Posts by HintOfLime

74

People STILL believe in Demons and Ghosts on this site...bloody 16th Century rubbish!

by Witness 007 in

it's the 21st century mate!

there is no evidence for demons and ghosts!

people saying ouija boards really work because: "this one time...at band camp...." crap i say!

HintOfLime

Give 'em a break 007. If everybody was a critical thinker, I wouldn't have anyone to sell my glass bead... I mean.. "Magic Crystals" to for $12 a pop, and then I'd be out 50k a year. They're magic!

Seriously, people will believe this sort of thing to the end of time. Humans are social creatures, and as such, we are prone to personify everything. When our computer crashes, we personify it, and attribute it a motive.

Likewise, when something happens that we don't understand, our brain's tendency is to immediately personify that unknown to be the result of some thinking rational force. We assume that everything that happens has a purpose - that a curtain wouldn't move for any reason other than to frighten us.

- Lime

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

People exaggerate all the time. It is a fact of life. The story about your family member is not first-hand, it is second hand. It is not unreasonable that some exaggeration or embelishment has been introduced to the facts either by your family member or yourself.

As a child, I remember opening my bedroom door while my brother sat reading in bed, and hearing my parents engaging in a conversation. My father said "Did they call the police? NO. They put the body in the back of the trunk, and..." and at that point, I closed my bedroom door in shock. Now the catch is, my brother, recalling the same story recalls the event differently. In his version, he was the one opening the bedroom door, while I was I was in my bed. Which one of us is correct?

Over and over again, studies have shown that human testimony is the least reliable of all forms of evidence.

Human testimony DOES NOT MAKE FACT. And just because you may say something that is slightly skewered or exaggerated does not make you a liar. It makes you a typical human with a mind that doesn't always notice and record every detail significant to the question at hand.

So forgive me if I do NOT believe your conclusion, or even some of the facts you present in your second-hand account. But please stop taking it as a personal attack, and realize that if I described seeing a fairy sitting on a unicorn in my back yard yesterday does not mean that I really SAW a unicorn, or that I am a liar. The mental models of the physical world that we build inside our heads and the conclusions we reach based on not 100% reliable. It is a simple fact of life. You are not a liar, you are a human.

To find TRUTH, we have to gather what physical evidence we can about a particular event, and build a model of the event that the known presentable facts agree with. In all carefully observed and recorded experiences involving metaphysics, including the Oujia board... there has been absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anything supernatural has occured. In each case, there is a documented, demonstratable, repeatable, limited, and rational force which can be used to explain a particular outcome.

- Lime

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

Or are you suggesting I am liar?

I imagine the facts of your experience are correct (though some are possibly exaggerated to support your argument). It is the conclusion you insist upon that I suspect as faulty. (This sort of 'defense' is of course, a logical fallacy.)

Absolutely NO test ever done has supported the idea that these spiritual encounters are real. The US government invested hundreds of millions of dollars into this kind of metaphysical stuff, and couldn't find anything that demonstrated special knowlege better than random chance. (Seriously, look into these experiments, and critically compare the actual results to your own experience.)

- Lime

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

Yeah, awesome video, rebel8.

One very simple test then create some questions with the people hands in place, note the answers.

Another simple test:

Have 2-3 people using the board, and a fourth person sit at a table nearby. Have him behind a sheet or screen so that he cannot see the ouija board, and the users cannot see him or what he does. Have him shuffle a deck of cards, and place four of them face-up on the table (where the users cannot see at any time).

Ask the ouija users to reveal the numbers/letters on the 4 cards from left to right.

Good luck!

- Lime

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

but what are the chances that a girl who had never met my sister before would be able to guess her boyfriend's last name?

Was your sister's hand on the planchette? If it was.. the gig is up - your sister could have provided that answer (even if she swears she didn't).

If not, why not use these skills in the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challange (http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html)! Why ask a spirit some petty thing your sister could have just told her outright... when there is cold hard cash at stake?

