Muscle reading

 Muscle reading, also known as "Hellstromism"[6], "Cumberlandism" or "contact mind reading", is a technique used by mentalists to determine the thoughts or knowledge of a subject, the effect of which tends to be perceived as a form of mind reading. The performer can determine many things about the mental state of a subject by observing subtle, involuntary responses to speech or any other stimuli. It is closely related to the ideomotor effect, whereby subtle movements made without conscious awareness reflect a physical movement, action or direction which the subject is thinking about. The term "muscle reading" was coined in the 1870s by American neurologist George M. Beard to describe the actions of mentalist J. Randall Brown [1], an early proponent of the art.

The technique relies on the assertion that the subject will subconsciously reveal their thoughts through very slight involuntary physical reactions, also known as ideomotor responses. The performer can determine what the subject is thinking by recognising and interpreting those responses. Muscle reading may be billed by some entertainers as a psychic phenomenon, where the audience will be told that by creating physical contact with the subject, a better psychic connection can be formed. In fact, the contact allows the performer to read more subtle reactions in the subject's motor functions that may not be apparent without contact, such as muscle control and heart rate.

Because muscle reading relies so heavily on the subject's subconscious reactions to their environment and situation, this technique is used commonly when performing stunts dealing with locating objects in an auditorium or on stage, and as such, it can be done 'clean' by the magician skilled in reading body language.

Performers often instruct the subject to imagine voicing instructions, which presumably amplifies the reactions of the subject, thus promoting the idea that the trick involves genuine thought tranference or mind-reading. However the subject who is "thinking directions" has a physical, kinaesthetic reaction that guides the performer so that he or she can, for example, locate a specific place on a wall on which to place a pin, without prior knowledge of where the pin should go.

Knowledge of muscle reading is a technique that is also reportedly used by poker players to hide their reactions to the game, as well as to read the other players for potential bluffs and/or better hands.

 [1] J. Randall Brown was an American mentalist of the Victorian era, and was one of the first nationally popular mentalists of his age. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Brown was a stage performer and early proponent of muscle reading, sometimes called "contact mind reading" or "Cumberlandism" after Stuart Cumberland [2], although Brown's act predated Cumberland's,  and Brown himself is often credited with starting the vogue for the art. The very term "muscle reading" was coined in a series of articles about Brown's abilities. Brown's shows also combined elements of the willing game and traditional séances. One of his trademark acts was the one in which he instructed the audience that while he was out of the room they were to select one of their own to be an imaginary murderer, one the victim, and something in the room to be the murder weapon. When they were done, Brown would return, take hold of one audience member by the wrist and physically lead that person to all three selections - "reading" the muscle resistance (or lack thereof) the audience member would give as he led them about the room. Much of his act consisted of variations on finding things he could not possibly know the location of. While an expert muscle reader, Brown still described this trick to his audience as "mind reading".

Brown was quite famous in the 1870s, attracting national attention with his feats. He was described in one article as holding the American people "by the nape of the neck, controlling the press as absolutely as a Napoleon or a Czar". Among people living through the progress and wonders of the Second Industrial Revolution, Brown helped create the popular impression that mental telepathy was a real skill that mankind was on the cusp of developing. He was the subject of some investigation and journalism by American neurologist George M. Beard. In 1874, Beard - irritated that Brown's abilities enjoyed so much excitement and attention in the scientific community - tested and examined Brown's claims in a New Haven music hall and (correctly) deduced that Brown's abilities were in fact due to muscle reading and not "thought transference" as Brown himself claimed. Beard also wrote a series of journalistic articles to this effect, but these were largely ignored by popular audiences and by his scientific peers.

Several of Brown's stage assistants, such as Washington Irving Bishop [4], took the information they gleaned in Brown's employ and went on to profitable solo careers of their own in the art.

