Ideomotor phenomenon and the good ole ouija board

"How the ouija board really moves"

by

Tom Stafford

July 30th, 2013

BBC NEWS

The mystery isn’t a connection to the spirit world, but why we can make movements and yet not realise that we're making them.

Ouija board cups and dowsing wands – just two examples of mystical items that seem to move of their own accord, when they are really being moved by the people holding them. The only mystery is not one of a connection to the spirit world, but of why we can make movements and yet not realise that we're making them.

The phenomenon is called the  ideomotor effect and you can witness it yourself if you hang a small weight like a button or a ring from a string (ideally more than a foot long). Hold the end of the string with your arm out in front of you, so the weight hangs down freely. Try to hold your arm completely still. The weight will start to swing clockwise or anticlockwise in small circles. Do not start this motion yourself. Instead, just ask yourself a question – any question – and say that the weight will swing clockwise to answer "Yes" and anticlockwise for "No". Hold this thought in mind, and soon, even though you are trying not to make any motion, the weight will start to swing in answer to your question.

Magic? Only the ordinary everyday magic of consciousness. There's no supernatural force at work, just tiny movements you are making without realising. The string allows these movements to be exaggerated, the inertia of the weight allows them to be conserved and built on until they form a regular swinging motion. The effect is known as Chevreul's Pendulum, after the 19th Century French scientist who investigated it.

What is happening with Chevreul's Pendulum is that you are witnessing a movement (of the weight) without "owning" that movement as being caused by you. The same basic phenomenon underlies dowsing – where small movements of the hands cause the dowsing wand to swing wildly – or the Ouija board, where multiple people hold a cup and it seems to move of its own accord to answer questions by spelling out letters.

This effect also underlies the sad case of  "facilitated communication" , a fad whereby carers believed they could help severely disabled children communicate by guiding their fingers around a keyboard. Research showed that the carers – completely innocently – were typing the messages themselves, rather than interpreting movements from their charges.

The interesting thing about the phenomenon is what it says about the mind. That we can make movements that we don't realise we're making suggests that we shouldn't be so confident in our other judgements about what movements we think are ours. Sure enough, in the right circumstances, you can get people to believe they have caused things that actually come from a completely independent source (something which shouldn't surprise anyone who has reflected on the madness of people who claim that it only started raining because they forget an umbrella).

You can read what this means for the nature of our minds in The Illusion of Conscious Will by psychologist Daniel Wegner, who sadly died last month. Wegner argued that our normal sense of owning an action is an illusion, or – if you will – a construction. The mental processes which directly control our movements are not connected to the same processes which figure out what caused what, he claimed.

The situation is not that of a mental command-and-control structure like a disciplined army; whereby a general issues orders to the troops, they carry out the order and the general gets back a report saying "Sir! We did it. The right hand is moving into action!". The situation is more akin to an organised collective, claims Wegner: the general can issue orders, and watch what happens, but he's never sure exactly what caused what. Instead, just like with other people, our consciousness (the general in this metaphor) has to apply some principles to figure out when a movement is one we've made.

One of these principles is that cause has to be consistent with effect. If you think "I'll move my hand" and your hand moves, you're likely to automatically get the feeling that the movement was one you made. The principle is broken when the thought is different from the effect, such as with Chevreul's Pendulum. If you think "I'm not moving my hand", you are less inclined to connect any small movements you make with such large visual effects.

This maybe explains why kids can shout "It wasn't me!" after breaking something in plain sight. They thought to themselves "I'll just give this a little push", and when it falls off the table and breaks it doesn't feel like something they did.

The "cube of Rubik" is back

 

"Rubik’s Cube Twists Back Into Limelight"

by

Douglas Quenqua

August 6th, 2012

The New York Times

The clatter of 200 Rubik’s Cubes twisting in unison filled the ballroom at the Riviera hotel and casino here on Saturday as Riley Woo, 15, stepped to the stage.

Shick shick shick shick shick.

He took 1 minute 46 seconds to study a jumbled cube, then pulled a blindfold over his eyes and started to twist.

Shick shick shick shick shick.

Forty-eight seconds later, Riley lifted his blindfold and smiled. He had solved the puzzle, in a total of just over 2 minutes 34 seconds; not bad. Across the table, his father stopped filming and give him a thumbs-up.

“I just memorized each color, and then based on that, like, you already know how to solve it, based on where each color is,” Riley said afterward.

“A ton of algorithms, right?” said his dad.

