What does gxd mean on ouija board?

Hear this out loudPauseThe Gene Expression Database (GXD) is a community resource for gene expression information from the laboratory mouse. GXD stores and integrates different types of expression data and makes these data freely available in formats appropriate for comprehensive analysis.

The board game, which uses movements of people's hands on a small device to send a "message from beyond," is still a popular toy. But its history is less well-known, so I asked someone to help me understand the layered meanings of Ouija: Robert Murch, who has the unique distinction of being a Ouija expert. As the chair of the Talking Board Historical Society, he served as a consultant on the 2014 horror movie Ouija and recently celebrated his passion at the inaugural OuijaCon.

It turns out that the real meaning of "Ouija" is as pliable — and mysterious — as the game itself.

A sincere spiritualist movement arose in the second half of the 19th century. As Americans dealt with a changing country, life in the wake of the Civil War, and other drastic changes, some sought answers in a spiritual — but not traditionally religious — realm.

It was significant from the 1860s on, David Nartonis writes in his history of the spiritualist movement's growth. Via the lecture circuit, seances, and other activities in which people attempted to talk to the dead, spiritualism became a significant cultural force. In 1868, for example, there were no less than 150 lectures on spiritualism advertised in the Spiritual Telegraph newspaper. That fad led to lots of unique business opportunities.

"Talking boards existed years before Ouija," Murch says. Some pre-1886 Ouija boards looked like Ouija boards, and some didn't. Murch says early versions featured different ways of receiving messages. Some used dial plates, in which you pressed your hand on a device and the pressure directed a needle to different letters. Other fortune tellers relied on knocking sounds on the bottom of a table to convey messages.

Some devices even used planchettes (that's the name for the thing you hold when you operate a Ouija board. Myth says it's named after a French medium, but it's a word for a small board dating back to medieval France). Often, these early planchettes had a hole so a pencil could write the answer.

The inventor of the 1886 Ouija board remains disputed — some credit a cabinetmaker named E. C. Reiche, while others say it was Charles Kennard. The most common belief is that Reiche sold his invention to Kennard, though it's hard to know for sure (Reiche later claimed it was stolen). "According to Kennard," Murch says, "he came up with the idea while sitting in the kitchen of his new house." Kennard said he placed a breadboard on the table and held a teacup over it, the same way you'd hold a planchette over a Ouija board. As he watched his hand move, he realized he'd found a way to access his subconscious.

Though we don't know the inventor, we do know that the Ouija board, made and sold by Kennard and his colleague Elijah Bond, represented a step forward for talking boards. Its design — an arc of letters, a planchette, and handy "Yes," "No," and "Goodbye" prompts — was unique.

Their board's name was unique as well, with a surrounding mystical myth. That name came courtesy of Helen Peters, Elijah Bond's sister-in-law. She had a reputation as a medium, so on April 25, 1890, she had a session in Baltimore with the entrepreneurs and the board. According to the letters and journals of the group, they asked the board what it wanted to be called. It spelled out "Ouija." When they asked what it meant, it spelled "Good luck."

Did Ouija's name come from the board? A misread locket? Or both?

But there's also a more practical — and market-driven — explanation for the Ouija name. After the name "Ouija" was "sent" to the participants on that April night, Peters revealed she was wearing a locket that she claimed had "Ouija" written on it. "One of the theories of the locket," Murch says, "is that Helen Peters was a well-read upper class woman. She likely read stories from English novelist Ouida. We believe she might have been wearing a locket that had 'Ouida' on it, and it's possible that 'Ouija' was in her subconscious."

There was also an exotic appeal to the name, which was meant to sound Egyptian. When the game earned a patent in 1890, it was as an "Egyptian luck board." Egypt was in vogue in some spiritualist and performance circles (in 1888, to take one example, "Professor Canaris, Wizard of the North" bragged about the "Egyptian necromancy" in his show).

We can't know for sure whether Ouija was a genuine expression of spiritualist beliefs, an Egyptophilic piece of flimflam meant to capitalize on those beliefs, or a little bit of both. But eventually, Ouija's name took on an even broader meaning.

By 1901, after a few other transactions where Ouija production changed hands, entrepreneur William Fuld secured the rights to sell the hit board. He'd already gotten a patent for his own talking board, but Ouija was a mainstream hit that he coveted.

"It didn't matter what you called it if you bought it"

"William Fuld took over," Murch says. "And he realized it didn't matter what you called it if you bought it."

"By the 1920s, people were using more slang," Murch says, "and if you were playing the board, you were Ouija-ing." Boards were changed to reflect that, and some even read, "If you call it we-ja or wee-gee, it still spells good fun." The board still had mystical cachet, but it was no longer solely a mysterious spiritualist message or an allusion to a forgotten Egyptian god — it was also a game to be played with family and friends.

