Ouija board are there any communications

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. They reported their findings in February issue of Consciousness and Cognition.

Those types of questions include how much and what the non-conscious mind knows, how fast it can learn, how it remembers, even how it amuses itself, if it does.

If it impacted the non-conscious earlier, Rensink hypothesizes, indications of the illness could show up in Ouija manipulation, possibly even before being detected in conscious thought.

Maybe you thought more sinister forces were making it move, or simply someone else sitting around the table. Ideomotor movements are unconscious gestures we make in response to strong ideas or emotions. The Ouija board, from its design to the myths surrounding it, practically hums with the desire for movement. We have this idea of the pointer swooping around the board. Those thoughts prime our hands unconsciously, almost irresistibly, to make that first twitch.

Now balance something like a bamboo cane all down this line of fingers, and tell them all to lower it to the ground. To their disbelief, they will all start lifting the cane higher and higher into their air. Sometimes the questions asked of the board are answerable by one of the participants, who unknowingly begins spelling out an answer and unintentionally encourages others to do the same.

Other times, the question is broad and open-ended, providing room for an eager group to invent it together. That potential for surprise was part of the allure of Spiritualism, the religious movement from which the Ouija board grew. Popular in Europe as a fad focused on contacting the dead, Spiritualism caught on in America in with the Fox sisters.

They were young girls from upstate New York who claimed to communicate with a spirit in their house via a series of unexplained rappings.

Spiritualism blossomed from there, with as many mediums popping up as there were spirits willing to spill the secrets of the afterlife.

Originally known as a spirit board or talking board, the first Ouija boards were made with household objects in the mid s. Users pushed a glass toward alphabet cards on a table, or even moved the table itself.

Moving a planchette was easier than chasing a flying table around the room. But there is no ghost, and when the Ouija board users are deprived of their ability to spell out words they can see, the game rapidly devolves into gibberish. Talking boards first became popular in midth-century America, when millions of people suddenly gained an interest in talking to the dead following the tremendous loss of life in the Civil War.

The popularity of talking boards, and their use as a tool to exploit grieving war families, meant scientists actually started studying the ideomotor effect in the midcentury , well before Ouija boards and planchettes were patented in Over the years, research has determined that the ideomotor effect is closely tied to subconscious awareness — and that its effect is maximized when the subject believes he has no control of his movements.

Paradoxically, the less control you think you have, the more control your subconscious mind is actually exerting. The effect might also make the Ouija board an effective tool to help you tap into your own subconscious. The researchers behind that study have gone on to speculate that using the Ouija board as a technique to unlock subconscious knowledge could lead to insights about the early onset of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

In other words, the Ouija board is potentially a very powerful communication tool — just not in the way most people think. This real physical effect causes some people to believe that seemingly miraculous or paranormal phenomena are behind certain behaviors and occurrences. Often, the ideomotor effect is used to defraud people who visit exorcists, psychics, mediums, and other self-proclaimed spirit-channeling types — sometimes leading to severe financial, physical , and psychological harm.

Dowsing is another example of the ideomotor effect being exploited for financial gain. Ironically, the same factor lies at the heart of both the cause and the effects of the ideomotor phenomenon: We want to believe. In reality, the true wonder of the Ouija board is what lies within our own subconscious. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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