Clever study shows how two minds interact to create the spooky sense that an Ouija board is moving by itself

By Christian Jarrett Psychologists have proposed an explanation for why Ouija board users feel as though a spirit is moving the planchette (an ornate pointer) and spelling out messages. It is based on the idea that two (or more) living users unwittingly take turns at controlling the planchette, cooperating implicitly to create a message that starts out random but becomes more predictable as the number of meaningful options decreases. “It seems that meaningful responses from the Ouija board are an emergent property of interacting predictive minds that increasingly impose structure on initially random events in the sessions,” Marc Anderson at Aarhus University and his colleagues explain in their open-access paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. The researchers travelled to a Ouija board conference and rigged up pairs of board users with eye-tracking equipment. This is the first time the Ouija board practice has been studied outside of a psych lab. The 40 participants’ eye movements were recorded in two conditions as they worked in pairs: when using the Ouija board in the usual way for 10 minutes, and in a “voluntary” condition in which they spelt out the letters and words given to them by the researchers. Anderson and his colleagues were interested in predictive eye movements in which the participant glanced to a letter ahead of the planchette landing on it (which would suggest the board user knew where the planchette was headed, pres...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Parapsychology Perception Source Type: blogs