Banachek's Journey Into The Mind

New Years Card Trick For You.

2011-12-30T23:16:00.000-08:00

This my version of an old Eddie Joseph effect. I love his thinking.

I once posted it elsewhere, and sent a copy on to Teller,(the silent half that brilliant duo), he liked it enough to put his own presentation together for his book, How To Play In Traffic. I gave them a few other things for the book too but that is another story.

I thought you would enjoy it so re-posting it here in the spirit of the season! Have fun

...........................................

A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Okay, I want you to get a deck of cards. It must be a full deck. Remove the jokers, in fact, throw them away, also throw away any advertising cards. In other words you need all 52 playing cards, no more, no less..

Now remove all the odd cards this includes the Kings and Jacks.

Set the even cards off to the side in a face down pile for now. You should have 24 cards in this pile.

Pick up the odd cards and shuffle them as much as your hearts content, now look at the top card and the bottom card and add the values together, Aces would be one, Jacks eleven and Kings thirteen....

Now set the odd cards face down to the side and pick up the even pile. Note the card at that position from the top in the deck down while keeping the cards in the same order.

In other words, if the total number of the two odd cards were 18, you would remember the 18th card down in the even pile keeping the cards in the same random order when finished.

Now let us review the situation up to this point. The odd packet is on the table. And the even pack is in your hands face down. You have two things in mind.... One; a certain number and two; a playing card.

If I was in hearing distance I could tell you what that card is. On the other hand, I could wait until I hear from you then disclose the identity of the card. But this might take too long as it is Christmas and I have relatives to visit and I do not have time to answer all of you. I could, of course tell you right here what that card is, but then you would lose interest and not care to try this little experiment out.

Therefore I propose to do better... I shall try to find that card even though several miles separate us. I know you don't believe such a thing is possible but I shall prove it to you in the next few minutes.

Oh, I forgot one instruction; you will need a full deck to continue so please place the ODD packet of cards on top of the even cards in your hand.

Have you placed the ODD cards on top of the EVEN pile?? Good!

Now deal out row of cards face up corresponding with the total number you have in mind (the total of the two odd cards you added earlier). I am asking you to do this because I wish to impress that number deeper in your mind as this number is your mystic number.

Have you got the row of cards in front of you?? As I wish you to identify your personality with mine and the cards laying in that row, please spell out

B A N A C H E K R O C K S

Lay out one card from the top of the deck on each face card up on the table for each letter of that phrase, (omit the space) . If by chance you do not complete the spelling by the time you cover the last face up card in the row, do continue again with the first card and carry through until finished.

Done spelling that phrase? Good.

Okay a little cheesy but stay with me.

Look at the top card of the deck in your hand. Bet you thought that was going to be your card. No, Sir! It's not that simple, deal this card on the table.

I have a wish for you this Christmas season and for it to come true you need to spell out the wish, deal one card as before for each letter of my wish below.

A H A P P Y N E W Y E A R

Right, now cross your fingers and think of your card. Now turn over the top card of the deck. What do you see? Don't bother calling to tell me, I know.

It is my wish for you.

How to raise a heart rate in a baby.

2010-05-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

I have a 2 year old granddaughter; Mikayla. She spends a lot of time with my wife Hedi and myself. I have come to the conclusion that she needs us for different reasons. When she is tired, she wants little if anything to do with me, in fact she appears to hate me. When it comes to playing she wants to spend time with me, even to the point she can't get candy without getting something for "GanPa." Now this does not bother me in least. The fact that Mikayla would rather spend time with me when it comes to playtime despite the fact that my wife constantly gives her comfort does bother my wife . I simply put it all down to a biological nuance. Turns out that research says I am right.

As the Scientific American Mind

June 2010 states:

"Together two parents may strike a nice balance in which mom acts as a 'lifeguard' and dad functions as the 'cheerleader.' "

You see dads are biologically programed to challenge children. In a study done in Australia it turned out that dads spent approximately 40 percent of their child-watching time playing interactive games like reading or simple physical playing as apposed to approximately 20 percent of the same child-watching time for mothers. I know that most of my interaction with Mikayla is either outside on the swings or playing hide and seek, holding her up by her feet and basically treating her like a monkey, in a good way that is. I don't do diapers. In fact she already uses the toilet because I simply told her to so I would not have to change her nappies. The women in the family all say, "all in good time." To me "good time" is "quick time" when it comes to stinky diapers. When my kids were very little (prior to most TV's having TV remotes), I taught my kids the joy of being a human remote. I turned it into a game, they loved it and I did not have to get off the couch. For a while my kids did a pretty good imitation of me, "change the channel, change the channel, back, okay change the channel." Yeah, I would say I challenged my kids.

