When Venkman is (not really) studying the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability, Jennifer’s fifth guess (the second one that we see on screen) is “Figure Eight.”
Talk about wrong… a deck of Zener (ESP) cards doesn’t even include a Figure Eight!
**Cross, Star, Circle, Square, Wavy Lines. ** That’s all. No Figure 8. No Triangle. No Heart. No Smiley Face.
The standard procedure for such an ESP test is for the Receiver (Guesser) to be familiar with the 5 shapes, which would imply that the student getting shocked was too flustered to even realize that something dishonest was going on right under his nose.
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*On a slight related note, *a friend of mine and I once sat down at an electronic Zener card booth. From two sides of a blind screen, I chose and he received: I pressed one of the five keys (cards) and he made his guess on a matching keyboard. The system informed us if the choices matched, so there was no Venkman-like opportunity to skew the results.
…We only tried Five Times, but we scored 5 out of 5. To this day, I remain impressed by that result – but I wish we decided to play a few more rounds.
I think the point of the scene was to show Venkman hitting on the coed by giving her all right answers no matter what she guessed, Most people sitting in a theater wouldn’t know what was in the deck.
Yeah, but then I’m guessing most people in the theater never studied the supernatural or paranormal phenomena … especially judging from the audience non-response the “Figure 8” line got when I first saw the movie in 1984. I think Dan Akroyd may have written that line only for me.
Venkman also says there are “75 more to go” which is far more than five cards. Unless it’s standard procedure to go through the same five cards over 75 times in a row? I think you’re over thinking the silly funny time cinematic comedy yuk yuks, dude.
There are 25 cards in a Zener deck - 5 each of 5 different cards. In order to reduce card-counting, many parapsychologists will shuffle multiple decks together to obtain a more accurate result.
Three decks of 25 cards shuffled together equals 75 cards. Yes: I am aware of the math whereby 10 (or 11 if Jennifer guessed second) out of 75 does NOT equal 75, but that’s what I consider truly “over thinking” the issue.
I’m pretty sure we all understood that there is no figure 8 in a deck of Zener cards. We didn’t need you to explain it or over analyze it for us. We got it.
I will file this under Who the hell cares. Its a movie. And if you feel you have to dumb down comments to make us appriciate your humor, May its best to bring your humor to a diffrent forum. So they can think you are not funny as well.
