In , physician and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, examining these automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example. Almost immediately, other researchers saw applications of the ideometer effect in the popular spiritualist pastimes.
The effect is very convincing. As Dr. Moreover, in most situations, there is an expectation or suggestion that the board is somehow mystical or magical. Quite a lot, actually. The idea that the mind has multiple levels of information processing is by no means a new one, although exactly what to call those levels remains up for debate: Conscious, unconscious, subconscious, pre-conscious, zombie mind are all terms that have been or are currently used, and all have their supporters and detractors.
Two years ago, Dr. Sidney Fels, professor of electrical and computer engineering, began looking at exactly what happens when people sit down to use a Ouija board. Fels says that they got the idea after he hosted a Halloween party with a fortune-telling theme and found himself explaining to several foreign students, who had never really seen it before, how the Ouija works.
After offering up a more Halloween-friendly, mystical explanation—leaving out the ideomotor effect—he left the students to play with the board on their own. When he came back, hours later, they were still at it, although by now much more freaked out. A few days post-hangover later, Fels said, he, Rensink, and a few others began talking about what is actually going on with the Ouija.
The team thought the board could offer a really unique way to examine non-conscious knowledge, to determine whether ideomotor action could also express what the non-conscious knows. Their initial experiments involved a Ouija-playing robot: Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. Were the Olympic Games held in Sydney?
What the team found surprised them: When participants were asked, verbally, to guess the answers to the best of their ability, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they answered using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time. The robot, unfortunately, proved too delicate for further experiments, but the researchers were sufficiently intrigued to pursue further Ouija research.
They divined another experiment: This time, rather than a robot, the participant actually played with a real human. At some point, the participant was blindfolded—and the other player, really a confederate, quietly took their hands off the planchette.
It worked. That was a good sign that we really got this kind of condition that people were convinced that somebody else was there.
The story of the Ouija board, however, is more than a tale of snake oil salesmen duping the Victorian masses or, subsequently, a game of harmless fun at a million junior-high sleepovers.
Now, we do everything we can in hopes of avoiding aging, let alone engage in any real thoughts of death. But in the s, people only lived to be 50 years old.
Mothers would have 12 children and six of them would die. Their parlor rooms were also their funeral rooms.
There always is when money is at stake, and by the early s, some 2, Ouija boards were already being sold a week. William Fuld, who worked for and invested in the Kennard Novelty Company—and eventually gained control of the Ouija business after the founder cashed out too early—went on to make millions manufacturing the board in Baltimore and elsewhere, but only after his brother was cut out of the company. Their ensuing lawsuits were no mere spat. The two sides of the family would not speak for 96 years.
And, tragically, William Fuld would suffer a fatal accident at his Harford Avenue factory, one he claimed in a Baltimore Sun story that the Ouija had told him to build. In , the first year it was headquartered in the town infamous for its witch trials, Ouija sold two million boards. Norman Rockwell, who was fond of depicting the revealing moments of everyday life, painted a well-dressed suitor and young woman, chairs pulled face-to-face, playing with a Ouija board for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in Yeats, friend Maya Deren, and the Archangel Michael.
But over time, the relative innocence of the Ouija board—or at least its nonpartisan relationship between good and evil—gave way to a more sinister reputation as Hollywood began utilizing it for darker purposes. Since then, it has shown up in more than 20 films, and made countless appearances in the ever-growing number of paranormal-themed TV shows. In , he packed his bag with a notebook, video camera, and eye-tracking equipment, and set off for Baltimore in the US with a research assistant.
They were headed to a conference for people that communicate with the dead via Ouija boards. Instead of a glass, they use a triangular piece of plastic, called a planchette, which moves around the board and points to letters, numbers, and individual words such as yes or no. The results are published in the scientific journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Read More: Why horror is so popular. As you might expect, when the participants spelled out Baltimore, they looked at the next letter ahead of time before moving the planchette to that letter. In other words, they could easily predict where the planchette would end up. But when they moved on to the second task to conduct a Ouija board session as usual , it was much more difficult for the individual participants to predict where the planchette would move.
And here is the paradox: How can the participants be unable to predict the word that will be spelled out hence the belief that a spirit did it when more than years of research shows that the participants are clearly moving the glass themselves? Read More: Horror games can be more frightening than movies. Read More: Religious and superstitious people understand the physical world less than atheists.
He was not involved with it, but has 25 years of experience researching how we communicate via others or using objects. Read More: Secrets and lies: The psychology of conspiracy theories. The Baltimore experiment also shows that people, who believe that the Ouija board can be used to contact the dead, are also more likely to believe that the planchette moves itself, compared to those who are more sceptical.
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