Reading With Your Eyes Shut?
The “Mid-Brain” Mystery
🙈 The amazing claim
In a hall full of parents, a group of children sit in a row with thick cloth tied over their eyes. A trainer holds up a card, and a child calls out its colour. Another child reads a page from a book. Some even ride a bicycle, still blindfolded!
The trainers say a short course has “activated” the children’s mid-brain, a part of the brain that, they claim, lets them see without their eyes, by touch or even by smell. They promise that the course will also make children cleverer, calmer and better at studies. Parents in many Indian towns have paid thousands of rupees for these courses.
Stop before you read on! If the children can’t really see without their eyes, how could they read with a blindfold on? Write down your guess.
🧪 Try It Yourself
What you need
- 🧣 A scarf, dupatta or strip of cloth
- 🟥 Some coloured cards or papers
- 📖 A book
- ⚪ Two cotton-wool pads
- 🛍️ A large paper bag
- 🧑🤝🧑 A friend
📄 Download the worksheet (PDF)
Part 1: Find the secret gap
- Fold the scarf into a band and tie it over your eyes. Ask your friend to check that it looks tight.
- Now look down, along the sides of your nose. Can you see anything? Most people can see a little strip of the world, just below the blindfold.
- Tilt your head back a little, as if you were sniffing the air. Hold a card low, near your chest. Can you see its colour now?
- Try a few more cards, and a page of the book held low. How many can you “read”?
Part 2: Make a cheat-proof blindfold
- Put a cotton-wool pad over each closed eye, then tie the scarf over them. The cotton fills the gaps beside your nose.
- Your friend holds up cards and a page of the book, in any position. Can you read them now?
- Try one more test: your friend holds a card behind your head, or you wear the large paper bag over your head instead of a blindfold. Can you read the card?
Part 3: The detective test
- Swap places. Your friend wears an ordinary scarf blindfold. Watch their head and eyes closely while they “read”. Do they tilt their head back, or hold the card low?
Before each test, guess: will the reader get it right, or will they be stuck? Then try it and see whether you were right. Write your answers on the worksheet.
💡 The Science Behind the Trick
Faces aren’t flat. Your nose sticks out in the middle of your face. A cloth tied over your eyes stretches across from cheek to cheek, so it can’t press into the hollows on either side of your nose. That leaves two small gaps, and by looking down through them you can see whatever is held low in front of you. That’s why “mid-brain” readers often tilt their heads back, or hold things near their chests.
The mid-brain is real, but it can’t see. The midbrain is a real part of your brain, deep inside your head. It helps control things like eye movements and reflexes. But it has no way of receiving light: all the pictures your brain uses come in through your eyes. Block the eyes properly, and there is nothing to see with.
You can’t feel or smell a colour. Red paper and blue paper feel exactly the same to your fingers and smell the same to your nose. The colour is only in the light the paper reflects, so only eyes can tell them apart.
Why the fair test works. Cotton pads fill the gaps beside the nose, and a paper bag or a card held behind the head leaves no gap at all. When journalists and rationalists have tested “mid-brain” children in these ways, the children could no longer read the cards.
🧠 Think Like a Scientist
The parents watched the children read, and the blindfolds looked tight. But nobody tested the blindfold. When a test can be cheated, even by accident, it doesn’t prove anything.
Test the blindfold, not just the reader.
Close every gap, then see what happens.
Scientists do the same thing in every experiment: they try to block every possible “leak” before they believe a result.
🗣️ Now be the teacher
Test a blindfold with your family: try an ordinary scarf, then add cotton pads, then hold a card behind the head. Ask: why must we test the blindfold, and not just the reader? That’s closing the gaps in a fair test.
🔦 Meet Narendra Nayak, the Professor Who Calls the Bluff
Narendra Nayak, from Mangaluru in Karnataka, taught biochemistry, the chemistry of living things, at Kasturba Medical College for 28 years. As a young man in the 1970s, he started investigating people who claimed magical powers.
In 1976, he and his friends set up the Dakshina Kannada Rationalist Association so that they could invite the great miracle-buster Abraham Kovoor to Mangaluru. Today he is president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations, the national group founded by B. Premanand. So the work of Kovoor and Premanand carries on through him.
In 2006 he left his college job to spend all his time fighting superstition. He has given more than 2,000 demonstrations in India and abroad, speaking in nine languages, and showing people exactly how “miracles” and frauds work.
He has exposed “mid-brain activation” many times, calling blindfold reading a simple trick that anyone can play. He offered ₹5 lakh to anyone who could read blindfolded under fair test conditions, and nobody has taken up the challenge. In 2021, after he objected, a popular TV quiz show removed a segment in which a child claimed to read a book blindfolded by smelling it.
Standing up to frauds has not always been safe, but he has never stopped speaking out. In his own words:
“I cope with these threats by not remaining silent.”
Others have tested these courses too. In Kerala in 2015, when journalists held objects behind “activated” children’s heads, the children couldn’t identify them, and the magician Gopinath Muthukad showed that the same “powers” could be produced by ordinary magic tricks. The trick keeps coming back with new names. Now you know how to spot it.
Make It a Fair Test · Our Senses Have Blind Spots · Who Has to Prove It?
For parents and teachers
- Safety: blindfolded children should stay seated. Never let a blindfolded child walk, ride a bicycle or go near stairs or roads. Use a large, clean paper bag with an opening at the bottom, never a plastic bag.
- The real harm: courses sold as “mid-brain activation”, “third-eye activation” or “intuitive reading” have charged parents around ₹10,000 to ₹20,000. Investigations have found no improvement in children’s learning or concentration. Worse, children are taught to peek and then to deny it: in effect, to cheat and to lie. Children who failed public tests have been seen in tears. If a child has taken such a course, reassure them that it was not their fault.
- Before paying for any course: ask for evidence from proper independent testing, not testimonials or demonstrations. A fair test would use eye pads, or cards held behind the head.
- The real story: “Will ‘mid-brain activation’ really produce super-kids or is it a scam?” (The News Minute, 2015); “Rationalist exposes mid-brain activation” (Deccan Herald); “KBC drops part of episode where kid showed ‘mid-brain activation’” (The News Minute, 2021).
- About Narendra Nayak: “An interview with Narendra Nayak” (The Caravan, 2015) and his profile at Atheist Alliance International; see also “Narendra Nayak” (Wikipedia).
Based on tests of “mid-brain activation” by journalists and rationalists in India, with the assistance of AI tools, and reviewed by our editors. — CHARVAKA DESK