Misbehaving Minds and Bodies

Inspiration
The idea for this week's festivities arrived out of the blue while eating a lovely dinner out with the family.  The girls were talking about magic tricks that some of their friends had done which lead my mind down the path of other nice tricks we can get our  minds and bodies to pull off.  Most of it will be nerve and muscle training and confusion.  This is a great low/no prep event too as nothing needs to be bought and can even easily be done while away from the home/lab.


Materials
3 bowls  of water (hot/warm/cold)
1 blindfold
1 doorway or similar barrier ~ wider than the subjects shoulders
Eager volunteers willing to follow directions

Notes
There are a few "tricks" I have in mind for this event, first is the deceptive sense of touch with regard to heat.  For this we use the bowls of water and have the kids don blindfolds and puts their hands each in either a hot or cold bowl for a minute.  After they describe what they think of the water temperature (in secret) have them both switch to the warm bowl and describe again and let them discuss.  Next let one kid at a time do one hand in each hot/cold and then let them feel and describe the sensations when they put both hands in to the room temp bowl.  The girls were appropriately amazed at how their bodies could tell temperature differences well but were lousy at being more specific.

The second one involves the doorways and having the kids spend a minute pushing as hard as they can against them with the back of their hands for a minute or two.  Afterwords have them step out and tell them to let their arms hang loose like spaghetti and enjoy effect as their arms seem to float up on their own.  After that we did one where they double invert their hands and fingers and we point to one (do not touch) and have them try and move it, everyone ended up moving the fingers on their wrong hands the first time.  They both had good floating arm results here.

The last trick is a two person event with someone linking index and middle fingers into a sort of handle for the other kids to squeeze as hard as they can for a couple minutes.  When done, have the squeezer let go and hold their hand out palm up, at this point ask them to straighten their fingers out and watch as they can't get their hand to obey.   Lana had great results from this one as she was really putting in major efforts to the squeezing.