Ouija boards are a favourite of spiritualists,
A favourite among spiritualists, Ouija boards have been around for a century. But do they really let people talk to the dead?
It was a dark and stormy night in Toronto as five colleagues gathered around a mystifying tabletop oracle. Candles flickered — ominously — as the wind whistled through a crack in the window. Each bemused attendee gently placed two fingertips on the planchette. And then we waited.
“What do we ask it?” someone said, their eyes darting around the circle.
We decided to ask about office gossip — such mysterious stuff — because as a bunch of skeptical 20- and 30-something journalists, we didn’t really think the Ouija board would offer us any otherworldly insight into our lives. Or could it? More than a century after its creation, the Ouija board still captivates people around the world. It’s a sleepover staple for teenagers and the creepy inspiration for 2016 horror flick Ouija: Origin Of Evil. “You have questions, and the spirit world has answers — and the uncanny Ouija board is your way to get them,” says product details for the latest edition.
The “game board” itself was trade- marked back in1890, but bore similarities to talking boards used by spiritualists to supposedly communicate with the dead. And it can definitely be spooky stuff. As people place their fingertips on the planchette, a heart-shaped wood or plastic device with a see-through peephole, it can feel like some otherworldly force is moving it around — spelling out words through the alphabet on the board and answering yes or no to questions.
Scientists, of course, have a different answer for the seemingly-mysterious motion: it’s happening thanks to your own subconscious.
“It’s what’s called the ideomotor effect — nonconscious muscular movement,” says Chris French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit.
If four or five people have their fingers on the planchette, it doesn’t take much movement from anyone for the device to start shifting around the board, he says. Once it goes to the first couple of letters, you start filling in the rest yourself. Some Canadian researchers actually tested out the Ouija board effect. In recent years, University of British Columbia professor Ron Rensink and his colleagues at the school’s Visual Cognition Lab conducted several experiments demonstrating how clever our subconscious minds can be.
One of the experiments involved people answering trivia questions with yes or no answers. First, participants answered verbally. Next, they tried using a Ouija board with a partner — getting familiar with the “Yes” and “No” spots on the board — and answered trivia questions again while blindfolded. But when they had the blindfolds on, Rensink says the partner was removed without the other participant’s knowledge.
Somewhat surprisingly, the subjects answered trivia questions more accurately when they thought they were using the Ouija board with a partner — suggesting the game taps into people’s subconscious thoughts, according to Rensink.
“It turns out that you could ask people whether they were guessing or sure, they were pretty much 50/50 on accuracy,” he says. “But with the Ouija responses, they were right more often than chance. They were better than the conscious mind for these kinds of things.”
But why would playing Ouija increase someone’s trivia ability? Rensink says it’s because we all have intelligence within our subconscious we’re not aware of. “There’s this new wave of research that shows we have this inner zombie . . . our conscious mind gives it commands,” he says.
It’s the same force that keeps us driving straight even if we zone out behind the wheel. And Ouija specifically, according to Rensink, allows people to turn off their conscious mind and let that inner “zombie” take control, perhaps tapping into our subconscious storehouse of information. So, in a sense, teenage girls at sleepovers have the right idea: there is a powerful force behind the mysterious Ouija board, albeit not the otherworldly kind.
“In reality, there is another intelligence for sure — but it’s actually within us,” Rensink says.