More recent work has shown that these unconscious actions occur regularly.10 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.
HOW TO TALK WITH THE DEAD: PART TWO
The procedure for a 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 sturdy 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 knows 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.
On Trying Not to Think About White Bears
Many experienced table-turners and Ouija board 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.11 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.12
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.13
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.14 Athletes have noticed the same effect in real life with, for example, former major league baseball player Rick Ankiel sometimes producing wild throws when a
ttempting to avoid such actions (Ankiel has named the phenomenon ‘the Creature’).15 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.
Encouraged by his investigations with the pendulum, Wegner turned his attention to the most mysterious of all Spiritualist phenomena – automatic writing. His work was to provide a solution to one of the most taxing philosophical problems of all time.
Mark Twain and the Grand Illusion
Perhaps the most prolific and impressive of all automatic writers was Pearl Curran.16 Born in 1883 in St Louis, the first 30 years of Curran’s life were uneventful, and involved dropping out of high school, trying her hand at various jobs, getting married and teaching music. Then, on 8 July 1913 everything changed. While using a Ouija board to chat with the dead an unusually strong and dominant spirit emerged. The entity explained that her name was Patience Worth and that she had been born in the seventeenth century in Dorset, England, but in later life had taken a ship to America where she was eventually murdered by ‘Indians’. Trying her hand at automatic writing, Curran discovered that she could easily channel Ms Worth. In fact, the communications came thick and fast for the next 25 years, with Patience eventually ‘dictating’ over 5,000 poems, a play and several novels. The quality of the work was as impressive as the quantity. When reviewing Worth’s novel about the final days of Jesus, a reviewer at the New York Globe favourably compared it to Ben Hur while another critic believed it to be ‘the greatest story of Christ penned since the Gospels’.
Unfortunately for Spiritualism, Curran’s writings failed to provide convincing evidence of life after death. Try as they might, researchers were unable to find any evidence that Patience Worth actually existed, and linguistic analysis of the texts revealed that the language was not consistent with other works from the period. The case for authenticity was not helped by Patience writing a novel set in the Victorian times, some 200 years after her own death. Eventually even the most ardent believer was forced to conclude that Pearl Curran’s remarkable outpourings were more likely to have a natural, not supernatural, explanation.
Additional evidence against the spirit hypothesis came from those who claimed to be able to channel famous authors. There’s the rather bizarre case of Emily Grant Hutchings, a close friend of Curran, who claimed to be in touch with the spirit of Mark Twain (think ‘gravy train’). In 1917 she produced Jap Herron, a novel that Hutchings claimed had been dictated to her by the great man himself. Critics were deeply unimpressed, with one noting:
If this is the best that Mark Twain can do by reaching across the barrier, his admirers will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.
Harper and Brothers, who owned the rights to the work produced by Mark Twain when he was earthbound, took legal action, claiming that the poor quality of Jap Herron damaged their sales. As part of their evidence, Harper and Brothers noted that Twain was deeply sceptical about the afterlife and so seemed an especially unlikely candidate as a spirit author. The media had a field day, noting that the Supreme Court would soon have to rule on the issue of immortality. Unfortunately, the case never made it into the courtroom, with Hutchings and her publisher agreeing to withdraw the book from sale prior to the trial.
Assuming that the dead do not have a hand in automatic writing, what are we to make of this curious phenomenon? Until the mid-1990s by far the most popular explanation involved some form of psychological dissociation. According to this argument, it is possible for some peoples’ consciousnesses to become divided into two, with each identity unaware of the other, despite them inhabiting the same brain. It is a strange idea, but nevertheless received widespread support, in part because at the time it was the only show in town. Suddenly everyone and their dog was seen as having multiple personalities and it wasn’t long before the idea made it into the world of psychiatry, with clinicians encouraging their patients to experiment with automatic writing as a way of accessing the issues that lay buried deep within their ‘subconscious’ self.
However, after studying various cases of this strange phenomenon it was again Dan Wegner who advanced a new and radical way of explaining automatic writing. Unlike previous explanations, his idea did not involve the existence of multiple identities trapped within the same skull. Moreover, if he’s correct, his work helps solve one of the most hotly debated issues in the history of science.