“Yeah, not a lot of math,” Riley agreed. “Just algorithms.” (The difference, he said, was between formulas you can memorize and equations you have to figure out.)

In the 38 years since the Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik invented his cube, it has alternately been regarded as an object of fun, art, mathematics, nostalgia and frustration. Some credit its enduring fame to its universality — it requires no instructions or cultural context — and some to its complexity. What other child’s toy could so befuddle an M.I.T. grad student?

It is an object that “sets its own challenge,” Mr. Rubik said via e-mail. “Anybody blessed with the basic human senses can instantly ‘get it.’ ”As a primary-colored offspring of the 1980s, the cube will forever be linked with fads like Pac-Man, neon leggings and Cyndi Lauper. Unlike those fascinations, the Rubik’s Cube is enjoying a resurgence of popularity and, in a world increasingly run by engineers and algorithms, relevance.

“You can use Rubik’s Cube to teach engineering, you can use it to teach mathematics, and you can use it to talk about the interplay between design and engineering and mathematics and creativity,” said Paul Hoffman, president of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, where an exhibit planned for 2014 will honor the 40th anniversary of the cube. “I’m hoping the Rubik’s Cube will excite a new generation and get them into engineering.”

Judging by the crowd at the 2012 World Cube Association’s United States National Championship last weekend in Las Vegas, that excitement may be building. While a few older cubing icons, like Lars Petrus, the 1981 Swedish champion and creator of the Petrus Method (hint: build a 2-by-2-by-2 corner, then expand it outward), were on hand, nearly all the competitors were born decades after the cube’s heyday.

And while most seemed to consider it a hobby rather than occupational training, the mental benefits did not escape them.

“The maths of the cube, like group theory, don’t really apply to many things,” said Thom Barlow, 24, a programmer from Manchester, England, who develops systems for solving the cube as a hobby. “But it teaches you how to practice something. Your brain starts to realize, ‘Oh, I need to work on this,’ and that’s how you get better.”

There were speed solvers and blindfolded solvers and those who solve with their feet, though purists consider foot-solving an unbecoming gimmick (tellingly, they were cordoned off in a far corner of the ballroom). Boys outnumbered girls by at least 4 to 1; the youngest competitor was 5.

“Solving a Rubik’s Cube isn’t hard,” said Tyson Mao, one of the event’s organizers. “It’s not impressive that a 5-year-old would be smart enough to solve a Rubik’s Cube. It’s impressive that he would have the patience.”

More than a story of puzzle fanatics or math geeks, the cube’s revival is a many-sided tale involving nostalgia, the Internet and the actor Will Smith.

Fifteen years ago, the cube “was in the closeout bin,” said Joe Sequino, a spokesman for Winning Moves, the company that shares cube-manufacturing responsibilities in America, with Hasbro. Despite selling more than 350 million units in the early 1980s, the cube had long since passed into memory for all but a handful of hard-core puzzlers.

But with the advent of Web video, fans got an opportunity to share their solving strategies. A new generation of puzzlers started catching on, and in 2004, a group calling itself the World Cube Association held the first speed-cubing tournament in more than 20 years, attended by 89 participants. It has since become an annual event, with about 300 competing in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, children of the 1980s began seeking out cubes for their own offspring — who, unlike their parents, were more likely to enjoy a fruitful relationship with the puzzle thanks to the online resources. In some places, the cube is now a schoolyard fad.

In 2006, Hollywood delivered the final pop-culture push: Will Smith’s brilliant but hard-luck character in “The Pursuit of Happyness“ solves a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes after seeing the toy for the first time.

“That Rubik’s scene was in the trailer, and it blew up from there,” Mr. Sequino said in an e-mail. “It was the perfect confluence of events, with the movie and with a new generation 27 years later getting turned on to the cube.”

Sales of the cube, which were negligible in 2000, peaked in 2008 at 15 million globally, and have leveled off since then. Recent years have seen the arrival of more challenging cubes, with as many as 6, 7 or even 10 squares across, as well as odd shapes, like triangles or a dodecahedron.

In the past 14 months, Rubik’s Cubes have been solved for the first time in space and atop Mount Everest. In 2011, a speed-cuber took the top prize in “Sweden’s Got Talent“ by, among other things, solving one while blindfolded. The American speed-cuber Anthony Michael Brooks — known for his one-handed solving — stars in a new Volkswagen commercial called “You Can’t Fake Fast.”

