Looking for a fun way to communicate with spirits? If you’re thinking about grabbing a Ouija board for your next conversation with another party, you might want to think again.
Despite their long history as cheats turned spiritual devices turned hit toys Satan’s tool, the Ouija board will not actually put you in touch with ghosts or ghosts. Any scary live reports you may hear or read Real life Ouija board horror stories Exaggeration, false claims, or a misunderstanding of how Ouija boards actually work.
Not only are Ouija boards sadly driven by all-too-human methods, but there is also a surprising link between this practice and an ongoing bogus technique known as “facilitated communication.” Sometimes abbreviated to “FC” or given other names such as “Supported Typing” to disguise its fraudulent history, Easy Contact is a dangerous and manipulative false medical practice that has led to multiple lawsuits and even sexual assault cases.
This is one of the cases as detailed in the Netflix documentary series Tell them you love meInvolved years of abuse of a cerebral palsy patient by a woman who falsely claimed to be interpreting his movements — the same bogus method we use when moving a Ouija board pointer.
All of this may be depressing news if you’re hosting a Halloween sleepover, but it may also have you asking, “How to do Does the Ouija board work?” The answer is surprisingly simple.
Ouija boards rely on your own body energy
If you’ve never used a Ouija board, the concept is pretty straightforward. With a group or by yourself, you place your hand lightly on a triangular pointer called a planchet. The planchet rests on the board, with the words “yes” and “no” in the upper corners, an alphabet in the center, and the word “goodbye” below.
The idea is to summon the spirits you want to communicate with, and they’ll move the planchet around the board to spell out the answers to the questions you ask — until they or you finally say goodbye and the spirits go back to where they came from.
It all sounds pretty innocuous, but there’s a long tradition of people believing that Ouija boards are dangerous secret gateways to demon possession or worse. After all, what if it’s an unfriendly spirit that moves the planchet without your control?
In fact, there is a simple scientific explanation: the mysterious mechanism that powers the Ouija board is called Ideomotor effects (pronounced “edo-Mo-tor” or “id-ee-ah-meh-ter”), and it’s basically your body’s way of talking to itself.
The ideomotor effect is an example of unconscious, involuntary body movement — that is, we move when we’re not trying to move. If you’ve ever experienced a sudden sensation of waking up from sleep (known as Hypnotic hiccups), you experience a more spontaneous version of the ideomotor effect: your brain signals your body to move without your conscious awareness. The obvious difference is that the ideomotor effect occurs while you are awake, so the reflexive movements you make are much smaller.
In the case of the Ouija board, your brain can unconsciously create images and memories when you ask the board questions. Your body responds to your brain without consciously “telling” you, causing the muscles in your hands and arms to move the pointer toward the answers you—again, unconsciously—might want.
there Multiple scientific studies which showed various examples of ideomotor effects in action. A well-known and Repeatedly A variant of the Ouija board test, blindfolded participants uttered much more incoherent messages. (You can try this one at home.)
These experiments easily show that the Ouija board only works if the participants are able to manipulate the pointer themselves. If a ghost or spirit is indeed in the room, it will be able to instruct the planchet to spell coherent messages without any assistance. But there are no ghosts, and when Ouija board users are deprived of the ability to spell the words they see, the game quickly devolves into obscenity.
The ideomotor effect is actually a powerful subconscious tool
Before the Ouija board was invented, spiritualists and other ghost communicators used makeshift devices called “talking boards”. That served a similar purpose. Talking boards first became popular in mid-19th-century America, when millions of people suddenly became interested in talking to the dead after mass casualties in the Civil War.. The popularity of talking boards, and their use as a tool to absorb grieving war families, meant that scientists actually began studying the ideomotor effect. In the middle of the centuryBefore the Ouija board and planchette were patented in 1890.
Over the years, research has determined that the ideomotor effect is closely tied to subconscious awareness—and that Its effect is maximum When the subject believes he has no control over his movements. Paradoxically, you have less control in mind You are actually exerting more control over your subconscious mind.
