As a scientist, I'm always looking for ways to explain or confirm the paranormal. This article from BBC News on July 29 provides an interesting explanation of how the ouija board plancehette moves. I think that some of it is our motion, but some may also be from the thoughts of ghosts and spirits on the other side. I've found that Ouija board use tends to open doors to any type of ghost or spirit- and some of them are not good. I'd be curious to hear what you think.
Rob
ARTICLE: How the ouija board really moves
The mystery isn’t a connection to the spirit world, but why we can make movements and yet not realise that we're making them.
Ouija board cups and dowsing wands – just two examples of mystical
items that seem to move of their own accord, when they are really being
moved by the people holding them. The only mystery is not one of a
connection to the spirit world, but of why we can make movements and yet
not realise that we're making them.
The phenomenon is called the
ideomotor effect
and you can witness it yourself if you hang a small weight like a
button or a ring from a string (ideally more than a foot long). Hold the
end of the string with your arm out in front of you, so the weight
hangs down freely. Try to hold your arm completely still. The weight
will start to swing clockwise or anticlockwise in small circles. Do not
start this motion yourself. Instead, just ask yourself a question – any
question – and say that the weight will swing clockwise to answer "Yes"
and anticlockwise for "No". Hold this thought in mind, and soon, even
though you are trying not to make any motion, the weight will start to
swing in answer to your question.
Magic? Only the ordinary
everyday magic of consciousness. There's no supernatural force at work,
just tiny movements you are making without realising. The string allows
these movements to be exaggerated, the inertia of the weight allows them
to be conserved and built on until they form a regular swinging motion.
The effect is known as Chevreul's Pendulum, after the 19th Century
French scientist who investigated it.
What is happening with
Chevreul's Pendulum is that you are witnessing a movement (of the
weight) without "owning" that movement as being caused by you. The same
basic phenomenon underlies dowsing – where small movements of the hands
cause the dowsing wand to swing wildly – or the Ouija board, where
multiple people hold a cup and it seems to move of its own accord to
answer questions by spelling out letters.
This effect also underlies the sad case of "
facilitated communication",
a fad whereby carers believed they could help severely disabled
children communicate by guiding their fingers around a keyboard.
Research showed that the carers – completely innocently – were typing
the messages themselves, rather than interpreting movements from their
charges.
The interesting thing about the phenomenon is what it
says about the mind. That we can make movements that we don't realise
we're making suggests that we shouldn't be so confident in our other
judgements about what movements we think are ours. Sure enough, in the
right circumstances, you can get people to believe they have caused
things that actually come from a completely independent source
(something which shouldn't surprise anyone who has reflected on the
madness of people who claim that it only started raining because they
forget an umbrella).
You can read what this means for the nature of our minds in
The Illusion of Conscious Will by psychologist Daniel Wegner, who sadly
died last month.
Wegner argued that our normal sense of owning an action is an illusion,
or – if you will – a construction. The mental processes which directly
control our movements are not connected to the same processes which
figure out what caused what, he claimed.
The situation is not that
of a mental command-and-control structure like a disciplined army;
whereby a general issues orders to the troops, they carry out the order
and the general gets back a report saying "Sir! We did it. The right
hand is moving into action!". The situation is more akin to an organised
collective, claims Wegner: the general can issue orders, and watch what
happens, but he's never sure exactly what caused what. Instead, just
like with other people, our consciousness (the general in this metaphor)
has to apply some principles to figure out when a movement is one we've
made.
One of these principles is that cause has to be consistent
with effect. If you think "I'll move my hand" and your hand moves,
you're likely to automatically get the feeling that the movement was one
you made. The principle is broken when the thought is different from
the effect, such as with Chevreul's Pendulum. If you think "I'm not
moving my hand", you are less inclined to connect any small movements
you make with such large visual effects.
This maybe explains why
kids can shout "It wasn't me!" after breaking something in plain sight.
They thought to themselves "I'll just give this a little push", and when
it falls off the table and breaks it doesn't feel like something they
did.
Article:
BBC News Story from July 29, 2013 on What Makes the Ouija Board Move
