There’s a party trick I’m sure we’ve all played at some time or other, which works roughly as follows.
You need five people. One person sits in an ordinary chair, not an armchair or anything. This person close their eyes and try to concentrate on being as light as possible.
The other four stand at the four corners of the chair, ie two at each arm pit and one at each knee. Each then put a hand over the middle person’s head and pushes down (not touching the head though), so that there is a stack of hands, not touching, above the person’s head.
The hands are then quickly removed, and everyone clasps their hands, extends the two pointing fingers and puts them under the armpit and knee bend of the sitting person.
They then lift up with the fingers at the same moment and the person in the chair – who would normally be too heavy to lift up in this way - can be lifted extremely easily, as if they were levitating.
(A trick which has a similar effect is much easier to do. All you need is a doorway. Standing in the doorway, you straighten your arms and press them, with your palms out, to the door jamb, with as much force as possible. Do this for about 2 minutes or so and when you step out of the doorway, you will find your arms float naturally up in by themselves.)
So what is the physiological explanation for this? Is it something to do with muscles relaxing and stretching? Is some hypnosis involved?
Well, one thing is for sure; pushing down on someone’s head for two minutes doesn’t make them less heavy (except perhaps by making them sweat a little). I’m quite confident that this will be verifiable with a set of bathroom scales.
My WAG would be this:
Many of the muscles in your limbs are arranged in antagonistic pairings; your biceps pulls your forearm up, your triceps pulls it back down; I think what’s happening is that you’re tiring out the muscles on one side of the pairing, then acting surprised that the opposite one is not at all fatigued, or rather, surprised at the contrast between the tired muscles on one side and the relatively perky ones on the other.
You know, every time I’ve seen or heard of this being done, I’ve never heard of the participants doing a control version, in which they just try to lift up the person in the chair, with none of the surrounding crap.
There’s also the fact that we expect the effort of lifting something to have a linear relationship with the weight of the object; this isn’t actually the case, so being one of ten people lifting a chair with a person seated upon it may feel significantly easier than we might expect it to be. This is why nobody thinks they’re pushing the glass around when they play ouija.
Yes I was wondering if it was something about a combination of muscles. But this ‘surprise’, why is it enough to cause this effect? I’ve been told that Tai Chi also does a similar thing, but don’t know enough about it to comment.
I have read of instances (when this was discussed somewhere else) of people trying to lift the person without the preparations, without success. Although some of the ritual is probably there just to add a bit of mystery to the thing (chanting 'up up up!" etc) presumably the thing on the head has some effect. And I still am wondering if hypnosis is involved.
Why do you come to this conclusion? If you can lift them, you can lift them; there is nothing “too heavy” about it. The evidence contradicts this conclusion.
The actual explanation for this is that the second time they try it they are acting in unison, the weight is distributed evenly between all four people. Each person only has to pick up one quarter of the weight. Which is a lot easier.
Hmm, I wonder if that is all there is too it? I’m still intrigued by Mangetout’s semi-explanation. (Ok, what causes the ‘surprise’, then? Lifting a quarter of the weight makes sense - but still, with two fingers? And the lifting that can take place is remarkable - really quite high. I’ve also read reports that suggest that if someone loses concentration, the effect is lost - perhaps because the muscles shift slightly?
Can anyone explain the second ‘trick’ I mentioned?
Let’s see… 130 pound girl, 4 lifters, 32.5 pounds to lift with 2 fingers? Not that impressive. My dining room table weighs about 100 lbs. and we move that with two people using our fingertips to lift.
In the second trick, it’s just your arm raising muscles taking a few seconds to turn off. Perhaps a physiologist can give a more detailed explanation about whether it’s the muscles or the nerves, with cool phrases like ‘depletion of inhibitory neurotransmittters’. But the bottom line is that your arms keep trying to push against the doorframe for a few seconds, since the doorframe is gone your arms naturally go up. I don’t think there’s much similarity to the group lifting thing.
And my comment on the group lifting thing is, again, have you tried lifting someone this way without the mumbo-jumbo? (But still making sure you’re all lifting in unison)
Just a WAG here, but maybe the real ‘trick’ is the proper application of each of the four people’s efforts. I bought a big honkin’ roll of carpet once for a retail store I own, me and 5 guys took it off the truck and put in a building to store it until we were ready to install it. It damn near killed us it was so heavy.
I hired a guy, Stan, who knew how to install carpet properly to be the crew chief of me and my fellow grunts I had recruited to do the install. Install day arrives and we move the carpet again, this time with only 4 of us total. I express my dismay to Stan about the fact that I didn’t think we’d be able to move it with just 4 guys since 6 of us thought we were having hernias.
Stan said, “No problem. You probably just don’t know how to lift it correctly.” He had us pair up and reach under the roll and join hands. We were able to lift it as though it weighed no more than a sack of groceries. It was surprising enough that all three of us who had already lifted this carpet once simultaneously commented on it.
Perhaps something like this is the case. Could you explain the way the lift takes place once again, I’ve never seen this trick and am a little unsure I understood it fully the first time you described it.
When we did it, we made two lifts. The first failed and the second succeeded.
I could tell at the time that the difference was the rigidity of the guy in the chair. On the first attempt, as everyone lifted their hands, his arms and legs raised, but his body sat in the chair. After the mystical mumbo jumbo, he was rigid and the lift went quite easily because he was not dead weight and his torso came along for the ride. I was never sure what about the mumbo jumbo made him tense up, but there was no hint of magic or the supernatural involved.
(When we pushed down, it was definitely on the subject’s head. I have heard the version where no one touches the sitter, but I have never actually seen that in action.)
that’s odd, that’s the only way we did it as kids. otherwise, what’s the point?
why it works? i think power of suggestion/self fullf. prophecy is it, as well as the other reasons on antagonistic muscles. finally, your muscles can lift more as the fibers get used to firing together, so if the 2nd lift improves this you might see a remarkable rise in strength. this is why people who first start doing weight lifting see a remarkable improvement after a few weeks: their muscles are learning to respond more efficiently.