Kids as young as eight months old learn these pattern differences between a mother and father to the point that when a child is picked up by dad or a male, their heart rate increases yet when picked up by mom or a female they calm down. Fathers tend to be more physical in their play compared to mothers.

Researchers think that a lot of this stems around the fact that fathers traditionally are the breadwinners in a family and as a result spend less time on the caring aspect of child; like diaper changing, feeding, putting a child down for a nap, bathing, cuddling. I must admit, I have found a way to get my granddaughters attention and love when she is tired. It took a while but I found the magic answer, Chocolate Swiss Miss Rolls. It is like crack for children. She can't throw the bottle down fast enough :-) Hey, I'm "GanPa" and it is my job to spoil her.

As said earlier, dads tend to challenge their kids. In fact the same article states that even though fathers speak less to their children, it was "the father language use that predicted the child's language development by the age of three. Mothers use more emotional words whereas fathers use more complex words to talk to their child." The other thing is that women will tend to play the games that a child chooses, men on the other hand tend to select the activity for a child to play (like my TV remote game), thereby challenging the child by causing a child to experience play outside their comfort zone and as a result experiencing growth.

The other amazing fact about fathers and children is that during pregnancy fathers go through many of the pregnancy biological changes too. Their testosterone levels go down ( a good thing as it quietens their physical tendencies males have), they have elevated levels of prolactin (which has many effects including regulating lactation, orgasms but primarily during pregnancy increases the size of mammary glands and produces milk) and men can even experience postpartum depression.

One thing in this article that I found of particular interest is the fact that it has been known that mothers can locate their babies blindfolded just by touch alone. Now turns out fathers can do the exact same thing. Sounds like a pretty good introduction line for a new blindfold routine.

Bats, echolocation and amazing people.

2010-05-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

During my last years of high school and after I graduated from high school, I worked three jobs, one was at Washington Hospital, Washington, PA. My first job there was as a dish-washer, I had to clean food off plates that sick people had been eating off. Not a nice job. I remember one time my boss made me extemely mad. I was livid. I do not remember what for but I do remember I made some sort of rude gesture at him behind his back. When he asked me what I was doing I told him that I was "putting a curse on him so he would not be able to speak." Keep in mind these were the days when people really thought I was psychic. Project Alpha (see web site www.banachek.com for info on Project Alpha) was already planned to take place at some time and Randi had asked me to pretend to be psychic. Well lo and behold, whether it was was due to his belief in my "powers",coincidence or the very unlikely fact I was psychic, he lost his voice for two weeks. This scared the beejesus out of everyone that worked with me, and to be honest, even scared me a little bit. I realized the power of words.

My second job at Washington Hospital was housekeeping. Usually you just stripped floors and put new wax on them or washed down the walls. The smoking rooms were the worse. Buckets of smelly, yellow water when you were done, just awful and certainly kept me away from cigarettes. Once I had to clean up the sidewalk where a person's brain laid splattered due to jumping out a window. Other times I worked the operating room where after a late Saturday night I slept in the on-call doctors bed until they needed me to mop up all the blood and guts on the floor. At that time they also incinerated the amputated arms and legs. It was my job to take them to the incinerator and that always bothered me. It was part of people they would never get back. I will never forget the smell of the cauterized flesh and mixture of glues. It was awful.

One day the housekeeping mothers (as we liked to call them) sent me up to an area that was not used anymore. Up in the attic of this old hospital. Scary as all hell, lots of cobwebs, old wooden wheelchairs and old medical paraphelia. Reminded me of something you would see out of a horror film. This did not bother me much, but the reason they sent me did. To get rid of some of the only mammals naturally capable of "true and sustained flight": bats. I hated bats. I had believed all the old tripe about them such as; they get stuck in your hair, they suck your blood, they are blind and that they all carried rabies. It took me a while but I did manage to catch the few that were nesting up there, but I have to admit I was screaming like a banshee and laughing due to my fear the whole time as the bats weaved and darted all around me. I used a very crude technique of swatting them with a broom, a bucket and throwing a large cloth over them. Took a while but my task was fulfilled and I vowed never again.

Turns out bats are pretty darn cool animals. Also turns out that bats are pretty clean creatures who groom themselves like cats do and fewer than one percent of all bats ever get rabies. They do bite but usually in self defense. It also turns out they have excellent vision and some like the Pallid Bat have big ears and excellent hearing. It also turns out that not all bats use echolocation for hearing. Microbats do, but all but one type of the megabats do not.

Echolocation is the ability to use biological sonar to navigate or locate. In other words some bats give out a sound and listen to the echo's of those sounds to locate and identify objects. The sound rebounds and the difference in the time it is received and intensity recieved by each ear allows the recipient to measure the horizontal angle. This allows them to perceive the direction of the objects, the density and the distance.

