In which case, the only way the normally outer edges of your fingers could be stimulated at the same time is if there were in fact two balls.I am going to try and post a riddle or brain teaser once in a while. So in our paper ball scenario, your brain doesn’t account for the unusual position of your fingers and makes the naive assumption that they are uncrossed. This is your sense of your body’s position space and what it’s doing, but unfortunately it’s just not very accurate. It’s your 'proprioception' that is giving us problems here. Scientists don’t agree on how many senses humans actually have, but they all agree that it’s more than five. One of the senses you’re using is touch, clearly, but the second sense is less obvious because it’s not one of the classic list of five that you might have learned in school: taste, sight, touch, smell, and sound. You are actually using two senses in this experiment and they’re not playing nicely together. This is called the Aristotle illusion, after his written description of the phenomenon more than 2,000 years ago. You should start to feel two little paper balls in your hand. Roll the ball around a little between your fingers. Put your crossed fingers on top of the ball so it nestles between them.Ħ. Cross the index and middle fingers of your other hand.Ĥ. Place it on the palm of your open hand.ģ. Removing all meaning from your brain is a pretty good way to relax.Ģ. This might help to explain the effectiveness of mantra meditation. The words lose their meaning inside your head. But it’s the firing neurons that are literally how you understand the meaning of the words! So when the neurons stop firing, you stop understanding.

These firing neurons are literally you understanding the meaning of the words the semantics of the words.īut as is so often the case in the brain, when your neurons fire repeatedly they become temporarily inhibited they stop firing. Normally, hearing a word or phrase causes a particular pattern of neurons to fire in your brain. Repeat the phrase in your head and it will start to lose its meaning – which would normally be something like “hilarious show on Radio 4 about science”. Try it now with the words Domestic Science. Basically, if you repeat a word or phrase enough times, it starts to sound really weird and lose all its meaning.

It’s all to do with something called 'Semantic satiation'.

1 feet 2 hands 3 face brain teaser