 [2] Stuart Cumberland enjoyed such success as a mentalist that a key part of contact mind reading is sometimes also known as Cumberlandism. The Englishman was a ‘thought reader’ who accomplished his theatrical feats by closely studying his subjects’ ‘facial expressions and muscular tensions.’ It was by using this early knowledge of a phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect that Cumberland’s muscle reading flourished.

With his act, he traveled throughout Europe and drew much acclaim for his talents. He was adept at discerning secret words (sometimes in languages he didn’t even know) and locating hidden objects with what seemed like lightning speed, and he performed for Oscar Wilde, Andrew Carnegie and other great names of the era. He could even pinpoint physical pains and ailments known only to the sufferer. One quote describes him as able to “do all that Mr. Bishop [Washington Irving Bishop[3]], ever professes to do without the fuss.”
As a journalist and author, he also penned a newspaper and several books concerning mentalism and the techniques he used to help spot fraudulent mediums and phony psychics. More than one of his contemporaries came under attack (including Washington Irving Bishop[3]) from Cumberland for claiming to possess a supernatural extra-sensory perception. He himself was one of the few mentalists who never claimed to have any kind of psychic powers whatsoever, attributing his extraordinary powers of insight entirely to muscle reading.

[3] Washington Irving Bishop, also known as Wellington (1855-1889) was an American stage mentalist. He started his career as an assistant under the muscle reader J. Randall Brown [2], but was most well known for his performance of the blindfold drive.[4]

[4] Blindfold Drive is an specific Blindfold Vision illusion in which the performer is able to navigate in a vehicle while his eyes are covered. Washington Irving Bishop was the originator of the blindfold drive in 1885, using a horse and carriage.

See also

• Cold reading
• Ideomotor effect

 [6] Axel Hellstrom was a muscle reader, mentalist and stage magician. He re-defined the art of muscle reading to such an extent that this technique, also known as "contact mind reading" and "Cumberlandism" (after a 19th century practitioner named Stuart Cumberland[2]), is now best known by the name "Hellstromism".

Hellstrom lived in Germany and fought in World War I where he watched a man perform an act of muscle reading. At the time, Germany did not allow mind reading unless it had a plausible explanation behind its means. The only type of mind reading allowed was muscle reading, and so Axel studied it carefully and taught himself everything. He entertained his fellow soldiers and became quite good at this old technique; and so, after the war, he and his wife moved to America where he knew his art form would be accepted by many - especially the magic audiences. He practiced and astonished many. Soon he was performing for professional magic audiences and amazed and bewildered all. After a short while mind readers, and even fellow hellstromists were questioning his ability.

During his live performances, his manager spoke for him because his English vocabulary was limited. Hellstrom would successfully complete many different challenges such as locating hidden items, performing actions of which others were thinking and determining which object someone had selected out of many. The accuracy of his results was astonishing and he was soon known throughout the United States. He was well respected by his peers ain the stage magic community, and other performers paid hundreds of dollars just to learn the secret behind his work.

During the 1930s, the American magician and mentalist Robert A. Nelson published the definitive book on Hellstrom's techniques, with his cooperation. Modern practitioners of Hellstromisnm include the magicians Banachek and Kreskin.

 [*] Sydney Piddington (1918 –  1991) and Lesley Piddington ( 1925 - ) were an Australian husband and wife mentalism team who performed as The Piddingtons and gave one of the most famous stage and radio telepathy acts of modern times.

 [???] Jeff & Tessa Evason World-Renowned Mentalist Duo

Their peers and fans alike recognize Jeff & Tessa as the finest mentalist duo in the world. They have amazed audiences worldwide in over 28 countries with their thought provoking, interactive show consisting of ESP, Mind over Matter, Super Memory, Telepathy, Prediction and Levitation.
They have been seen by millions on network TV shows including Powers of the Paranormal on FOX, The World’s Greatest Magic on NBC, Grand Illusions on Discovery Channel, Open Mike with Mike Bullard on CTV & The Comedy Network and Masters of Illusion on PAX.