As part of its cube exhibit in 2014, the Liberty Science Center plans to build on its roof a 35-foot-tall cube made of lights that people can manipulate with their cellphones; it will be visible from Manhattan. Also on hand will be a $2.5 million cube made of diamonds, a giant walk-in cube where visitors can explore the inner workings of the puzzle and a wandering flock of cube-solving robots.

And in a sign of how affectionately the cube is viewed in techie culture, Google in 2010 donated its computing resources to determine “God’s number,” the minimum number of moves required to solve the cube from any position, if one uses the most efficient method. In 1980, it was thought to be 52; Google’s computers place it at 20.

At the end of the day Saturday, a few records had been set, including one by 16-year-old Deven Nadudvari of Monterey Park, Calif. He solved each of five different 3-by-3 cubes with one hand in an average 14.86 seconds, setting a North American record.

“I just practiced a lot for this competition,” Deven said. Asked what about the cube appealed to him, he said, “I just like it.” (Asked what line of work he wanted to go into, he laughed and said he did not know.)

Not that you have to be a budding engineer to enjoy all this. “Twisting the cube and getting faster at it, it’s a good feeling,” William Boards, 17, soon to be at Southern Methodist University, said while fiddling with a cube. “I don’t get that big a mathematics boost from it, but it’s a good healthy competition."

Erno Rubik and his cube

Rubik's Cube is back for a mere $150

Erno Rubik and a retro toy

The "Claw"...you can win a prize

"How Do You Win the Claw Game?"

by

Forrest Wickman

February 7th, 2012

Slate

An Australian 3-year-old climbed inside a coin-operated claw game at a family restaurant Sunday, and proceeded to hand out the game’s candies and toys. Similarly frustrated players have busted into claw machines in Wisconsin and Minnesota over the last few years. If you’re playing by the rules, what’s the best way to grab a prize with the claw?

It depends on the machine. Claw games can be adjusted to make the prizes either easier or harder to grab. The difficulty is controlled by setting the length of time allotted for each attempt and the number of attempts given for each quarter spent. Operators can also change the strength of the claw’s grip. Given these variables, claw-game experts recommend spending a few minutes on the sideline while others play. Once you have a sense of the machine’s idiosyncrasies, ask a partner to stand on one side of the machine to help you align your claw on the depth axis. If the prize is a plush toy or stuffed animal, aim for the chest, which allows for the firmest grip. If the claw has a weak grip, try knocking objects sideways into the prize chute. Experts differ as to whether it’s easier to win with a three-pronged or a four-pronged claw.

There are other ways that a claw-game operator can tweak the odds. In some machines, the prizes are crammed together such that it requires more force to pull them out. According to the British TV show Brainiac, some claw machines (or “fairground grabbers,” as they’re known in the United Kingdom) are programmed so that they only maintain a firm grip on every fifth or 10th play; they’re guaranteed to drop the prizes the rest of the time. Whatever their methods, claw-machine operators lean toward settings that allow a ratio of about $3 worth of prizes doled out for every $10 in revenue.

While claw games have been compared to kiddy slot machines by critics, the law considers them to be to be games of skill, as opposed to games of chance. In several states, so-called “Chuck E. Cheese laws” ensure that children’s arcade games won’t be tagged with regulations designed for casinos. (Even under these rules, claw games are illegal when they don’t give players a fair shot.)

Claw crane [Wikipedia]

Rubik's Cube is back for a mere $150

"Bust Out the Parachute Pants — Rubik Is Back"

by

Warren Buckleitner

September 29th, 2009

New York Times

While the amount of technology packed into Rubik’s TouchCube is impressive, the big question remains: Would you want to spend more than a few minutes with it before tossing the $150 puzzle through a window?

In stores Oct. 18 from Techno Source USA, this is the second electronic edition of the famous puzzle from Techno Source, following last year’s Rubik’s Revolution. Rather than physically twisting the interlocked mechanical cubes patented by Erno Rubik in 1977, you swipe your finger against one of the cube’s capacitive sides to “flip” the colors. There are no moving parts; instead, the multicolor LEDs change color with a flipping sound emitted from an internal speaker, while an accelerometer keeps track of which side is up.

The onboard computer provides hints, or it can solve itself. When it is not being used, the cube sits in a charging cradle and lights up, making an ideal geek’s night light.

In case you are still working with the original:

DIRECTIONS FOR SOLVING THE 5x5x5 (Professor) CUBE

How To Solve A Rubik's Cube