“If voodoo and magic spells work, why isn’t there any proof?”
It’s a fair question, and the basis on which any skeptic of the supernatural stands. But that foundation seems to finally crumble. A pair of new studies, one from New Zealand and the other from Japan, have just provided compelling evidence that some spells do, in fact, work. The New Zealand study has received a fair amount of press, so a link at the end of this article will suffice. But the second study, in Japan, has only now come to light.
This is what Dr. Tagasaki and his team of researchers did:
Please note that this was a carefully controlled double-blind study. Neither the participants nor the researchers knew the objective of the study or the working hypotheses. And the beauty of the study was its simplicity.
One hundred men and women were brought to a convention center for a so-called craps tournament. For those unfamiliar with the game, skill plays no role, except for the more advanced bets that were not allowed in the tournament. In essence, in dice you need to roll the same number you rolled at the start of your turn before both dice show a total of 7.
After two hours of play, as expected, some players were ahead, others behind. During a break, the researchers approached the top twenty losing players and offered each a chance to “buy” a Good Luck spell (using tournament playing chips). Of those who accepted, half were taken to a private office where a real voodoo priest, Jean Emmanuel II (son of the famous Haitian voodoo priest, Jean Emmanuel), cast an authentic voodoo good luck spell. The other half were also taken to see the priest, but unbeknownst to them, the priest cast only a general well-being spell. (This, then, was the control group.)
Of those who received the authentic Good Luck spell, an initial 84% had a winning round in the next tournament session. Meanwhile, the control group thought were getting a Good Luck spell (but really only got a General Wellbeing spell) they did no better than would be expected by chance, with about 44% having won rounds.
Dr. Tagasaki and his team aren’t quite sure what to make of the results of the experiment, which they repeated several times, with different people each time. One researcher theorizes that despite the spell being given in a Creole dialect of Haitian French, the authenticity of the spell is somehow conveyed to the recipient, perhaps through tonal fluctuations in the priest’s voice. If the recipient were subconsciously convinced of the spell’s authenticity, he could play it in such a way that he took advantage of the natural grouping inherent in all statistically random events. (Click here to learn more about grouping in math.)