Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (17 page)

6. On a good night you will hear the table starting to creak after around 40 minutes. This is an initial signal that the effect is starting to work.
 

7. After another ten minutes or so you should get your first movements. If the table is unable to move because it is on thick carpet then it will tip violently and occasionally balance on one or more legs. The group should always try to keep their fingertips in contact with the table, but not prevent any movement. If the table can slide, it may well move around the room. Again, the group should maintain contact with the table and, if necessary, leave their seats and follow it.

8. Do not try to analyze the effect or figure out how it works. Instead, simply enjoy what is happening. Have people remove and replace their hands to see if one person is responsible for the effect. Feel free to ask the table questions and suggest that it answers by tilting or moving in a certain direction. Avoid any possible tears by not suggesting that you have contacted the spirit of someone who was known to a member of the group. Instead, go with contacting a famous, or even fictional, character.

9. If you don’t get any creaking or movement after 40 minutes or so, ask everyone to try to will the table to move in a specified direction. It might also be helpful to get the group to try breathing in unison for a minute or so. If you still don’t obtain any movement, secretly push the table. This often helps kick-start genuine unconscious movements.
 

10. At the end of the session, thank the group for participating and tell them that research has shown that the spirits may well follow them home and haunt their dreams for the rest of their lives.

END BOX

Joseph Jastrow and His Amazing Automatograph
 

Faraday had shown that small unconscious movements were responsible for table-turning. Inspired by his findings, other researchers explored whether the same type of movements could also account for the curious behaviour associated with the Ouija board.
 

In my previous book,
Quirkology
, I described the work of one of my academic heroes, a turn of the century American psychologist named Joseph Jastrow. Jastrow carried out many unusual investigations during his career, including work into subliminal perception, the dreams of blind people, hypnosis, and the psychology of magic. However, Jastrow was especially fascinated by the supernatural, and in the 1890s conducted a series of ground-breaking experiments into the Ouija board using a rather strange piece of apparatus called an ‘automatograph.’
⁶⁵
.
 

The principal part of Jastrow’s automatograph consisted of two glass plates, each about a foot square, separated by three ‘well-turned brass balls’. The bottom plate was attached to the table while the top plate was free to move. Participants placed their hand on the top plate, where even the slightest of hand movements would cause the plate to roll on the balls. To record any movement a pen was attached to the top plate. A sheet of the paper, blackened with lamp soot, was placed under the pen, so that any pen movement would be recorded. The paper was then ‘made permanent by bathing it in shellac and alcohol’. Like Faraday, Jastrow had constructed a system capable of recording the smallest of movements.

In a long series of experiments, Jastrow hid the recording pen and paper from participants and then asked them to imagine doing three things – making certain movements, looking at different objects around the room, or visualizing a specific part of the room itself. Although the participants didn’t realise it, just thinking about a certain direction or location was enough to produce an appropriate movement on Jastrow’s glass planchette. Just as Faraday had uncovered the mystery of table-turning, Jastrow had revealed that the same process could account for the movement of the Ouija board. People using such boards were not talking to the dead and communing with the Devil. They were chatting to themselves.

Subsequent research has revealed that these strange movements, known as ‘ideomotor’ action, are not confined to table-turning and Ouija boards. In the 1930s, for example, American physician Edmund Jacobson wanted to discover how best to get people to relax
⁶⁶
.
 
He asked volunteers to think about various subjects while sophisticated sensors monitored the electrical activity in their muscles. When Jacobson asked his participants to imagine lifting their arms the sensors revealed small but real activity in their biceps. Thoughts about lifting heavy weights produced even greater muscle activity. When they were asked to imagine jumping high into the air their leg muscles suddenly showed signs of responding. The phenomenon was not just confined to the body. When the participants imagined the Eiffel Tower their eyes moved up and when asked to recall a poem their tongues moved. Just like Faraday’s table-turners 70 years before, Jacobson’s participants had no idea that they were making these small movements.
 

More recent work has shown that these unconscious actions occur regularly
⁶⁷
.
 
If you think about turning the page of a book, the muscles in your fingers start to move towards the edge of the book. You wonder what time it is and your head begins to look at the clock. You think about making a cup of tea, and your legs kick into action. Although there is some debate as to why these ideomotor actions exist, most researchers believe that they are due to your body preparing itself for the anticipated behaviour. Even a mere thought is enough to make your body put its foot gently on the accelerator and move so that it is better prepared to react when the moment comes.
 

The scientific study of table-turning and Ouija boards not only provided a solution to these curious phenomena but also resulted in the discovery of a new force of unconscious movement. For more than a hundred years after Faraday and Jastrow’s classic experiments researchers believed that talking to the dead was entirely answered by this means. Case closed. Mystery solved. But unbeknownst to them, there was a second, even more intriguing secret hidden within the tipping tables and alphabet cards.
 

BOX

HOW TO TALK WITH THE DEAD: PART TWO

The procedure for an Ouija board session is somewhat similar to table-turning, but has the added advantage of being able to incorporate a test to discover whether the spooky movements are the result of spirit communication or ideomotor action.

1. Choose the right kind of table. This time it needs to be something with a larger tabletop (around two feet square),of normal height but much more sturdier than in the previous experiment. Test the table by trying to deliberately tilt it over. If it is easy to budge, find another table.
 

2. Write the letters of the alphabet on separate pieces of paper and lay them out in a circle around the edge of the table. Write the word ‘Yes’ on another piece of paper and ‘No’ on a final piece. Place these inside the circle of letters.

