So You’re Saying I’m Not Going to Sleep with B-I-E-B-E-R?

The ideomotor effect is the phenomenon of unconscious physical response (i.e. crying when someone is especially nice to you after a long week) and it’s responsible for events as inconsequential as Ouija board action and as horrifying as the James McCormick case, in which a man sold $30 joke golf-ball finders as $70,000 bomb-detector devices to government military forces from 20 countries around the world, turning a profit of $60 million and causing many, many deaths. (McCormick faces million-dollar fines and a decade of jail time now, although he still insists that the devices work, although he “doesn’t know how,” and it’s a matter of the “secret bit that has the magic in it.”)

A piece on the BBC today quotes psychologist Daniel Wegner on the ideomotor effect — “The mental processes which directly control our movements are not connected to the same processes which figure out what caused what” — and suggests an easy personal test:

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.

So this morning I tied my keys onto the end of my headphones, held my hand completely still, and asked the universe whether I would ever sleep with Justin Bieber. After about five seconds, the keys graciously began to swing counterclockwise for no.