He and his friends made their own Ouija board by writing the alphabet on a piece of paper and using an upturned wineglass as a planchette.
However, he adds, he and his friends were simply experiencing a long-known phenomenon called the ideomotor effect. Basically, the ideomotor effect is subconscious, involuntary movement; scientists first documented it in What about the messages? Our subconscious minds are responsible for those too. Andersen published a study in looking at how these predictions play out in Ouija sessions. His team asked participants to wear goggles outfitted with cameras to track their eye movement.
Are you here? Are you near? Are you old? Are you young? Are we alone? Did you murder? How long ago did you die? How long have you been dead? How long have you been here? How many are in this room? How many ghosts are in here? How many ghosts are in this room? How many people are in here? 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.
If the ghost is a Demon, you won't take any at all. If it's worked, the indicator on the board will start moving to spell out the answer to your question. Well, hopefully.
As with asking questions via the spirit box, ghosts sometimes give you non-sequitur answers. They're a flighty bunch. You'll also get a reading on your EMF reader during a successful answer, if you happen to have one handy.
Lauren loves long books and even longer RPGs.
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