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What is this, and how can we cope? Ouija boards: Science explains the spooky sensation. Share on Pinterest Ouija board enthusiasts report that the planchette shown here on the left moves on its own…but science begs to differ. That is, until In that year, The Exorcist scared the pants off people in theaters, with all that pea soup and head-spinning and supposedly based on a true story business; and the implication that year-old Regan was possessed by a demon after playing with a Ouija board by herself changed how people saw the board.
Almost overnight, Ouija became a tool of the devil and, for that reason, a tool of horror writers and moviemakers—it began popping up in scary movies, usually opening the door to evil spirits hell-bent on ripping apart co-eds.
Christian religious groups still remain wary of the board, citing scripture denouncing communication with spirits through mediums—Catholic. Even within the paranormal community, Ouija boards enjoyed a dodgy reputation—Murch says that when he first began speaking at paranormal conventions, he was told to leave his antique boards at home because they scared people too much.
Parker Brothers and later, Hasbro, after they acquired Parker Brothers in , still sold hundreds of thousands of them, but the reasons why people were buying them had changed significantly: Ouija boards were spooky rather than spiritual, with a distinct frisson of danger.
In , rumors that Universal was in talks to make a film based on the game abounded, although Hasbro refused to comment on that or anything else for this story. Ouija boards are not, scientists say, powered by spirits or even demons. Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than years: the ideometer effect.
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.
If we cannot predict the sensory consequences of our own actions, we feel a loss of control. That loss of control was most felt by the participants who believed in the supernatural, while the other participants reported they felt a higher sense of agency in their lives.
Both groups, however, demonstrated the ideomotor effect while they played. This phenomenon describes the way a sensory stimulus can unconsciously initiate physical action, even though participants may have felt a loss of conscious control.
Jay Olson, Ph. But Olson also points out other research has demonstrated that a distorted sense of agency can even occur when just one person holds the planchette. In a study , blindfolded participants were told a partner was moving the planchette with them when, in reality, they were the only ones pushing it around.
Ultimately, though, we do not understand how sense of agency distortions occur so readily and consistently in these situations.
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