And that's the meaning of Ouija that's stuck since, especially after the sale of Fuld's business — and Ouija — to Parker Brothers in 1966. That same year, it outsold Monopoly. Today, the board symbolizes everything from retro gaming to the scary movie that bore its name. And that's probably appropriate. Ouija always did what we wanted it to, so it's fitting that "Ouija" means what we want it to as well.

You have probably either tried it yourself or have heard of others who have: The Ouija Board.

One or more participants sit across from each other with their fingers on a glass. Around the glass are numbers and letters. A spirit is summoned, you ask questions, and the glass begins to move from one letter to the next to spell out the response:

“K-N-I-F-E”

Perhaps you were absolutely certain that it was not you who moved the glass, and everyone else had the same feeling. So who did? A ghost?

Alright, so here comes the breaking news: No, it was not a spirit. It was you! Or rather, it was you and your friends that unconsciously collaborated to select the letters.

In a new study, scientists from Aarhus University, in Denmark, the University of Southern Denmark, and Bielefeld University in Germany have identified precisely what happens when the glass moves.

Lead-author on the new study, Marc Andersen, a postdoc from the Interactive Minds Centre at Aarhus University, had long wondered:

How can a group of people, each with a finger on the glass, spell out a meaningful word and still be convinced that they didn’t do it?

In 2015, he packed his bag with a notebook, video camera, and eye-tracking equipment, and set off for Baltimore in the US with a research assistant.

They were headed to a conference for people that communicate with the dead via Ouija boards. Instead of a glass, they use a triangular piece of plastic, called a planchette, which moves around the board and points to letters, numbers, and individual words such as yes or no.

Andersen recruited 40 participants who wore eye-tracking equipment, which followed the participants’ eye movements as they navigated the board. The séance was also recorded. The results are published in the scientific journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

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Participants sat in pairs, and were instructed to do two things:

As you might expect, when the participants spelled out Baltimore, they looked at the next letter ahead of time before moving the planchette to that letter. In other words, they could easily predict where the planchette would end up.

But when they moved on to the second task (to conduct a Ouija board session as usual), it was much more difficult for the individual participants to predict where the planchette would move.

And here is the paradox: How can the participants be unable to predict the word that will be spelled out (hence the belief that a spirit did it) when more than 100 years of research shows that the participants are clearly moving the glass themselves?

Andersen explains they figured out what was happening, not by looking at each individual’s eye movements, but by looking at the combined eye movements of each pair of players.

Tracking the combined eye movements of two players turned out to be as good a predictor of where the planchette would end up as tracking just one player’s eye movement when they are purposely spelling out a known word, as in the Baltimore exercise.

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So, while an individual player cannot predict where the planchette will move, the combined eye movement of the pair of players reveals what the “spirit” will write, especially after the first few letters, which seem to occur at random.

“What is so fascinating about this phenomenon is that individual participants exhibit great difficulties in predicting what the “spirit” is trying to tell them, but as soon as we look at the participants as a collective entity, we see how meaningful responses are still able to emerge out of their interaction with each other,” says Andersen.

“Our study solves the apparent paradox that participants on the one hand are producing the Ouija responses themselves, while they on the other hand are unable to predict those very same responses at an individual level. In that sense, you could say that the “spirit” is actually a representation of the collective ‘we’,” he says.

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Professor James Todd from Eastern Michigan University, USA, is impressed with the study. He was not involved with it, but has 25 years of experience researching how we communicate via others or using objects.

“I was impressed by their imaginative and effective use of . In other words, Andersen’s work is quite valuable in that it gives us a relatively easy way to detect and measure mistaken attributions of action under reasonably ordinary conditions in ordinary people,” he writes in an email to our sister site, Videnskab.dk.

“The fact that Andersen and his colleagues were able to get these results outside of the laboratory probably strengthens the outcome. The effects were strong enough to detect under reasonably ordinary conditions,” he writes.

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The Baltimore experiment also shows that people, who believe that the Ouija board can be used to contact the dead, are also more likely to believe that the planchette moves itself, compared to those who are more sceptical.

This pattern fits Andersen’s previous experimental research, using virtual reality. In this study, as participants walked through a virtual reality forest, those who expected to encounter something supernatural were more likely to report experiencing it afterwards.

This is thought to be due to the effects of expectations on our conscious experience of the world around us.

———————-Read more in the Danish version of this article at Videnskab.dk

Translated by: Catherine Jex

5 days ago — Ouija board definition: 1. a brand name for a board, printed with letters of the alphabet and numbers, that . Meaning of Ouija board in English.