On the face of it, free will doesn’t seem especially contentious. You make a decision to move your wrist and your wrist moves. You decide to lift your leg and up it comes. So far, so what? However, this simple scenario has hidden depths.
Most scientists believe that all of your conscious mental life is the direct result of activity within your brain. For example, right at this moment you are reading the words on this page. Light enters your eyes and triggers cells at the back of your retina. These, in turn, send signals to the visual cortex in your brain, which sets about recognizing the letters and words, and then conveys the required information to the parts of the brain that are able to extract the meaning from the sentences. The process might be extremely complex and difficult to understand, but fundamentally it is all taking place in your eyes and brain.
But when making decisions suddenly, the model doesn’t feel quite right. I am going to ask you to make a decision. You can either continue to read this paragraph or go and make a cup of tea. Regardless of your choice, my guess is that it didn’t feel like your brain at work. You didn’t suddenly feel a rush of blood to the front of your brain, followed by a quick spurt in your left hemisphere. Instead, it felt as if it was ‘you’, and not a series of electrical impulses in the lump of meat between your ears, that made the decision.
Wegner’s neat and clever solution to this mystery involves positing that the sense of ‘you’ as decision maker is actually a grand illusion created by your brain.17 According to him, your brain makes every decision in your life including, for example, whether you should stand up, say something or wave your arms around. However, a split second after making each decision your brain does two things. First, it sends a signal to another part of the brain that creates the conscious experience of making the decision, and second, it delays the signal going to your legs, mouth or arms. As a result, ‘you’ experience the ‘I have just made this decision’ signal, see yourself act in a way that is consistent with that signal, and incorrectly conclude that ‘you’ are in the driving seat. In short, you are the ghost in the machine.
THE HELPING HANDS ILLUSION
Many years ago I performed magic on the streets of London's Covent Garden. My act involved selecting a man from the audience and placing a cloak completely around his body. I would then stand behind the man, have him place his hands behind his back, and poke my hands out of two slits in the front of the cloak. To the audience it looked as though the man's hands were poking through the front of the cloak. In reality, they were seeing my hands, not his, and so I could perform tricks and make the man appear to be an expert magician.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner has used exactly the same type of set-up to illustrate another curious aspect of free will. To carry out his demonstration you will need a mirror and a friend. Stand in front of the mirror and have your friend stand behind you. Next, place your hands behind your back and ask your friend to poke their arms under your arms. Now look in the mirror. All being well, your friend's arms will look like your arms (if you are struggling to create this illusion try both wearing black tops). Now have your friend read out the following instructions and then make the appropriate actions with their hands
Clench your right hand into a fist three times
Clench your left hand into a fist three times
Wave at the mirror with your right hand
Turn both of your hands palm up and then palm down
Clap your hands toge
ther twice
Because your brain finds visual feedback more compelling than movement-related feedback, you should feel as if your friend's hands belong to you and that you are in control of them.
All sorts of clever experiments are put forward by Wegner to support his idea that our feeling of free will is little more than a grand illusion, including one especially curious study conducted by physiologist Benjamin Libet from the University of California in San Francisco in the 1980s.18
Imagine travelling back through time and taking part in Libet’s experiment. After arriving at his laboratory and having a nice cup of tea, you are taken into a small room and have several small electrodes placed on your head and forearm. Next you are sat in front of a small screen displaying a dot moving in a circle, like the seconds hand of a clock. You are asked to flex your wrist whenever you like, but to report the position of the dot each time you make the decision to flex. After a few wrist flexes the experimenters remove the various electrodes and thank you for your participation.
Like Faraday’s study into table-turning, Libet’s experiment is as simple as it is ingenious. His experimental set-up measured participants’ brain activity, forearm activity and the precise moment that the person thought they decided to move their wrist, allowing him to plot the exact time that each event took place. Libet’s data showed a large amount of brain activity about a third of a second before each participant said that they made the decision to move their wrist. In short, exactly as predicted by Wegner, your brain appears to make a decision before you are conscious of it.
Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there Page 12