Let’s talk sense. Here you can explore each of your senses separately and discover all sorts of abilities and inabilities you may not have known you had.
Sight
Try looking at the world through the eyes of different animals, and above all test your own, human vision and related abilities: visual acuity, color vision, visual memory, perception or balance. How skilled would you be with only one eye and how would you cope if you were completely blind, relying only on hearing and touch? Have you noticed color distortion in artificial lighting? Explore. How about making your own cartoon, having yourself imprinted on the wall by light, or laughing at your images in crooked mirrors? And don’t forget to take a peek into the Ames room, where people turn into giants and dwarves.
Hearing
Play xylophones and metallophones and discover the basic principles of musical instruments. Take a closer look at the vibrating string of a double bass and discover why strings of different thicknesses and tensions produce different tones. Can you reliably distinguish between higher and lower notes? Which animals have the best hearing range and which ones beat yours? Do you have a good auditory memory? Do you get fooled by auditory illusions? And why do you have two ears – wouldn’t one be enough? And when you have had enough of all that self-recognition, honk out loud with a rubber plunger for cleaning the sink.
Touch, smell and taste
Do you think fakirs can somehow magically turn off their sense of touch so it doesn’t hurt? Of course not - you can become a fakir too! It is much more difficult to use Braille, but even that can be done, you will see, or rather, feel for yourself. Can you navigate herbs and spices by smelling them? And did you know that there are only four tastes (or five at the most, if we consider umami the fifth) and that each of them is perceived most sensitively by a different part of the tongue?
Speed, power and more
Measure the greatest running speed and the greatest pulling force you can exert. And how is your perception? If there are more of you, you can have a mini-Olympics in non-traditional events.