This is where the triangular pointer of the Ouija board comes in. The planchet makes it easier to subconsciously control your muscle movements, because it focuses and directs them even when you believe you’re not in control of them. The tablet seems to move more efficiently when more than one person is using it at the same time: it frees everyone’s mind to subconsciously create the dreaded Ouija board answers together.
The effect can make the Ouija board an effective tool to help you tap into your own subconscious. inside a research Published in 2012, scientists found that using a Ouija board allowed subjects to recall factual information with greater accuracy than if they did not use the board. Participants were instructed to answer yes/no questions and to rate whether they were confident in their answers or merely guessing. Next, they faced another round of questions but again used a Ouija board to indicate “yes” or “no” to determine their level of confidence in their answers. In cases where participants believed they did not know an answer, they were able to give more accurate answers, often, when using the Ouija board than when they believed they were just guessing on their own.
The researchers behind that study have gone ahead to guess Using the Ouija board as a technique to unlock subconscious knowledge may lead to insights into 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.
The ideomotor effect goes back far beyond just the Ouija board — including a number of harmful real-life scams and “therapies.”
The appeal of the ideomotor effect is that you actually may be Get in touch with something you normally can’t access — your own subconscious — and the experience can feel like communicating with something miraculous or unknown.
This real physical effect leads some people to believe that a seemingly miraculous or miraculous phenomenon is behind certain behaviors and events. This is a common element Satanic Possession Deception, since the witnesses believe that the “possessed” person is running without his own control. It can satisfy people with their gifts Automatic writing, meaning they assert that spirits can communicate with the living through their “uncontrolled” handwriting. Often, ideomotor effects are used Deceiving people Those who visit exorcists, psychics, mediums and other self-proclaimed spirit-channeling types — sometimes for serious financial, the physicaland psychological damage.
Dowsing Another example of harnessing the ideomotor effect for financial gain. Practices, the stated purpose of which is to obtain divine water or other things that are underground or otherwise hidden, Holding a special device (such as a dosing rod or divining rod) and the ideomotor effect allows your hand to “mysteriously” indicate the location of a desired object or substance. These devices have been Scientifically tested And debunked again and again, but it did not stop their purveyors make false claims They can detect everything from them the gold per Liver disease and hepatitis per “Harmful Earth Radiation.” In 2013, a charlatan was convicted of selling nearly $70 million Fake bomb detector to the Iraqi police.
Finally, the ideomotor effect is behind a controversial, oft-debunked form of pseudoscience called therapy. “Easy Communication,” which emerged as a popular therapy technique in the 1990s. Facilitative communication claims to work by allowing disabled or autistic patients to “communicate” with slight finger movements. in reality, Science has proven it many times over Patients whose movements are caused by ideomotor effects and their caregivers are reading meaninglessly. One scientist even referred to communication as an advantage “Ouija Board Stuff.”
Disastrous effects of this fake therapy include a Sexual assault cases Where the caregiver claimed that he used simple communication to obtain consent from his patient and that it was destructive Parental Custody Cases Whereas manipulative caregivers use it to suggest that involved children have “blamed” their parents for the abuse. Sadly, it still is exists today As a deceptive speech therapy technique used with autism patients, Under different names Such as “quick prompting method”, “assisted typing” or “progressive dynamic response.”
Ironically, the same factor is at the center of both cause and effect of ideomotor phenomena: we want to believe. Our desire to confirm the existence of ghosts, spirits, and other unlikely possibilities leads Ouija board users, communicators, and anyone else who experiences ideomotor impressions to believe that they have experienced something real: a tangible vision from another dimension, some sort of mystical sign, or a hint. That the patient trapped in his own mind is suddenly able to break free and communicate.
But the wonderful thing about a Ouija board is not what a planchette can read or what a psychic can claim the spirit is saying through it from the other side. In reality, the real wonder of the Ouija board lies within our own subconscious.
Update, June 18, 2024, 4:50 pm ET: This piece was originally published on October 29, 2016 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with information from Netflix. Tell them you love me.
