
Photo credit: Desilu Productions/Paramount Television, 1967. Fair use of a single frame from a television episode to illustrate the topic under discussion.