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Engage
To get my audience engaged, I did an experiment known as the rubber hand illusion. In this experiment, you place a fake hand in place of your real hand and put the real hand on the other side of a border. You tell the participant to put all their attention on the fake hand. Then you touch the real and fake hand at the same place at the same time. This causes the brain to adjust and adapt the fake hand as it's own. Once the participant 100% believes the fake hand is their own, you hit the fake hand with a hammer, which makes them flinch as if their real hand was being hit. |
Explore
For the explore I had them trace their hands and color it in to give it the illusion that it was popping out of the paper. I did this to show how lines can be distorted to give us a different idea of what the image is. After they finished doing this, I had them roll up the paper and put it to their eye like a telescope. Then, they put their left hand half way down the paper and open both eyes. This makes it so that it looks like there's a hole in the middle of your hand. |
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Explain
This is where I explained to the kids what was happening and why. The way that we see things is by light bouncing from objects into our eyes. The trick is, what we actually see is what our brain makes of the images we received and how it processes these images. Optical illusions take advantage of this by tricking what our brain knows and should make sense of and manipulates you into believing something that's no actually happening. Optical Illusions can also work by tricking your senses, like the rubber hand illusion. By seeing the fake hand be touched and feeling your real hand being touched, a feature called multi-sensory perception takes the two senses and makes your mind believe the fake hand is your own. |