In the first condition, the participants - who worked in pairs - were asked to move the planchette deliberately to spell the word “Baltimore” or to point to “Yes” and “No,” respectively. When prediction and consequence match, the result is the feeling that ‘I did that.'”Īndersen and team examined the participants’ eye movements in two different conditions: the “voluntary action condition” and the “Ouija condition.”
That is, the researchers wanted to see if the participants first glanced at the letters they would later move the planchette to.Īs the scientists explain, a person’s sense of agency, or the feeling that one has control over their actions, arises primarily from the brain’s ability to predict “the sensory consequences of an action, and then this prediction the actual consequences. The participants were equipped with eye tracking devices so that the researchers could study their - largely unconscious - predictive eye movements. Using eye trackers to study ‘spooky’ feelings The scientists’ findings were published in the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Using eye-tracking devices and data analysis, Andersen and colleagues examined the behavior of 40 experienced Ouija board users at a Ouija board conference. However, what if there was a simple scientific explanation for why Ouija boards work? Researchers led by Marc Andersen at Aarhus University in Denmark set out to demystify the Ouija board experience. The appeal of a device that supposedly helps you communicate with the dead is undeniable.
Ouija boards may have “haunted” most of our childhoods, but some people are Ouija enthusiasts well into their adulthood - and understandably so. The decorated planchette conjures images of scared kids staying up late, Halloween horror movies, or TV shows old and new, such as Charmed or Stranger Things. Since its invention in the late 19th century, the Ouija board has become a hallmark of popular culture. Share on Pinterest Ouija board enthusiasts report that the planchette (shown here on the left) moves on its own…but science begs to differ.
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