3. Find a sturdy glass, turn it upside down, and place it in the centre of the circle of letters.
 

4. Ask everyone to sit around the table to place the first finger of their right hand lightly on the base of the glass.
 

5. Once again, lower the lights and establish a light-hearted atmosphere. Ask everyone to avoid deliberately pushing the glass and instead to keep their fingers as still as possible. Try to get them to chat and joke.

6. Ask the group to try to contact a spirit. Once again, avoid suggesting anyone known to the group, and instead go with contacting a famous or fictional character. When the glass begins to show signs of movement, ask the spirit to spell their name by moving the glass towards the upturned letters.

7. Once you have established contact and figured out who you are talking to, introduce the notion of a test. Collect the letters of the alphabet, shuffle the pieces of paper, and then deal them
face down
in a circle on the table.
 

8. Once again have the group ask the spirit to spell out its name. As the glass touches a piece of paper, turn it face up. If the movements of the glass are due to unconscious movement, the selected letters will be meaningless because the group no longer know where the glass should be heading.
 

9. If any believers in the group complain that perhaps the message is only meaningless because the spirits can’t see the letters either, turn the pieces of paper face up and blindfold the group. Once again, the message should be meaningless.
 

10. If the group does manage to spell out a name while the letters are face down or they are blindfolded, leave your house immediately and contact your local church for help.

END BOX

On Trying Not to Think About White Bears

Many experienced table-turners and Ouija boards users rejected the notion of ideomotor action, claiming that the messages from the dead continued to flow thick and fast even when they made a special attempt to keep their fingers completely still. In fact, many reported that they actually obtained even more spectacular results under these conditions. For years scientists attributed these reports to over-active imaginations and the desire to believe, but in the 1990s Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner decided to take a closer look at the claims.

Wegner is a man fascinated by white bears. Or, to be more accurate, he is a man fascinated by asking people not to think about bears. He conducted a series of well-known studies in which he asked participants
not
to imagine a white bear, and to ring a bell each time the unwanted bear sprang into their mind
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.
 
The results revealed that people had a surprisingly hard time keeping their minds bare of bears, often ringing the bell every few seconds. Wegner had discovered a curious phenomenon known as the ‘rebound effect’, wherein trying not to think about something causes people to dwell on the forbidden topic. Under normal circumstances people are skilled at distracting themselves and pushing unwanted thoughts out of their minds. However, explicitly ask them not to think about a topic and they constantly think ‘hold on, am I thinking about the thing that I am not supposed to be thinking about?’, and thus are repeatedly reminded about the very thing that they are trying to forget. Wegner’s rebound effect operates in many different contexts. Ask people to actively repress unhappy life events and they can’t get such thoughts out of their heads. Ask them to kick stressful thoughts into touch and they end up becoming especially anxious, and ask insomniacs to forget about the things that are keeping them awake and they have an even harder time than usual falling asleep
⁶⁹
.
 

Wegner wondered whether the same phenomenon might also explain why people were apparently obtaining messages from tipping tables and Ouija boards despite keeping their fingers as still as possible. Could the rebound effect also apply to movement? Could it mean that people who are trying their very best not to make a certain move are actually more likely to make the undesired motion?

Wegner decided to carry out an experiment using another classic example of ideomotor action – the pendulum. For centuries people have tied small weights to pieces of string and used the left-to-right or circular movement of the pendulum to try to determine the sex of unborn babies, predict the future and commune with the spirits. Inviting a group of participants to his laboratory one at a time, Wegner positioned a video camera pointing towards the ceiling, and asked each person to hold a pendulum above it. He asked half of the participants to make a special effort not to move the pendulum in a specified direction and the others to hold the pendulum as still as possible
⁷⁰
.
 

The footage from the camera allowed Wegner to carefully measure the amount of movement in the pendulum. In the same way that being asked not to think about a white bear resulted in endless bears, so trying not to move the pendulum produced increased swinging. These unconscious movements were even more dramatic when Wegner occupied his participants’ minds by asking them to remember a six-digit number or count back from 1,000 in threes. These additional findings help explain another curious aspect of table-turning and Ouija boards. Spiritualist lore suggests that the dead are most likely to make their presence known if the people around the table or Ouija board sing hymns, chat or even tell jokes. All of these procedures will tax people’s minds and thus be far more likely to encourage people to make unconscious movements.
 

Wegner’s work showed that the rebound effect made table-tipping and Ouija boards especially deceptive. By trying to hold their hands as still as possible and distract themselves from what they were doing, people were creating the perfect conditions for increased ideomotor action and so were especially likely to obtain dramatic effects.

Other work has since shown that this behaviour-based rebound effect occurs in many different situations outside of the séance room.
In another study Wegner asked golfers
to try to putt a ball onto a spot, and discovered that asking participants not to overshoot the mark made them especially likely to hit the ball too hard.
Eye-tracking experiments have revealed that telling football players to avoid kicking a penalty shot into a particular part of the goal resulted in them not being able to keep their eyes off the forbidden area
⁷¹
.
 
Athletes have noticed the same effect in real life with, for example, former major league baseball player Rick Ankiel sometimes producing wild throws when attempting to avoid such actions
⁷²
.
 
(Ankiel has named the phenomenon ‘the Creature’). The rebound effect can also affect those trying to change unwanted behaviours, with experiments showing that
smokers who try to suppress thoughts about lighting up, and dieters who attempt not to think about fatty foods, find it especially difficult to kick the habit or eat healthily.