The Weirdness of Boxes | Brain Games

We've placed weights inside of each of these boxes. We asked our volunteers, without peeking, to tell us which is heavier.

"That wouldn't seem to have," here definitely, yeah, definitely.

"Uh, this is lighter. Yeah, this one feels a little bit heavier, which I thought it would be lighter, but it's not. Thanks. Hmm, I don't works. Huh. Okay, so when you had just looked at the boxes, when you just looked at the size, which one did you think would be heavier?"

"Um, I guess this one because it was just so big."

"So it's bigger?"

"Yeah, initially you're gonna think bigger means heavier."

"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing too. Turns out this game requires more than just your sense of sight and touch. Your brain also relies on motor learning, a kind of muscle memory, super sense, to gauge the weight of the boxes. So which box is really heavier? Bring that one over here and then read the reading from the scale in pounds."

"Fourteen pounds."

"Fourteen pounds, yeah. All right, so now we know the lighter box is yielding pounds. Let's bring in the heavier ball, heavier box, right? Fourteen pounds."

"Wait, wait, what does it say? Fourteen pounds or fourteen pounds? It's the same exact thing."

"But we wait, really? Yeah. How does that even work though, like why?"

"Well, when you first pick up the box, you have this expectation that the larger one will be heavier, and so you apply more force than you need, and that makes it wind up feeling lighter in a way. But you lifted it multiple times, and you moved it around, and you really developed an internal model of what the weight was. In other words, your motor sensing system figured it out. It knows that it requires the same force to lift each box, but the cognitive perceptual part of your brain refuses to accept that conclusion. So it thinks that the smaller box is heavier."

"What does that tell you about your brain?"

"It has lives. Me? I do not trust anything anymore. Ever. We live in the matrix."

"Oh god, no."