Trick your brain!

Your brain is amazingly clever and can do all sorts of calculations in milliseconds…however you can confuse it with some very simple things! Try and play an April Fool on your own senses!

Can you believe what you see? Holey Hands

Want to see right through your hand? For this experiment you need an old kitchen roll tube, your eyes and hands. Have the tube in your left hand, carefully hold it against your left eye. Now put your right hand in front of your right eye, with your palm towards you and the side of your hand touching the tube. Keep both eyes open. Slowly move your hand away from you, along the side of the tube. You should see a hole in your hand! Your brain is used to ‘stitching together’ the pictures it gets from each of your eyes, this makes it look as if the tube goes through your hand!

Can you believe what you hear? Ear Switcher

Our ears don’t just let us hear sound but we can also tell which direction the sound is coming from. This is because we hear sounds slightly earlier in the ear that is nearest the sound and our brains can measure that distance and do some very clever maths to work out the direction. You can confuse this process with a couple of bits of hose pipe and a some funnels! See our Ear Switcher page for details. You can make funnels by cutting the tops off empty plastic bottles.

Can you believe what you taste? Apple flavour potatoes

Investigate how your senses of smell, taste and sight work together to help you enjoy your food. Get a few different fruits or vegetables such as carrot, apple, potato, turnip, parsnip or pear. Either grate or chop them into small pieces (all about the same size). Now get a volunteer to close their eyes and hold their nose while you feed them a little of each. Can they work out which is which? They probably can’t as you need all of your senses for your brain to identify a food. You could try different foods or different people (are adults or children better at this?). Apparently even strong-tasting foods such as garlic don’t taste any different from a potato if you hold your nose but I’ve never been brave enough to try! You could try chewing a small piece of raw potato while sniffing a piece of apple, does it start to taste of apple?