At the time, this inspired me to to use echolocation as one of the explanations to the press of how I was able to drive a car blindfolded like in this footage of me from Evening Magazine.

Echolocation is a pretty amazing feat and thought in the past to only have existed in some animals like the aforementioned bats, shrews, dolphins and crustaceans. Recently though it has become more apparent that humans can develop this sense as well.

Below is a video of an amazing kid, Ben Underwood who uses echolocation to play video games and basketball.

It seems that even more blind people are being taught to use echolocation to navigate their environment and yes, it is a skill that can be learned. It is a fairly new field having only been brought to attention of scientists since the 1950's. Most blind people who practice the technique though like to think that it is not a learned sense but inherent and intuitive. They liken the process to "feeling pressure" from items as they pass them.

When you think about it, it is quite logical that blind people would inherit this sense. Both vision and hearing are very closely related in how they work. They both use reflected waves of energy. Seeing uses light waves, hearing uses sound-waves. They both work off interpreting that reflected energy wave. The reflected waves via echoes can give detailed information about location and the dimensions and density of items. This latter being very important as you can learn over time what that density means and associated it with what you already know. A hedge would be less dense than a wall and so forth.

Looking back at the history there are many documented cases of this amazing phenomena. The first goes as far back as the late seventeen hundreds into the early eighteen hundreds when a man by the name of James Holman used the sound of his cane to travel the world.

In this day and age, a man by the name of Daniel Kish, who has been blind since he was 13 months old and uses a device to emit clicks and get around, teaches other teenagers to use the technique to the point where they even ride mountain bikes though the wilderness.

To me this is just more proof that there are so many truly amazing things in the world that one does not have to look towards pseudoscience to find them. I love the amazing world we live in and this is a perfect example of why.

Keep a Baby Picture in Your Wallet If You Want It Returned.

2010-05-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1990's I coached a kids soccer team; St. Theresa's in Memorial Park, Houston, TX. I was very proud that I took the last place team and moved them up to the finals. Despite all of that there is one thing that always stood out during that time. When I started to work with the team I lived by the school. During the season we moved across town. One day I was drawing new lines out for the field in the hot Houston sun. I left and low and behold my wallet had fallen out of my back pocket. I went back but could not find it anywhere. I had pictures, money and credit cards in it and panicked pretty bad. Keep in mind that during the 90's I had little money at the time and was pretty much private school poor with four kids in private school at the same time. Then something really amazing happened. My wallet, like magic, appeared in my mailbox at my new home. It was not in an envelope. Someone had actually taken the time to look up my address (prior to GPS's being the rage), and driven across town to deliver my wallet. Seeing I was not home, they simply dropped it in the mail slot. No note, nothing. I expected that there would not be any cash left. But I was wrong, everything was still where it should be, the cash, the credit cards, everything. It was quite a testament to the fact there are still good people out there and left quite an impression with me to go above and beyond to do the right thing. I know how it made me feel.

Now if you lose your wallet I can't guarantee that same will happen to you, but I can tell you how to increase your odds that your wallet will be returned.

I have an incredible friend in England. His name is Professor Richard Wiseman. If you have not heard of him he is brilliant. Visit his website at:

http://www.richardwiseman.com/

You may know him from his brilliant color changing trick seen in this video.

Anyway, Richard always has some very interesting project he is working on to find out how people think or react. The one that concerns us here is the idea that "can what one finds in a lost wallet we come across actually influence us in some way as to what we do with that wallet?'

Richard had 240 wallets mixed and dropped around Edinburgh over a couple of weeks and then had his team monitor which ones were returned to their proper owners. None of the wallets had any money inside like mine did, but they did contain other valuables like discount tickets, raffle tickets and membership cards. They were secretly dropped on the streets in high foot traffic areas, but well away from "postboxes, litter bins, vomit, and dog faeces."

Prof Wiseman notes in an article in the May 10, 2010 New York Times Online that this was not as easy a task as one would think:

"We dropped 200 or so wallets, and tried to see if certain types of content would make people more likely to return them. That was funny, in part because it turns out dropping wallets is an absolute nightmare. It’s a social psychology nightmare, because you have to drop them quite a distance from one another. You don’t want someone walking down the street, finding five wallets. So you have to walk about half a mile between each drop, and timing that by 200, it turns into quite a drawn-out study. And then you discover how difficult it is to drop a wallet these days. You drop a wallet, and you walk off, and then there’s someone behind you going “excuse me, you dropped this wallet.” And you’re, kind of, “Back off, it’s science. Put it back exactly where I dropped it.” And the drop zones are very carefully calculated, so that they’re not too close to bins and letterboxes, so you’ve got to walk around the block and drop it again, and if the same person sees you, they think you’re insane. So those things were quite good fun. I dropped one wallet, and sort of stood nearby to see if anyone picked it up. A policeman came along, picked it up, looked at it, walked over to a litter bin and dropped it inside."

