Does this eerie parlor game really give voices to ghostly spirits? While the answer is debatable, scientists envision even more intriguing clinical applications.
Published in Wise & Well
Oct 26, 2023 (Medium.com)
When I was a teenager, nothing was as terrifying as watching the movie The Exorcist. The story tells the tale of Regan, a 12-year-old girl who uses the family Ouija board to ask questions of “Captain Howdy” — a demon who takes possession of her soul. Generous head-spinning and pea-soup spitting ensue.
As an adolescent girl, I found the movie so thoroughly horrifying that (duh) my BFFs and I just had to play Ouija at our next sleepover.
For those unfamiliar with Ouija (pronounced WEE-gee), here’s how it goes: Two or more people sit around the board. It’s flat, with the letters of the alphabet laid out in semi-circles above the numbers 0 through 9, plus the words “Yes,” “No,” “Hello,” and “Goodbye.”
You place your fingers on the “planchette” — a type of sliding pointer — and ask a question. Then you watch, dumbfounded, as the pointer glides about the board, spelling out the answer.
Naturally, as hormonal teenage girls, we had to ask Ouija which boys liked us and who we would marry. (I know, our game preferences tended more toward Mystery Date than Ouija — but what can I say?)
It was all fun and games until suddenly, the answers began coming not just from the Ouija board…but also from above us, through a sinister, deep-throated voice.
We immediately scattered and called our moms to take us home.
The strange history of Ouija
In 1891, “Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board” first appeared in a Pittsburgh novelty shop. Its popularity took off in the uncertain decades around World War I, when the country became obsessed with spiritualism.
Surges in the game’s popularity coincided with other difficult times — including the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, and the 1967 race riots in Detroit, Newark, and Milwaukee.
In recent years, Ouija is once again in high demand, driven in part by the new sequel The Exorcist: Believer. And while a new crop of teenagers will likely take their turns wetting themselves in their movie seats, the real question everyone wants to know is, How does Ouija really work?
Is Ouija all in the mind?
Some people attribute Ouija’s power to ghostly forces, while others point to deceptive pranksters. The real answer is as spooky as it is scientific.
Contrary to the insistence of the drum-circle-and-healing-crystals crowd, Ouija boards are not powered by the supernatural. When we play, we may swear on our grandmother’s grave that we’re really not pushing the pointer. But as it turns out, we really are.
That doesn’t mean the game is entirely useless. On the contrary, as science tells us, Ouija may in fact provide a portal into the secrets of human consciousness.
Science unveils a powerful “second intelligence”
At the University of British Columbia, Helen Gauchou and her team of researchers had that very same hunch. So they devised a two-part study.
For the first part, participants verbally answered yes-or-no trivia questions. These included inquiries such as“Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil?” and “Were the 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney?”
For the second part, test subjects were blindfolded and paired with partners around a Ouija board. They then placed their fingers on the pointer and asked Ouija to help them answer another set of yes-or-no trivia questions.
Unbeknownst to the participants, their “partners” — actually fellow researchers — removed their fingers from the pointer, leaving the test subjects to move it by themselves.
According to Gachou, for the participants, this step triggered “ideomotor actions” — automatic muscular movements that occur outside of conscious thought. Put simply, they moved the pointer but were unaware they were doing so.
Scientists have long been aware of the ideomotor 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 a person’s conscious will.
More recently, researchers at the University of Plymouth witnessed the effect through a 2018 study that demonstrated for the first time that involuntary movements could be elicited from people simply by encouraging them to imagine those movements.
When Gachou and her fellow researchers compared the results of their two experiments, they were astonished. During the first portion of the study, when participants verbally guessed at questions they were unsure of, they answered correctly 50 percent of the time. But when subjects erroneously believed they were receiving help from their partners, they guessed correctly more often: 65 percent of the time.
The study, published in Consciousness and Cognition, showed that many of the pointer’s movements emanated from information stored at an unconscious level — not readily accessible to the conscious mind.
“These surprising results suggest we have a powerful ‘second intelligence’ resting beyond our conscious minds that can be accessed under the right conditions,” Gauchou said in a statement. “We may believe we don’t know an answer consciously but actually have the answer right there in our subconscious.”
Could early medical diagnoses be next?
While Ouija may not let us communicate with our dearly departed, it may help unlock vexing medical mysteries.
For example, Gauchou and her teammates speculate that using a Ouija board could raise early warnings of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases — afflictions that may be missed by our conscious minds, but recognized by our subconscious ones.
In other words, the Ouija board may be a powerful communication tool — just not in the way we expected.
Which leads me back to the deep-throated voice that terrified me and my teenage sleepover buddies so many years ago. Turns out, as I learned the next day, the voice belonged to my friend’s not-so-funny big brother, who spoke through the heating vents from the floor above us.
Discovering that trick didn’t mean I stopped believing in the power of Ouija. Because when it comes to Ouija, there may be something equally as mysterious and captivating at play here: Our own minds.
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Written by Kathleen Murphy
·Writer for Wise & Well
Health writer and essayist offering insights into physical and emotional wellness and successful aging. Subscribe: https://kathleenamurphy.medium.com/subscribe