Do you still remember the Ouija board game you played back then? Would you still be afraid if you tried it now?

Unconsciously, the popularity of the Pen Fairy Ouija game has been over for more than ten years... Friends born after 2000 know even less about it. The game is long gone, but it does not prevent us from occasionally picking up memories.

"Pen Fairy" is a psychic game. According to the game's introduction, the Pen Fairy will attach to the pen, and then drive the pen to move by itself, and write down the answer to your question. In foreign countries, there was also a similar game that was popular on social networking sites. It was called "Charlie Charlie Challenge". "Charlie, Charlie, are you there?" This bland question comes from this "summoning evil spirits" game.

Charlie Charlie Challenge

Here’s how to play Charlie Charlie Challenge:

Photo | charliecharliechallenge.net

The player balances a horizontal pencil on top of a vertical pencil (forming a cross). Under the two pencils is a piece of paper divided into four areas, two of which are marked "yes" and the other two are marked "no".

The player then summons the evil spirit "Charlie" to play with them by asking "Charlie Charlie are you there?"

If Charlie is in a good mood, the pencil above is said to start turning and eventually stop in the "yes" area.

The player can then ask Charlie questions that can be answered with yes or no, and wait for the pencil to move again.

The two games are essentially the same, and are actually based on pseudoscience - claiming to be able to summon an evil spirit from another world. The evil spirit force does not really exist, but there is indeed a real and powerful "force" behind the game.

This force is called gravity.

So what makes the pencil move on its own? Only one of the most powerful forces on Earth, gravity, can do it. For one object to be balanced on top of another, the center of gravity of the former must be exactly above the latter.

In the Charlie Charlie Challenge, players need to stack two long cylindrical objects on top of each other, so these two objects that are not easy to keep balanced will naturally have the possibility of rolling.

Christopher French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at University College London, said: "Balancing one pencil on top of another creates a very unstable system, where even the smallest draft of air or breathing can cause the top pencil to move."

French said the unstable pencils moved regardless of whether evil spirits were summoned, proving that "demonic powers" weren't necessarily required for the pencils to move.

Of course, in a setting like a candlelit room at night, a pencil moving without anyone touching it might seem a little creepy, but French points out that it's really no different than the wind blowing through a curtain.

The second force is called psychological suggestion.

Objectively speaking, gravity is not the only force at work in the Charlie Charlie Challenge; the power of psychological suggestion can also be powerful.

A 2012 study published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science found that people develop certain expectations about how things will turn out in certain situations. That is, when we expect something to happen, our thoughts and behaviors help that expectation come true.

In a game that summons evil spirits, the player may be expecting a certain answer, so their actions may help to bring about that result, such as breathing at the right time or gently waving their hands to fan the air.

This conjecture is similar to that proposed by French, who has pointed out that many forms of divination games, such as the Ouija board (where players place their fingers on indicators that move around the board in response to questions asked) and the twirling table (an ancient parlor game in which people place their hands on a table and wait for it to rotate), are influenced by the subconscious behavior of the participants.

Ouija board, where players place their fingers on markers that move around the board based on the questions asked. | flix.gr

French said the "magic" behind Ouija boards, twirling tables, pendulums and dowsing rods can be scientifically explained by the ideomotor effect, also known as the Carpenter effect, which was first proposed by British physician and psychologist William Carpenter, who believed that involuntary muscle movements caused the pointer or table to move when people played divination games.

The psychomotor effect cannot fully explain the Charlie Charlie Challenge because players do not touch the pencil with their hands in this game.

However, it is similar to other divination games in that it is influenced by what French calls "wishful thinking," or the belief that an accidental event (such as the turning of a pencil) is related to some unconnected or even imaginary force (a ghost).

"The so-called 'answers' in divination games may be ambiguous, but our innate ability to seek meaning from things (even if they are made up) can lead us to see meaning in these responses and believe that they are manipulated by some form of intelligence," French said.

Perhaps because of this innate ability to see the inner meaning of things, people have long claimed that the face of Jesus appeared on their toast.

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French believes the Charlie Charlie Challenge is a perfect example of wishful thinking, which may have played an important role in human evolution. He says it may have been meaningful for our ancestors to see "signs" in unexplained events because they may represent real threats that needed to be avoided, and the cost of avoiding a nonexistent threat was much less than the cost of failing to avoid a real threat.

Modern people also often find deep meaning in meaningless or irrelevant events, French said. This innate tendency may be why so many people believe that the answers in the Charlie Charlie Challenge really come from some intelligence that wants to communicate with them.

Author: IvyP

Editor: Globe Monster, Iris

An AI

I always feel that there will be more people coming to me for fortune-telling (spreading hands)

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