Techciple
Junior Member
- Messages
- 65
All this talk about 'Hell' and 'Evil' is a little too much. I admire peoples passion,and like most of us on this site have had a personal experience, which is probably a good thing because the paranormal community is notoriously disjointed and confused on getting it's mantra out to the masses, so it's easy to see why the scientific community shuns us as a pseudoscience. Something to understand about the Ouija board, it's at foremost a tool. And as such it can be abused and misinterpreted. Even with the most amicable intentions it can lead us up the garden path. The ideomotor effect is something I've studied over the years, but I'm limited as I'm just a dumb Mech. Engineer but it is quite eye opening. The ideomotor effect refers to the influence of suggestion or expectation on involuntary and unconscious motor behavior. The movement of pointers on Ouija boards, of a facilitator's hands in facilitated communication, of hands and arms in applied kinesiology, and of some behaviors attributed to hypnotic suggestion, are due to ideomotor action. Ray Hyman (1999) has demonstrated the seductive influence of ideomotor action on medical quackery, where it has produced such appliances as the "Toftness Radiation Detector" (used by chiropractors) and "black boxes" used in medical radiesthesia and radionics (popular with naturopaths to harness "energy" used in diagnosis and healing.) Hyman also argues that such things as Qi Gong and "pulse diagnosis," popular in both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic medicine as practiced by Deepak Chopra, are best explained in terms of ideomotor action and require no supposition of mysterious energies such as chi. Now the above is science, which readily accepts criticism and correction within its peers. Maybe we in the paranormal community would do well to avail ourselves of the same open mindedness. Is the Oujia board a nefarious device? I think not. It's like any tool, it's application is where people get into trouble.
All the above is my personal opinion, and if you're going to dispute it, that's fine, but please use empirical evidence and not anecdotal clap trap.
All the above is my personal opinion, and if you're going to dispute it, that's fine, but please use empirical evidence and not anecdotal clap trap.