Some of the wallets were stuffed with receipts showing the person just donated to a charity and other ones had one of four photographs inserted in them behind a clear plastic window: a smiling baby picture, a picture of a cute puppy, a happy family picture or an very content elderly couple.

When all was said and done only 42% of the wallets were returned in total. Surprisingly, 88% of those returned were the wallets that had the picture of the baby in them, compared to 53% for the dog, 48% for the family, and only 28% for the elderly couple.

When faced with the photograph of the baby, people were far more likely to send the wallet back. In fact, only one in ten were either unethical enough, hard hearted enough or just did not care enough to do so. When there was no picture in the wallet to tug at the emotions, just one in seven were mailed back.

Now you would suspect that the wallets that contained the charity donation card would trigger a positive response for return, but this was not so, at 20 per cent and 15, the charity card and control wallets had the lowest return rates. I can only speculate that the charity card actually triggered a response of, "oh they give to charity so they have money to give away, they won't miss their wallet." Again, this is only speculation from me and I am not a professor. Prof. Wiseman would be the one to ask.

So why does this work, Prof. Wiseman told The Daily Telegraph: “The baby kicked off a caring feeling in people, which is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective. We were amazed by the high percentage of wallets that came back." The result reflects a compassion instinct towards the vulnerable infants that humans have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations.

So the lesson here is; Place a baby picture in your wallet, it can't hurt.

I suspect that if you have a picture with you holding the baby and make sure it is in a prominent place in the wallet, it will help increase those odds even further. Again, no guarantee as it is just a guess. More research would have to be done to bear this out. Placing a baby picture in your wallet is no guarantee that you will get the wallet returned as I did at the beginning of this blog, but every little bit helps.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have also found evidence for a baby instinct in brain scanning experiments. A recent study at the University of Oxford examined how people responded when they were shown photographs of baby or adult faces. The photographs were all matched for attractiveness yet activity in the section of the brain associated with empathy (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) was much more responsive to the baby faces than to adult faces. According to the study the response happened too rapidly to be consciously controlled in any way.

And one more interesting fact on babies that I will cover due to an upcoming tweet: Fathers are less likely than mothers to hold their infant in a face-to-face position. Mothers are more likely to follow through the child’s choice of topic in play, whilst fathers are more likely to impose their own topic. http://twitter.com/banachek

Join me on facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Banachek/117436141609381?ref=sgm

2010-05-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

The Science Of Diluting"Fuck" and Other Cuss Words With L Words

When I find I am stressed and start to use foul language more than I would like I think of L words.

Let me explain the real psychology in all of this. Usually when one is upset that is when one uses the F word per say, until it just becomes a habit of course.

Anger is an emotion. As you become angry your body's muscles tense up. Inside your brain, neurotransmitter chemicals known as catecholamines ("fight or flight" hormones that are released by the adrenal glands in response to stress.) are released that cause you to experience sudden burst of energy lasting up to several minutes.

Now there are not that many L words that fit angry situations. Try and you will not find them. By the time you have tried words like , Ludicrous, loquatious, lobotomoyabarum, labefactation, labeorphily, labidometer, labile, labrose, and even lallation and found non of them fit, you have slowed down the emotional anger process by distraction and restructuring of thoughts in order to bring about a casual reduction in anger or in this case and anger response that has become a habit. Habits are seen to be routines of behavior that are repeated and tend to occur subconsciously about them. So by using this stalling technique, you force yourself to think consciously about them and change that habit.

It is basically a relaxation technique that helps to decrease your amygdala activity and the use of cognitive control techniques which help you practice using your judgment to override your emotional reactions. And if practiced soon enough will interrupt the flow of additional brain neurotransmitters and hormones (among them adrenaline and noradrenaline) being released which trigger a lasting state of anger arousal and physical effects like increased blood pressure and increased heart rate.

Of course you can just as easy use other letters that have hard to find anger words. Oh and if you want a negative L word, try one of these:

lapidat: to pelt with stones; to kill by stoning
larrup: to flog or thrash
libertinage: debauchery
lickerish: lecherous; lusty; greedy
limaciform :slug-like
lubricious:slippery; lewd

If you still want an L cus word sentence try these French terms:

L?chez mon cul: Lick my Ass
or

La putain de ta race: Whore of the Race.

Enjoy