Keith Barry’s TED talk twisted my arms, my mind, and tested the amount of tension I could stand! The only question that was floating through my head was, “How does he do it????” and, “THERE’S NO WAY!” but because I couldn’t answer them, I ignored them and went deeper into the brain magic. The first brain trick he did was asking people to cross their arms and somehow untangle them like his. Now I did mine EXACTLY like his, but I could not unravel my hands, even after I did the trick for 5 minutes. This confused me so much that I can’t even understand how that happened! I think that part of the “magic” in the trick was that the mind was too focused on following his arms exactly, that it didn’t pick up on whatever change he did, if any*. This made my brain hurt, the same way that it does when I spend countless hours on homework, or writing the same paper. So, when schools and teachers assign big projects that require undivided attention, does the brain miss more of the little details because it is so focused on doing well? I've noticed that when I read over an assignment that took me a while, there are stupid mistakes in it. Another case of this is that the brain could be thinking too fast and trying too hard to keep up with whatever is going on, that it misses the essential things, however minute they may be. The next act was that he drove a car with a blindfold, supposedly seeing through the woman in the front seats eyes. This one struck me as obvious, that is, if I’m right, that he had simply driven the road before and memorized the way the road went. Also it was fairly straight. This experiment just shows how willing some people are to believe whatever is put in front of them. Human’s brains are so easily influenced that they will go with what they are presented with. Why have people stopped questioning things? In class, anything a teacher says is automatically taken down as correct, even if it might not be. In my classes it seems that no one ever asks “why?” or “how?” when those are the ways we should be learning, and not just by taking notes and having answers given to us. Schools are not challenging students enough, and even if they were, there is no incentive to achieve highly. Going back to intrinsic motivators, the carrot and the stick just aren’t effective ways of getting people to do things well. Schools need to come up with a new system that will help their students accomplish more. Next, Keith called up two audience members and messed with their minds. When he poked one person, the other one would feel the same thing. I think this is plain fake. Even though he swore he never knew these people, he must have told them when to raise their arms or where they would get special sensations. However, if this voo doo hypnosis thing is true, I would be extremely interested in finding out how it works. The ability to control someone’s mind with your own is amazing and could be used for either good…. or evil! The last brain magic act he did was place a metal spike under cups and ask a man to risk his hands by pressing on the cups so that they would collapse and impale him if the spike was there. This made me cringe and close my eyes. I did not want to see that poor guy lose a hand. But luckily, somehow, he survived, intact. This kind of stress and tension on the human body is odd. My reaction was to cover my eyes and squeal, involuntarily of course. But of course, because I have a low tolerance to pain and gory things my reaction would be much more dramatic then that of a horror film producer. One of the most basic things about brains is that they adapt to the environment they are out in, and if they are not used to a situation, they will react in the most rudimentary way. For me, I have not been desensitized to things like this, so I freaked out. Obviously, the brain is a very powerful thing, and it takes an extraordinary person, like Keith Barry, to harness that.
*I asked my dad to come in and do it, and he saw that Keith switched his hand position when the camera wasn’t facing him. Tricky, tricky man!!
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