Winning Moves Games 1175 Ouija Board Game

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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. “It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” recalled Fels. “It was so dramatic we couldn’t believe it.” The implication was, Fels explained, that one’s non-conscious was a lot smarter than anyone knew. Another explanation, which is also linked to the ideomotor effect, is related to our sense of agency. Sense of agency refers to our subjective ability to control actions that will have an influence on external events. So for example, if you decide to lift a table up, it will cause it to move. The board’s instant and now, more than 120 years later, prolonged success showed that it had tapped into a weird place in American culture. It was marketed as both mystical oracle and as family entertainment, fun with an element of other-worldly excitement. This meant that it wasn’t only spiritualists who bought the board; in fact, the people who disliked the Ouija board the most tended to be spirit mediums, as they’d just found their job as spiritual middleman cut out. The Ouija board appealed to people from across a wide spectrum of ages, professions, and education—mostly, Murch claims, because the Ouija board offered a fun way for people to believe in something. “People want to believe. The need to believe that something else is out there is powerful,” he says. “This thing is one of those things that allows them to express that belief.”

UBC’s experiments show that the Ouija could be a very useful tool in rigorously investigating non-conscious thought processes. “Now that we have some hypotheses in terms of what’s going on here, accessing knowledge and cognitive abilities that you don’t have conscious awareness of, [the Ouija board] would be an instrument to actually get at that,” Fels explains. “Now we can start using it to ask other types of questions.” One possible answer is the ideomotor effect. The term ideomotor stems from ideo (an idea) and motor (muscular activity), suggesting our movements can be driven by our thoughts. The ideomotor effect refers to movements people make that they’re unaware of – referred to as a subconscious movement. So when using a Ouija board for example, a person may subconsciously move the planchette, spelling out things only they could know. Despite being around for more than 100 years, Ouija boards (a wooden board covered with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words “yes”, “no” and “goodbye”) continue to be a popular activity – especially around Halloween. To work, all participants must place their hands on the wooden pointer (or planchette) and ask any present “spirits” to answer their questions by moving the planchette around the board to spell out their response. Though truth in advertising is hard to come by, especially in products from the 19th century, the Ouija board was “interesting and mysterious”; it actually had been “proven” to work at the Patent Office before its patent was allowed to proceed; and today, even psychologists believe that it may offer a link between the known and the unknown. Ouija boards are not, scientists say, powered by spirits or even demons. Disappointing but also potentially useful—because they’re powered by us, even when we protest that we’re not doing it, we swear. Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than 160 years: the ideometer effect. In 1852, 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. In 1853, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, intrigued by table-turning, conducted a series of experiments that proved to him (though not to most spiritualists) that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants.

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The effect is very convincing. As Dr. Chris French, professor of psychology and anomalistic psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, explains, “It can generate a very strong impression that the movement is being caused by some outside agency, but it’s not.” Other devices, such as dowsing rods, or more recently, the fake bomb detection kits that deceived scores of international governments and armed services, work on the same principle of non-conscious movement. “The thing about all these mechanisms we’re talking about, dowsing rods, Oujia boards, pendulums, these small tables, they’re all devices whereby a quite a small muscular movement can cause quite a large effect,” he says. Planchettes, in particular, are well-suited for their task—many used to be constructed of a lightweight wooden board and fitted with small casters to help them move more smoothly and freely; now, they’re usually plastic and have felt feet, which also help it slide over the board easily. Our woodcrafters create boards and planchettes of different sizes and shapes to make them as inspiring, original, and suitable for the regular spiritual practices. Modern occultists, neopagans, and witches use talking board to get the answers to any questions and reveal hidden mysteries. 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. This opens up even more avenues of exploration—for example, if there are two or more systems of information processes, which system is more impacted by neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s? 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.

Experiments with Ouija boards have demonstrated that our sense of agency can be manipulated, leading us to think that an invisible third party is moving the planchette. This is thought to be due to issues our brain faces around predicting the consequences of outcomes. When our predictions match the outcome (for example, you lift the table and the table moves), we feel that we are responsible for the action. But if we feel the actual outcome doesn’t match up with how we expected things to turn out, then our sense of agency decreases – and it’s possible that, in the context of a seance, we may instead attribute this movement as coming from an external source. But despite its early popularity, the Ouija board fell out of favour at the start of the 20th century. This was largely due to many famous mediums who used the device being publicly debunked. Even the Society for Psychical Research moved away from spirit communication, towards other paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (the ability to send and receive information with your mind) and haunted houses. However, interest in spiritualism and Ouija boards more generally was rapidly revived after the second world war – and continues to this day. Ouija boards at work 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. This meant that the participant believed he or she wasn’t alone, enabling the kind of automatic pilot state the researchers were looking for, but still ensuring that the answers could only come from the participant.While some see it as a harmless parlour game, others swear by the board’s ability to communicate with those who have passed to the “other side”. But though science suggests that ghosts aren’t behind the board’s mysterious movements, the explanation for how they do work isn’t as straightforward as you might expect. The first patent offers no explanation as to how the device works, just asserts that it does. That ambiguity and mystery was part of a more or less conscious marketing effort. “These were very shrewd businessmen,” notes Murch; the less the Kennard company said about how the board worked, the more mysterious it seemed—and the more people wanted to buy it. “Ultimately, it was a money-maker. They didn’t care why people thought it worked.” A traditional Ouija board set consists of the rectangular board with an alphabet, numbers from zero to nine, and words "yes", "no", and "bye", and a small planchette with a magnifying glass, to make reading the messages from the other side simple and accurate.