Expressing unconscious general knowledge using Chevreul’s pendulum

Can unconscious knowledge be elicited by ideomotor action when the knowledge fails to be elicited by verbal reports? Using a Ouija board, Gauchou et al. (2012), found ideomotor action produced substantial accuracy for general knowledge questions previously rated as pure “guesses”, and for which later verbal reports produced accuracy close to chance. We replicated the procedure substituting Chevreul’s pendulum rather than a Ouija board. We found that questions whose answer was previously rated as a guess, were answered equally well and at about chance levels by ideomotor action and verbal responses. Thus, one cannot presume that ideomotor action rather than verbal report will allow greater knowledge to be expressed in any particular context, including therefore the hypnotherapy one. An ideomotor action may elicit only conscious knowledge. Further research is recommended to clarify this important issue.

The Queer Afterlife of Gossip

This article reveals the formative interplay between the queer art of gossip and poetic practice in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a sprawling verse trilogy composed with the unlikely assistance of a Ouija board. The poem’s extensive gossip with the dead is often dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins. Arguing that midcentury American attitudes about sexuality inflect—productively as much as disastrously—the relationship of lyric privacy to gossipy publicity in Merrill’s poem, the article shows how gossip, in its rich afterlife in Sandover, emerges not so much as a normative threat to be overcome but as a mode of fostering and preserving nonnormative voices, converting the privacy imposed on the homosexual into the conditions for creating queer worlds. Gossip concomitantly provides Merrill with a model of poetic self-performance that at once pushes against and embraces New Critical ideals of lyric subjectivity—a way of telling one’s own scandalous story through someone else’s words, even words intended as hostile, discovering poetic and sexual pleasures where others see only anxiety and dread.

The Illusion of Conscious Will

Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. The first edition of this book proposed an innovative and provocative answer: the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain; it helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, the book says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion (“the most compelling illusion”), it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. This new edition includes a foreword and an introduction. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, the book examines cases both when people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing and when they are not willing an act that they in fact are doing in such phenomena as hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, and dissociative identity disorder. The author's argument was immediately controversial (called “unwarranted impertinence” by one scholar) but also compelling, and the book has been called the author's magnum opus.

Slumber Parties as Rites of Passage

Children’s supernatural based activities such as M.A.S.H, Bloody Mary, Ouija board experimentation, and “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board” comprise a traditional repertoire of paranormal and divinatory rituals to be drawn upon many times throughout a series of friends’ birthday parties or sleepovers. This article investigates the cognitive and ritual functions of such supernatural play as performed by American pre-adolescent girls within the liminal context of the slumber party. Though characterized as children’s play, this is ritual behavior in two senses: in its direct confrontation and thrilling exploration of the supernatural, and in its trance-inducing, ceremonial qualities. Such play is often structured and performed as traditional ritual and can invoke aspects of rites of passage, especially when undertaken cumulatively throughout adolescence. Drawing upon fieldwork in consultation with the collections of University of Oregon’s Mills Northwest Folklore Archive, the Utah State University’s Fife Folklore Archive, and children’s folklore scholarship, this article explores such spiritualistic play as a vernacular process of adolescent individuation.