How do Ouija boards work, really?

In a ton of movies, Ouija boards are used to contact evil powers from beyond, who give eerie advice and open the gateway for malevolent spirits to reach our cosmos. Generally, this is extremely unusual performance in a game made by Parker Brothers.

Personally, I think it's all misdirection, and the truly Satanic game is Monopoly. Think about it: have you ever played it with your family and not had it result in arguments, tension, and bad feelings? It's like that game was created by demons to spread anger and discord.

What exactly is, then, the scientific explanation for how Ouija and other spiritualist talking boards work? After all, they seem to result in intelligible data.

The answer is the phenomena called the "ideomotor effect." The ideomotor effect, in a nutshell, is that our bodies can move involuntarily without our being actively aware of it, that at times muscular impulses are made without any volition on our part, without any conscious desires or emotions. Breathing, for example, is a well-known example of an ideomotor impulse.

With a Ouija board, however, movement exists that is consistent with our subconscious impulses. Ideomotor effects have been shown to be extremely vulnerable to suggestion; in fact, a person with strong ideomotor activity can also easily enter a hypnotic state.

In fact, our involuntary muscle actions can be made to behave in response to implanted expectations, according to this guy at QuackWatch. In other words, we ourselves are the source of the motion of a Ouija board.

Ideomotor effects seem supernatural, and are the scientific basis behind not only Ouija boards but also "dowsing" and pendulum-swinging divination.

Here's the thing about everything on this blog: you don't have to take my word for it, look it up. But this time I actually encourage you to try this out for yourself. Wear a blindfold, hold a Ouija board, and have a partner read what you produce. It will produce unintelligible gibberish (or alternatively, like the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, you'll produce the greatest novel ever written).

Great video on why there's homosexuality in the world

A few things:

• The video claims that genetics play a role in gayness, which may be partially true but doesn't tell the whole story. What is considered to be a greater factor is hormonal development inside the womb, which is mentioned later on. Fetuses that develop when the mother is stressed are more likely to be homosexual, something discovered during an analysis of babies that were in the womb during the London Blitz.
• ...they mention animals are often gay, but there's little mention of how birds are often gay, including (adorably enough) penguins. A current theory in ornithology is that birds "turn gay" as a result of a form of population control. When a population grows too large, some birds turn homosexual.
• The video really starts getting good at 2:41, where it talks about people that are "fixed." In the opinion of nearly every responsible and reputable psychological organization on the planet, homosexuality is a condition that is not curable. Science has a moral obligation to set the record straight and make people aware of this.
• Finally, I personally have always been of the opinion that too much is generally made, when explaining homosexuality, about biology instead of culture and definitions. Looking for a biological explanation for why people are gay as opposed to a sociological or psychological one always struck me as pointless, like looking for a biological explanation for something like politeness. What etiquette is differs from society to society, so how can there be an etiquette gene, anyway? Here's a dirty little secret about psychology: a lot of it can't be worked out from applied biochemistry because it's about the interaction of an individual and society. One of the greatest fallacies of modern times is that microphenomena can explain macro-level trends, and sometimes that's true (chemical structure determines properties at larger levels) but most of the time it isn't (crackpot explanations for how genes determine religious practices).