Discover 9 Unbelievable Brain Tricks

Confuse Your Mindfulness

To begin, lie down flat on your back with both legs extended or simply sit on a chair cross legged. Lift your right foot a few inches off of the ground and begin moving it in a clockwise motion. While moving your right foot, use your right index finger and draw the number six (6) in the air. Within moments your foot will begin moving in a counter clockwise motion and you won’t be able to control it without putting your foot down first. Why does this happen? The left side of our brains controls the right side of our bodies and is most responsible for timing and rhythm control. The left side has incredible difficulty understanding and operating two opposite movements at the same time, so it then combines the two motions to a single motion.

smart your right foot

Ganzfeld Procedure

Ganzfeld Procedure
The intended effect of the Ganzfeld Procedure is to experience sensory distortions, such as seeing horses prancing in the clouds or hearing the voice of deceased family. To do this you will need a radio, tape (use tape that you won’t mind putting on your face and eyebrows), and a ping pong ball that is cut in half. You begin the procedure by tuning the radio to a station that is playing static. With the radio near your head, lie down in a comfortable area and tape the halved ping pong balls on each of your eyes. You should begin experiencing the sensory distortion experiences within a few minutes. The reason that this bizarre experience can be achieved is because our brains are addicted to the five senses, and with all of these stimuli blocking our senses our brain ends up making up its own.

If you tape two halves of a ping pong ball to your eyes, and stare at a red light while listening to the radio tuned to static, you will have complex and vivid hallucinations. The Ganzfeld Procedure.

brain tricks

Confuse Your Photoreception

When you look at an image for a certain length of time (usually 30 seconds) and then immediately look at a white area, an effect called an afterimage occurs. This visual phenomenon is most commonly explained by how the rods and cones (photoreceptors) used become “fatigued” and don’t work as well as they should. This is caused by a temporary bleaching of the light-sensitive pigments within the photoreceptors being used. The result causes the photoreceptors to be imbalanced which causes a combination of previously viewed colors and images to combine when looking at the white field.

confuse your photoreception

Confuse Your Cognition

The spinning silhouette illusion provides the viewer with an image that appears to be spinning clockwise or counter clockwise. In reality, the image is in 2D and is actually simply shifting back and forth. Since our brains evolved in a 3D world, they can’t properly identify the image’s true movements and therefore uses already known stimuli to fill in the blanks and perceive the image to be spinning.

Confuse Your Hearing

Three people are needed to do this: one subject and two observers. You will also need a headset that is connected to routine plastic pipes on both sides. The subject begins by sitting on a chair that is in between and equally distant from both observers. The observers then hold onto the plastic pipes on the subject’s headset that is on the observers’ corresponding side. One at a time, both observers should speak into the pipes. Right now the subject should be able to correctly identify which side the voice is coming from. Then, the observers should switch pipes and again speak into the pipes. The subject’s brain will become confused and cause the subject to say the voice is coming from the opposite direction that it is.

confuse your hearing

18000 Hz Sine Wave

You may have already heard of this, just not by this name. The 18000 Hz Sine Wave is commonly known by its modern use by teenagers as a ringtone that older people are unable to hear (which is why it was also given the name “under 20s”). The produced sound is extremely high pitched and is audible to people who are young and do not have a damaged inner ear or part of the brain that deals with hearing.

sine wave

Shrink Your Pain

Suffering from severe pain from an injury or chronic pain can have a significant negative impact on our daily living, but there is a way to decrease your pain without harsh medications. A study done at Oxford University recently discovered a new pain killer: the inverted binoculars. According to the study’s results, subjects who looked at their injuries through the wrong end of binoculars experienced a significantly less pain and even decreased swelling. The reason this works is because the inverted binoculars makes the affected body part appear much smaller, and our brains get slightly confused and thinks your body part is really that small.

shrink your pain

Confuse Your Depth Perception

We all see the world in three dimensions (3D) which is possible through our brain’s ability to properly perceive depth. Our eyes work together to correctly identify depth perception, so closing one eye will alter the way your mind perceives visual stimuli. Our brains are trained to judge time and space in order to perceive depth correctly but are only able to do so with both eyes. One simple way to test this is to stare at an object at least a foot or two away from you and close one eye, then switch to closing the other eye and you will notice that the object appears to be in a different location.

confuse your depth perception

Confuse Your Proprioception

(The Pinocchio Effect)
You will need: 2 chairs facing the same direction and one in front of the other, 2 people sitting in the chairs, and a blindfold. The person blindfolded sits in the rear chair and will face the back of the person without a blindfold. The blindfolded person will put one hand on his own nose and at the same time be reaching around the person in front of them and touch their nose. Then, the blindfolded person should start gently stroking both his and the other person’s nose. About a minute after beginning to stroke both noses, the blindfolded person more than half of the time will report his nose being so long that it reaches the other person’s nose.

confuse your proprioception