Mysterious posters that popped up in a Portland park claim recent events have resulted in an Ouija board ban.
  • radicalautonomy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    Once I had an old phone number of mine on the tip of my tongue but couldn’t for the life of me remember it. So I got my brother to help (because the Ouija board requires at least two people), and I asked him to clear his mind. Then, in my own head and not aloud, I asked myself “What was that old phone number we had?”. The thingy flew across the board and wrote out the phone number exactly.

    Ouija boards work through subconscious thought, nothing more. Any time anyone has swore they talked to a ghost with their friends, even if everyone’s minds were relatively clear and no one was consciously forcing the device to spell something in particular, someone at that table had a subconscious in overdrive and really wanting to talk to a spirit.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Or just regular old lying. God knows I’ve influenced my share of ouija results for my own amusement, and I’m really not a special person.

      • radicalautonomy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I never implied that there weren’t people who didn’t lie and force the thing; in fact I alluded to it. My point was, apart from those circumstances, when no one is acting intentionally, the device moves due to subconscious influence and not by supernatural means.

        • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          2 months ago

          I’m sorry, I did not realize you were being sincere in sharing that revelation. I assumed them not being supernatural was… well, obvious? Are there really people out there that think Ouija boards are real?

          • radicalautonomy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Are there really people out there that think Ouija boards are real?

            More than two-thirds of Americans are some variety of Christian, and I’d say about a third of them probably do just based on the proportion of hyper religious parents I deal with every year as a teacher in Texas. Couldn’t say for certain the exact percentage, but it is definitely gonna be a significant number.

            • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              I sure hope you’re wrong because man, I do not need yet another extreme good reason to start drinking again. Fuck that’s depressing.

              • radicalautonomy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                2 months ago

                I really wish I was wrong.

                From Catholic.com:

                The Ouija board is far from harmless, as it is a form of divination (seeking information from supernatural sources). The fact of the matter is, the Ouija board really does work, and the only “spirits” that will be contacted through it are evil ones.

                Here is a CBC article talking about how the Ouija board actually works basically the way I described:

                Researchers at the University of British Columbia are using Ouija boards to test human intelligence.

                Docky Duncan with UBC’s Visual Cognition Lab says the spirit board traditionally used to channel the dead can also be used to test people’s unconscious knowledge. He says it’s not ghosts moving the board, but users’ ideomotor reflex.

                “The movements that you see on a Ouija board are unconscious movements. They are produced by the players themselves, but they don’t feel responsibility for them,” said Duncan.

                To test this theory, Duncan has blindfolded subjects place their fingers on the planchette — or the triangular piece of wood that moves across the board — and then asks them yes or no questions. So far, he has found that most people answer two out of every three questions correctly, even if they think they don’t know the answer.

                "Ask someone if they know, you know, ‘What’s the capital of Cambodia?’ and they might say, ‘I have no idea.’ But they might have heard it somewhere, and it may actually be inside your brain somewhere," said Duncan.

                “When we ask people these questions using these unconscious answers, suddenly players can actually access that knowledge and it really becomes manifested.”