- Lime

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

From: http://www.hypnosiseducationcenter.com/ideomotor-action.html

Ideomotor Action

Human thought manifests itself in two forms. We can think using visual images or by using words (language). Language consists of sound symbols used as a means of communication between two individuals. Objects in the exterior world are designated by sound symbols that permits them to be envisioned even in their absents. However, words become detached from the objects they symbolize and take on an independent life. They no longer are only a means of communication, but become an instrument of thought. Words become an internal language, which is no longer speech, since it is not expressed in sound, but a method of thinking.

No matter which method we use for thinking, the end result is a change in the musculature of our body. If you think of performing some act, the muscles of your body responsible for carrying out that act are enervated whether you actually carry out the act or not. If you think about buttoning your shirt, or describe how to button a shirt to someone else, the muscles of your body that would be used to perform the action are energized and in an aborted way carry out the act. This is why the Semantic-Relaxation Exercise works. If you suggest to yourself or imagine that a muscle or groups of muscles are relaxing, they actually respond to some small degree. Through repetition the response becomes greater and more generalize. I don't expect you to believe this. I intend to let you perform a little experiment and prove it to yourself. For the experiment you will need a piece of string or thread and a small weight of some kind (i.e., heavy button, bead about 3/4" in diameter, etc.).

Attach your weight (button etc.) to the string as illustrated at the right. What we are creating is just a pendulum, a small bob hanging to a thread or string. Almost any small object will do. The dimensions given are not critical. If you use a button it should be about 3/8 to ½ inch in diameter. The color is unimportant. What you will have created, if you decide to make the object above, is called Chevreul's pendulum. This experiment can be performed while you are in any comfortable position. Just hold the end of the string so that the weighted end can swing freely. One way to do it is to sit at a table. Rest your left forearm in your lap or along the edge of the table. Rest your right elbow with your right arm lifted almost vertically, a little forward of your left arm. Hold the end of the string between your finger and thumb. Position yourself so that you are comfortable. If you are sitting as described, the pendulum should hang in front of the center of your body (median plane).

The bob should be about ½ " from the top of the table. Actually none of these instructions are crucial, if you approximate them the experiment is virtually certain to succeed. After you have assumed your position, the bob will probably be swinging freely in some direction. With your left hand bring it to a stand still (if you are left handed, reverse hands). Put your hand back into position. If the pendulum is not perfectly still don't worry about it, its not that important. Now fix your gaze on the bob and imagine that it is the pendulum on a grandfather's clock. Imagine that it is swinging from side-to-side just like a pendulum on a clock. The more you can see the pendulum swinging from side to side in your imagination, the greater the response will be. Follow with your eyes an imaginary pendulum on a clock moving from side to side. Try not to think about anything else and do not try to analyze what is happening. If you followed the above instructions, the pendulum will do exactly what you imagine.

Once you have the pendulum swinging from side to side, without stopping it, imagine that the bob is sitting on the edge of a phonograph record and the record is going around and around. As you imagine the bob going around on the outer edge of the disk, you will find that the side to side motion changes into a rotary motion. Once the bob starts going in circles, imagine that the record is spinning faster and faster. The bob will begin to make a larger circle and pick up speed. Some individuals when first trying this experiment tend to tense their muscles. This should not be done and will only serve to lessen the response. Try to be relaxed when you try this experiment. The only people that this experiment will not work for are those individuals that "know" before they start, it will not work. However, if they are thinking, "this will not work, the bob will not move." The experiment is working for them, they are getting exactly what they are thinking, "the bob will not move" and it will not.

The Chevreul pendulum experiment is a demonstration of the phenomenon of ideomotor action. That is, the tendency of thoughts or ideas to be automatically translated, reflex like, into specific patterns of muscular activity. Probably many hypnotic suggestions act purely through ideomotor action. As stimuli they trigger corresponding thoughts and images that act as cue-producing responses, evoking actual motor responses. The repeated elicitation of an ideomotor response increases the intensity of the response.

Ideomotor actions tend to be weak responses, particularly in their initial phrase. If there is present another strong muscular action or tension involving the same muscles it will tend to mask or block the weak pattern induced by thoughts. The probabilities are that you will succeed with this experiment as very few people fail to get a response. If you do not get any results, do not give up. Try again on several consecutive days or try using a lighter or heaver bob. You might try a different length of string. In general, a longer string will give a greater response.

