How does science explain Ouija boards?

Leviathan Press:

A few years ago, I played with Ouija board with my friends on a mountain in Hangzhou. It is said that the place was originally a mass grave, and a friend of mine in the same industry had also successfully "invited out" Ouija board here. This is the background explanation.

I can't remember some details. Logically, the moon was bright and the stars were sparse that night. We also drank a few glasses of wine and started to work at midnight. The props were a one-meter square character plate that was prepared in advance, with densely packed Chinese characters printed in the form of concentric circles. And a flat plate with a slightly ancient style, with a red line drawn on the back as a pointer (as shown in the picture below). Four people sat at the four edges of the character plate, with their index fingers against the upside-down plate.

When the plate moves away from you, you can clearly feel that your fingers are just touching the plate, and the person sitting opposite you is obviously not involved in this movement. As for the people on both sides, there is no sign of intentional force. In addition, there is a setting of "you can't retract your hand no matter what, otherwise something bad will happen", so this matter becomes impossible to verify. As for the result, corresponding to the question I silently asked in my heart, the red lines on the plate all point to the words next to the word "fire", such as "burn", "roast", "flame", "bake", etc. My friend joked that I can be a chef in the future. It sounds good.

Imagine standing in a crowded elevator and your crotch suddenly itches, but the elevator is packed with people, and everyone is waiting to squeeze out like puppies waiting to be born. But you are stuck in the middle of the crowd.

You can only stand there, biting your lower lip, staring at the elevator's floor indicator. When you find that you are still a long way from your destination, you start to panic. You wonder if you have mushrooms growing in your crotch, and maybe you should buy some antifungal ointment, which makes you itch even more. But you can only stand there politely, not saying a word, not daring to look at anyone.

Another minute passes before you can no longer bear it. You try to hold your head high and look straight ahead, something that would please your instructor. You carefully try to readjust the wool belt your grandmother gave you. As your eyes roll back to your head, you say, "Aaaaah..." What a relief!

Maybe the colleague on your left quietly put his hand between your legs and helped you, but you firmly believe that you caught it yourself, so you will definitely not smile and say "thank you" to Dwight in the accounting department.

But why? How do you know it was you who caught it and not someone else? Answering this question will help us understand how the Ouija board works.

What is agency awareness?

As adults, we usually know what we are doing, unlike babies who might stare blankly at their chubby arms waving, wondering who is shaking those sausages. Neuroscientists call this sense of agency, which is a "feeling of being in the driver's seat when we act," usually referring to your sense of control over your limbs. For example, when you scratch yourself, you know: "Yes, I did it."

(dx.doi.org/10.3389%2Ffpsyg.2016.01272)

However, the strange thing is that it is very possible to disrupt your sense of autonomy. When the actions you take are completely controlled by an external force, your brain can be tricked. Ouija boards create just such an illusion!

How a Ouija Board Can Trick You

Suppose, I invite you to a spooky house, light a few candles, and sit down at a wooden table. On the table are a Ouija board and a sylph board. The Ouija board is a piece of cardboard with letters printed on it, while the sylph board is just a simple wooden board that can point to any letter with the movement of the hand.

Once you're comfortably seated, I'll turn on a webcam connected to a computer running eye-tracking software. This lets me know exactly when you looked at which letter. Thus, I'll recreate the experiment that first revealed the secrets of the Ouija board.

(link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-018-9585-8)

Now, with the eye tracking system working, I will make a mysterious gesture to my wife hiding in the bushes in the garden, and she will start howling like a wolf, which will make your hair stand on end, and then I will talk about some obscure things related to ghosts, spirits, demons and the afterlife. In order to create the supernatural phenomenon, I will do three experiments in sequence.

Experiment 1: Supernatural spelling?

I asked you to place your hand on the Ouija board and use it to spell the word "NAIVE". With the help of eye-tracking software, I could see you scanning the letters on the board until your eyes focused on the letter "N". You then pushed the board over that letter. Your eyes then followed the board through the letters "A", "I", "V", and finally "E". At all times you looked for the letter first, then looked at the board.

After you finished the spelling, I gave you a cookie as a reward and asked you, "Who moved the planchette?" You rolled your eyes and said, "Of course it was me!"

Experiment 2: You and the Howling Wolf

Now, I walk over to the window, open it, and yell, "Hey, Fabi! Stop howling and come in!" A few seconds later, she walks in and sits down at the table next to you. I adjust the eye tracking software to make sure it can track both of you at the same time. Even though she is my wife, I did not tell her about the experiment, so she also had no idea of ​​the whole plan and its purpose.

We will repeat the previous experiment, but this time you will not be the only one manipulating the board, but you and Fabi. I show you the word "GULLIBLE" and ask you to work together to spell it. You nod and start to spell it.