With bases in both the Washington DC & Baltimore MD area and in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, you can now bring The Evasons to your next event - anywhere in the world.

1.       http://www.evason.com/

2.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoD6qGMKyHM

3.       http://goalhypnosis.blogspot.ca/2011/01/there-are-fundamental-transcendent-laws.html

4.       http://pvrguymale.blogspot.ca/2011/01/clairvoyance-iv.html

5.       http://pvrguymale.blogspot.ca/2011/01/clairvoyance-v.html

Seeing what we want to believe.

The Ideometer effect!

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.ca/2011/11/chris-french-seeing-what-we-want-to.html

Illusions for Realities: Fantasy masquerading as science?

The Chevreul Pendulum Test. Used in hypnosis to show the client the power of the mind and concentration.



Chevreul was curious about "the exploring pendulum" used to analyze chemical compounds, a method employed by his colleagues at the time.
Chevreul did what none of his predecessors had thought of doing. He conducted the equivalent of what we would call a double-blind trial. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant place or remove the glass plate between the pendulum and a bowl of mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevreul concluded,

"So long as I believed the movement possible, it took place;
but after discovering the cause I could not reproduce it."

His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is "to mistake illusions for realities, whenever we are confronted by phenomena in which the human sense-organs are involved under conditions imperfectly analyzed."
His research on the "magic pendulum", Dowsing rods and table-turning is revolutionary. In his paper "De la baguette"(1864), Chevreul explains how human muscular reactions, totally involuntary and subconscious, are responsible for seemingly magical movements. In the end Chevreul discovered that once a person holding divining rods/magic pendulum became aware of the brain's reaction, the movements stopped and could not be willingly reproduced.

In 1853 Michael Faraday, while studying table tipping, concluded:

that honest, intelligent people can unconsciously engage in muscular activity that is consistent with their expectations

.

The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. The term was first used in a scientific paper discussing the means through which the Ouija board produced its results, by William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852, whence the alternative term Carpenter effect. In the paper, Carpenter explained his theory that muscular movement can be independent of conscious desires or emotions.
Carpenter, in 1852, wanted to show that a variety of currently popular phenomena had conventional scientific explanations rather than the widely believed supernatural ones. The phenomena he tackled included dowsing ("water witching"[1]), the magic pendulum, certain aspects of mesmerism, spiritualists' "table turning," and Reichenbach's "Odylic force." [Scientists have abandoned concepts such as Odic force. In western popular culture, the name is used similarly to qi or prana in reference to spiritual energies or vital force associated with living things.]

Pendulum charts: Fantasy masquerading as science?

On August 31st, 1886 Michel Eugene Chevreul celebrated his 100th birthday.

He managed to celebrate two more.

[1] Finding water underground.
• A 1948 study tested 58 dowsers' ability to detect water. None of them were more reliable than chance.
• A 1979 review examined many controlled studies of dowsing for water, and found that none of them showed better than chance results.
• In a study in Munich 1987–1988, 500 dowsers were initially tested for their "skill" and the experimenters selected the best 43 among them for further tests. Of the 43 pre-selected and extensively tested candidates at least 37 showed no dowsing ability. The results from the remaining 6 were said to be better than chance.
• During a 2004 study in Germany, the three-day test of some 30 dowsers showed results which were no better than chance

TREATMENT BY HYPNOTISM AND SUGGESTION 1907

Association of ideas plays a very important part in all our sentiments and actions, and this association is certainly strengthened by hypnotism. This explains the success of the treatment in many cases of drunkenness. A good plan in these cases is to suggest dislike for alcohol, and even vomiting at the taste of it. If the patient is then made to swallow a small quantity and sickness follows, and he is told, while in the hypnotic state, that such will be the invariable consequence of indulgence, we shall have established a train of very disagreeable associations which will for a long time, and perhaps always, be connected with the first step in alcoholic indulgence. It may be objected that the association of a drunkard's ideas with alcoholism cannot naturally be pleasant, as excess is always followed by illness. But ordinarily sickness and disgust come after excess, while hypnotism causes them to precede it. We frequently see the action of association of ideas where hypnotism is not in question at all.

For instance, I know a lady to whom the taste of strawberry -jam is most disagreeable and nauseating, because, as a child, on two or three occasions evil-tasting powders were given to her disguised in it.

The same lady tells me that the sight of a bottle from which she had been dosed with castor-oil used to arouse a feeling of nausea long after she had been emancipated from such compulsory medication. But similar instances are so common that they must occur to the mind of everyone.

In the combination of moral and physical influences thus produced we possess a very powerful lever. If a man has been made a drunkard through the solicitations of fast companions, his power of resistance is reduced to nil, and the offer of a drink has so often been followed by its absorption, that the sequence of events becomes automatic, an ideo-motor reflex action ; but let such a man be hypnotized, and in this state be told that alcohol is poison, and that to offer him a drink is to grossly insult him and we form a new inhibitory tract, which by repeatedly being traversed becomes well worn and habitual in place of the other. But it is plain that we must not expect immediate cure. Old channels cannot be destroyed, any more than new ones can be formed, in the course of a few days. I always tell my patients that it takes one month to get over the crude effects of confirmed alcoholism, three months for the liver, stomach, and other organs to recover their tone, and twelve months for the brain power and morale to be re-established.


One has only to tell the patient that if he takes beer or spirits they will at once cause him to vomit, and then on waking him compel him to drink a glass of beer to produce such an attack of nausea and sickness as he will remember for many a day. Even in such a case it will, no doubt, be possible for the subject to re-educate himself to like liquor, just as a schoolboy who will go on smoking, though every pipe at first makes him sick, may at last overcome the repugnance and become a confirmed smoker.

Sexual Perversion. — If hypnotism had done nothing more for medical science than bring such melancholy cases as the above within the scope of curative treatment, it would have conferred a lasting benefit on humanity. In even worse cases of perverted sexual instinct it is frequently successful.

Modern medicine teaches us that these perverted instincts depend upon a hereditary or acquired morbid condition of the brain and spinal cord, and constitute, in fact, a psychical disease. Hypnotic suggestion seems to act by checking excessive functional irritability, and by developing and bringing into play the inhibitory action of the higher brain centres, which have either not developed or have undergone impairment.

In treating cases of sexual inversion the hypnosis should be very profound, for one has to alter by suggestion a set of very deeply ingrained instincts and emotions.
from:PSYCHO-THERAPEUTICS
TREATMENT BY HYPNOTISM AND SUGGESTION
1907

Philip Aylesford: Come out, come out where ever you are!

In 1972 some Canadian parapsychologists undertook an experiment. The members of the experiment attempted to create, through intense and prolonged concentration, a collective thought-form.
The group fabricated the fictitious identity, physical appearance, and personal history of their “Philip Aylesford” who was born in England in 1624. He had an illustrious role in the Civil War, becoming a personal friend of Charles II and working for him as a secret agent. But Philip brought about his own undoing by having an affair with a Gypsy girl. When his wife found out she accused the girl of witchcraft, and she was burned at the stake. In despair Philip committed suicide in 1654 at the age of thirty.
The group began conducting sittings in September 1972 during which they meditated, visualized, and discussed the details of Philip’s life. After going for months with no communication, the group attempted table-tilting through psychokinesis.
Some weeks after changing to the séance setting the group established communication with “Philip.” He answered questions that were consistent with his fictitious history, but was unable to provide any information beyond that which the group had conceived. However, “Philip” did give other historically accurate information about real events and people. The group theorized that this latter information came from their own collective unconsciousness.
One session was held in front of a live audience of fifty people and was videotaped to be shown on television. In other sessions sounds were heard in various parts of the room and lights blinked on and off. The levitation and movement of a table were recorded on film in 1974.
As the group became more comfortable with their encounters with Philip, they began to treat him as just another member of the group. They learned his personality as if he was a good friend. And Philip would play tricks on them. At times, he would move the table around the room, especially to rush up to those arriving late as if to greet them and say “Hi”. Other times, the table would trap certain individuals in corners.
During one especially active night, one of the members jokingly admonished Philip by telling him that he could be sent away and replaced. After that, Philip’s activity began to decrease until it stopped altogether and the experiment was ceased.

Table Turning

Table Turning or "Table Tipping" is a type of séance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it, and wait for rotations. The table was purportedly made to serve as a means of communicating with the spirits; the alphabet would be slowly called over and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, thus spelling out words and sentences.


When the movement of Modern Spiritualism first reached Europe from America in the winter of 1852–1853, the most popular method of consulting the spirits was for several persons to sit round a table, with their hands resting on it, and wait for the table to move. If the experiment was successful the table would rotate with considerable rapidity, and would occasionally rise in the air, or perform other movements.

In England table-turning became a fashionable diversion and was practised all over the country in the year 1853. Dr. John Elliotson and his followers attributed the phenomena to mesmerism.

The general public were content to find the explanation of the movements in spirits, animal magnetism, odic force, galvanism, electricity, or even the rotation of the earth.

William B. Carpenter, in 1852, wanted to show that a variety of currently popular phenomena had conventional scientific explanations rather than the widely believed supernatural ones. The phenomena he tackled included dowsing ("water witching"), the magic pendulum, certain aspects of mesmerism, spiritualists' "table turning," and Reichenbach's "Odylic force." Carpenter did not question the reality of the phenomena, nor the honesty of the people who were involved. He only disputed the explanation, arguing that, "All the phenomena of the 'biologized' state, when attentively examined, will be found to consist in the occupation of the mind by the ideas which have been suggested to it, and in the influence which these ideas exert upon the actions of the body." Thus Carpenter invoked ideomotor action as a nonparanormal explanation for various phenomena that were being credited to new physical forces, spiritual intervention, or other supernatural causes.

William James elaborated upon Carpenter's ideas, asserting that ideomotor activity was the basic process underlying all volitional behavior:

"Wherever a movement unhesitatingly and immediately follows upon the idea of it, we have ideomotor action. We are then aware of nothing between the conception and the execution. All sorts of neuromuscular responses come between, of course, but we know absolutely nothing of them. We think the act, and it is done; and that is all that introspection tells us of the matter."

Probably the first major scientist to become concerned about the mischief being created by ideomotor action, although he did not know the concept by this name, was the French chemist Michel Chevreul. Chevreul, who lived for one hundred three years, became interested in the experiments of some of his fellow chemists around the beginning of the nineteenth century. These colleagues were using what was known as "the exploring pendulum" to analyze chemical compounds.

As a budding scientist, Chevreul was intrigued, but he remained skeptical. He was surprised, however, to find that the pendulum worked as advertised when he tried it over a dish of mercury. He carried out more tests, however. To see if a physical force was responsible for the movement of the pendulum, he placed a glass plate between the iron ring and the mercury. To his surprise, the oscillations diminished and then stopped. When he removed the glass plate, the pendulum movements resumed. He next suspected that the pendulum moved because it was difficult to hold his arm steady. When he rested his arm on a support, the movements diminished but did not stop altogether.

Finally, Chevreul did what none of his predecessors had thought of doing. He conducted the equivalent of what we would call a double-blind trial. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interpose or remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevreul concluded, "So long as I believed the movement possible, it took place; but after discovering the cause I could not reproduce it." His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is "to mistake illusions for realities, whenever we are confronted by phenomena in which the human sense-organs are involved under conditions imperfectly analyzed." Chevreul used this principle of expectant attention to account for the phenomena of dowsing, movements of the exploring pendulum, and the then current fad among spiritualists, table-turning.

Chevreul was one of France's most prestigious scientists by the time he conducted these investigations.

The most publicized and carefully controlled study of table-turning was reported by Michael Faraday in 1853. Faraday obtained the cooperation of participants who he knew to be "very honorable" and who were also "successful table-movers." He found that the table would move in the expected direction, even when just one subject was seated at the table. Faraday first looked into the possibility that the movements were due to known forces such as electricity or magnetism. He showed that sandpaper, millboard, glue, glass, moist clay, tinfoil, cardboard, vulcanized rubber, and wood did not interfere with the table's movements. From these initial tests, he concluded that,

"No form of experiment or mode of observation that I could devise gave me the slightest indication of any peculiar force. No attraction, or repulsion . . . nor anything which could be referred to other than mere mechanical pressure exerted inadvertently by the turner."

By then, Faraday suspected that his sitters were unconsciously pushing the table in the desired direction. However, his sitters firmly maintained that they were not the source of the table movements. And, as already mentioned, Faraday was satisfied that his sitters were "very honorable." So he devised an ingenious arrangement to pin down the cause of the movement. He placed four or five pieces of slippery cardboard, one on top of the other, upon the table. The sheets were attached to one another by little pellets of a soft cement. The bottommost sheet was attached to a piece of sandpaper that rested against the table top. This stack of cardboard sheets was approximately the size of the table top with the topmost layer being slightly larger than the table top. The edge of each layer in this cardboard sandwich slightly overlapped the one below. To mark their original positions, Faraday drew a pencil line across these exposed concentric borders of the cardboard sheets, on their under surface. The stack of cardboard sheets was secured to the table top by large rubber bands which insured that when the table moved, the sheets would move with it. However, the bands allowed sufficient play to permit the individual sheets of cardboard to move somewhat independently of one another. The sitter then placed his hands upon the surface of the top cardboard layer and waited for the table to move in the direction previously agreed upon. Faraday reasoned that if the table moved to the left, and the source of the movement was the table and not the sitter, the table would move first and drag the successive layers of cardboard along with it, sequentially, from bottom to top, but with a slight lag. If this were the case, the displaced pencil marks would reveal a staggered line sloping outwards from the left to the right. On the other hand, if the sitter was unwittingly moving the table, then his hands would push the top cardboard to the left and the remaining cardboards and the table would be dragged along successively, from top to bottom. This would result in displacement of the pencil marks in a staggered line sloping from right to left. Faraday observed that,

"It was easy to see by displacement of the parts of the line that the hand had moved further from the table, and that the latter had lagged behind -- that the hand, in fact, had pushed the upper card to the left and that the under cards and the table had followed and been dragged by it."

Faraday's report was sufficient to convince most scientists that table-turning and related phenomena did not stem from new physical forces or occult powers. Unfortunately, it inadvertently had the opposite effect upon a few prominent scientists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, the cofounder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection. He seized upon the differences between the table's behavior in Faraday's experiment and what he had witnessed to assert that what Faraday had explained and what Wallace had experienced were not the same thing.

The most striking, and saddest, example of loopholism is the story of the eminent American chemist, Robert Hare. Hare was professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania when he became involved with table-turning in 1853, at age 72. Hare firmly rejected the possibility that some exotic force could produce movement of wooden tables. He wrote,

"I recommend to your attention, and that of others interested in this hallucination, Faraday's observations and experiments, recently published in some of our respectable newspapers. I entirely concur in the conclusions of that distinguished expounder of Nature's riddles."

Invited to attend a table-turning session, Hare went. Hare attended a "circle" at a private house. He wrote of the experience and became interested in spirit communication.

Hare created a device "which, if spirits were actually concerned in the phenomena, would enable them to manifest their physical and intellectual power independently of control by any medium." The Spiritscope, as he called it, consisted of a pasteboard disk slightly larger than a foot in diameter. Around its circumference he attached the letters of the alphabet in a haphazard order. An arrow that swivelled at the center of the disk was used to select letters one at a time by pointing toward them.

Hare carried out several experiments. Apparently he never fully understood the key aspect of Faraday's results -- that honest, intelligent people can unconsciously engage in muscular activity that is consistent with their expectations. Although the medium sitting opposite him could not see the letters or the index on the disk, she was looking directly at Hare as he was observing the behavior of the index. We now know from many other investigations of ideomotor action -- such as Oskar Pfungst's classic investigation of the allegedly intelligent horse, Clever Hans [http://goalhypnosis.blogspot.com/2012/01/clever-hans-effect.html] -- that people frequently give clues about what they are thinking or observing without realizing it. These subtle clues can guide the behavior of other individuals -- or even animals. Sometimes these individuals consciously detect these clues and use them to deceive, but frequently the person being guided by the clues is just as unconscious of them as is the individual providing them.

Hare eventually found he could work alone, without the help of mediums, and still get meaningful communications from his Spiritscope. He had no inkling that he could be source of the messages being spelled out on his Spiritscope. Hare's example shows again that intelligence, professional accomplishment, and personal integrity offer no automatic protection against wishful thinking and self-delusion. Hare's Spiritscope served as the model for the later commercial development of the Ouija board -- another striking example of the power of ideomotor action.

Table tilting - a practical guide.
http://www.assap.ac.uk/newsite/articles/Table%20tilting.html

The ideomotor effect

is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action. For instance, tears are produced by the body unconsciously in reaction to powerful emotions. Automatic writing, dowsing, facilitated communication, and Ouija boards have also been attributed to the effect of this phenomenon. Mystics have often attributed this motion to paranormal or supernatural force. Many subjects are unconvinced that their actions are originating solely from within themselves.
The term was first used in a scientific paper discussing the means through which the Ouija board produced its results by William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852. In the paper, Carpenter explained his theory that muscular movement can be independent of conscious desires or emotions.
Scientific tests by the English scientist Michael Faraday, the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, and the American psychologists William James and Ray Hyman have demonstrated that many phenomena attributed to spiritual or paranormal forces, or to mysterious "energies," are actually due to ideomotor action. Furthermore, these tests demonstrate that "honest, intelligent people can unconsciously engage in muscular activity that is consistent with their expectations”. They also show that suggestions that can guide behavior can be given by subtle clues.
Some practitioners claim they can use the ideomotor effect to communicate with a patient's unconsciousness using a system of physical signals (such as finger movements) for the unconscious mind to indicate "yes", "no" or "I'm not ready to know that consciously".
A simple experiment to demonstrate the Ideomotor effect is to allow a hand-held pendulum to hover over a sheet of paper. The paper has keywords such as YES, NO and MAYBE printed on it. Small movements in the hand, in response to questions, can cause the pendulum to move towards key words on the paper. This technique has been used for experiments in ESP, lie detection and ouija boards. The validity of these experiments has not been proven.
Michael Faraday, FRS (1791 – 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

William James (1842 –1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.

James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. His pragmatic theory of truth was a synthesis of correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, with an added dimension. Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice.

De la baguette

Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786 – 1889) was a French chemist whose work with fatty acids led to early applications in the fields of art and science. He is credited with the discovery of margaric acid and designing an early form of soap made from animal fats and salt. He lived to 102 and was a pioneer in the field of gerontology.

Chevreul was a determined enemy of charlatanism in every form, and a complete sceptic as to the "scientific" psychical research or spiritualism which had begun in his time (see his De La baguette divinatoire, et des tables tournantes, 1864).

His research on the "magic pendulum", Dowsing rods and table-turning is revolutionary.

In his paper "De la baguette", Chevreul explained how human muscular reactions, totally involuntary and subconscious, are responsible for seemingly magical movements. In the end Chevreul discovered that once a person holding divining rods/magic pendulum became aware of the brain's reaction, the movements stopped and could not be willingly reproduced.