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

My hand wasn't moving it.

Then his hand was. :P

Why come up with supernatural explainations when the truth is staring you flat in the face. The game DOES NOT MOVE on it's own. It requires someone to put their hand on it. Doesn't that pretty much give away the trick right there?

It's like Invisible Boy from Mystery Men here... So you can only be invisible... as long as nobody, including yourself... is looking at you.

- Lime

48

Have you ever had your palm read, fortune told, or read your horoscope etc?

by restrangled in

jw
friends

after reading the ouji board thread, i wondered if anyone had "dared" anything of this nature.. i was always too scared to even watch movies with any of this content.

i do read my horoscope.

my great aunt was into the occult and she was told she would die before she was 50 when she was in her 30's.

HintOfLime

The local skeptics group I am a part of has sent out many invitations to these sort of people... and four have responded that they would certainly meet our 'challenge' and demonstrate their skills.

All four of them canceled the days before, however. The invitation is still open, of course.

Of course, this stuff has been exposed to be simple cold-reading and other such tricks many times before. Your body language, nature of your dress, etc. tells a lot about you, and these scammers pick up on it.

- Lime

2

Are you superstitious and/or what is your take on those who are?

by StoneWall in

jw
friends

was reading on another thread (ouija board) and it got me to thinking about a friend of mine who was almost.

paranoid about anything and everything.

he was very superstitious.. when he helped me on a few job sites and would say stuff like don't walk under the ladder or careful with that.

HintOfLime

Witnesses are equally superstitious, they just call it 'demons', 'holy spirit', or something else instead. They might not use good luck charms - but they still have the same brain wiring that causes false positives in pattern recognition, and will embrace superstitious behaviors.

I remember reading about an experiement they did with two birds. One bird received a snack every time it bobbed it's head (the control). The other bird (isolated from the first) received a snack completely at random.

But a strange thing happened, both birds began to constantly bob their heads. Apparently, the bird just happened to be bobbing it's head a few times when the random snack appeared, and it created a 'false pattern' in the bird's mind that it's actions had triggered the snack to appear.

Superstition is essentually caused by this faulty sort of association. Our brain is a pattern matching machine. In fact, companies use neural network software to detect fraud, because neural networks are very apt at learning and detecting subtile patterns. Unfortunately, sometimes we think we detect a pattern when no pattern really existed, and when we do - a superstition is born.

"My sports team won two games in a row, and both times, I was wearing this particular jersy. It must be the jersy!!" For some reason, once these patterns take hold, we'll ignore anything that doesn't match the pattern, but grab on tightly everytime something does.

- Lime

170

ouija board

by The-Borg in

jw
friends

anyone had any experiences good or bad.

i'm interested in your stories.. .

.

HintOfLime

Penn & Teller did a good episode on the Ouija board, having 'professional spirit mediums' using the board (They were so special, they were using a board they custom designed for their use).

Guess what they learned? It's all a bunch of shinannigans! The board couldn't correctly answer anything that none of the individuals didn't already know. They would claim to be talking to someone dead, so the investigators would suggest simple known questions about the person (where they were board, when did they die, etc.), and the mediums would get back wrong answers or it would be 'muddy'. They could only answer things that were subjective and untestable ("He feels sad right now"). They also played a few jests on the participants by blindfolding and rotating the board... and of course, the participants continued to point to positions on the board that they THOUGHT were yes and no (apparently the spirits can't see the board is flipped).

They also described some of the 'mystereous forces' at work. If two people hold an object, and it moves, you know it's the other person. But if three people hold an object and it moves, there is no one person to say 'you're moving it'.. and the object becomes more difficult to keep stationary.

They had some random individuals try it that had never done it before. Roughly half of them felt 'something special was happening', and the other half thought that too many answers were wrong and it was just a game.

My JW mom played with a ouija board when she was a kid, and to this day swears that it told her things nobody else in the room could know (but SHE didn't move it that way), and that night she saw 'shadows' moving around her house, and one of them centered on her and posessed her for a few minutes. Actually, the story gets better every time she tells it. (She was also using drugs at the time, but SWEARS she didn't take drugs that night, and it had NOTHING to do with it.)

- Lime