As you work together to move the planchette, the eye-tracking software shows that both of you look for the letter first and then move the planchette toward it.

When you finished one cookie, I offered you another, which you gladly accepted. Then I repeated my question: "Who moved the planchette?" You rolled your eyes again, stuffed your cookie in your mouth, and muttered, "It was us!"

I wiped up the cookie crumbs you dropped on the table and moved on to the next experiment.

Experiment 3: Oh my god! We are talking to the dead!

One last experiment. I opened YouTube, typed in the search keyword "creepy music", and pressed the play button. With the eerie background music, I began to tell you a bizarre story. 50 years ago, a popsicle vendor was found dead where you are sitting now. He was killed with a popsicle stick, but the police were never able to identify the vendor or solve the case.

Then, I command you and Fabi to place your hands on the Ouija board. I get carried away and start yelling, "Oh! Dead Spirit! I command you to speak! I command you to answer my questions! I command you to show up on the Ouija board!"

The board began to move slightly. I smiled knowingly: "Look, our guest is here. Tell me, what's your name!"

I looked at you and Fabi with great anticipation. To embarrass me, you began to move the board around randomly. Finally, you chose a letter: M, then A, R, I, O.

“Oh my god!” you screamed, your face starting to turn pale.

"Thank you, ghost!" I said. Then I looked into your eyes: "Who moved the planchette?" You stared at me with wide eyes for a while, then stammered: "I... I don't know. It wasn't me!"

I turned back to my wife. “Is that you, Fabi?”

She was horrified: "No! I swear! It's definitely not me!"

So what happened?

Before I go on, I must make one thing clear: my wife is being honest, and she is not lying. She really didn't mean to spell "Mario," and neither did you. You both knew full well that you had no control over the board, because you had no sense of agency over the actions you had just taken.

So, what happened? Did the ghost of the vendor take control of the board? Was Mario his name? Let's find out. When I yelled "What's your name?", you and Fabi started moving the board around randomly. You saw the letter "M", and then the name "Michael" inexplicably popped into your mind.

It doesn't matter whether you moved the planchette to the "M" on purpose or whether you were just affected by the ideomotor effect (that is, a muscle reflex triggered by the sight of the letter "M"). The fact is that you simply thought of the letter "M" and moved the planchette to it, intentionally or unintentionally. Or, the planchette just landed on the "M" randomly. In any case, nothing terrible has happened so far.

Next, you think of the name "Michael," so you look at the letter "I," expecting the planchette to move there next. But it doesn't, because when Fabi sees the letter "M," the name that comes to mind is "Matt." So she, either intentionally (under the influence of the telekinetic effect) or unintentionally, moves the planchette to the letter "A."

You might frown at this moment because you were expecting the letter "I" instead of "A". Meanwhile, Fabi, still looking relaxed, is already looking for the next letter "T" because she wants to spell "Matt". But a new name "Mark" appears in your mind, so you start looking for the letter "R".

So, when the planchette moves to the letter "R" that you wanted, Fabi starts to get a little upset because it doesn't match her expectations, but she chooses to continue. She thinks to herself, so far we have spelled "MAR", maybe "Mariano". So she looks at the letter "I" and wants to move the planchette to that letter. However, you look at the letter "K" because you are still thinking about the name "Mark". When Fabi moves the planchette to the letter "I", you are at a loss again.

After spelling "MARI", Fabi was thinking of "Mariano", but you were obsessed with "Mario", so you moved the board to the last letter "O", which surprised Fabi.

At this point, you both realized that "Mario" was a real person's name, so you both stopped moving the board. Just like that, the name "Mario" appeared on the board instead of the names that had flashed through your minds. Therefore, both of you were shocked.

More importantly, none of you felt that you had full control over the board, because you had no sense of agency over it. Therefore, you attributed the movement of the board to an external agent - a spirit, because I had planted this idea in your minds at the beginning of the experiment.

As Marc Andersen and his colleagues, who uncovered all this, said: "The effective response of the board is an emergent property of interactive predictive thinking, which continuously strengthens the connection between random events in the divination process." In simple terms, when you use a Ouija board, there is always someone controlling it, but it is never the same person, which creates the illusion that the participant has no control over the board.

This illusion will grow stronger because "people's own self-generated forces are often perceived to be weaker than external forces of equal magnitude." In other words, the sense that an external force is moving the planchette is amplified because you—due to a phenomenon called "force escalation"—have grossly underestimated your contribution to the planchette's movement.

(science.sciencemag.org/content/301/5630/187)

By David B. Clear

Translation/Sodium Potassium

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article/medium.com/i-wanna-know/how-science-explains-ouija-boards-7b478586956e

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Sodium Potassium in Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan