Brain Games show demands heady host
Illusions, tests reveal how the mind plays tricks
Thirty seconds.
That’s how long it takes into a conversation with Jason Silva before he relates how he is stimulating his brain on this particular day.
The perpetually enthused host of the National Geographic Channel’s Brain Games is on the line from Amsterdam, where he has been busy bicycling for the past few days with his brother.
On the surface, this may not seem like the most cerebral of activities. But apparently it does the trick.
“I’m stimulating my brain with novelty,” Silva says cheerfully. “One of the things we learned on Brain Games is that new experiences make you come alive. Novelty is key to firing up the dopamine in your brain. I figure novel cities, novel experiences, you can’t go wrong with.”
Silva — described as both a “wonder junkie” and “the Timothy Leary of the Viral Video Age” — oversees far trippier experiments than bike riding on the series, which begins airing in Canada Tuesday after a successful U.S. run.
The idea is to offer optical illusions to show how the brain works — or in some cases, doesn’t work — by examining topics such as fear, focus, deception and even the “battle of the sexes.”
With the help of “gentleman thief” Apollo Robbins, who once famously pickpocketed a Secret Service agent while entertaining former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Silva introduces “brain games” to show how preconceived notions, confidence and our brain’s strange wiring can make us see things that aren’t there, or miss things that are.
The experiments can be simple: A repeated word in a sentence that most people miss when reading it out loud; the different ways in which a man or woman would load up the trunk of a car. All come from real lab experiments scientists have used to study the brain.
But they all work to reveal a basic truth about the human experience.
“We use these visual games to create this unsettling feeling that what you see is not always what you get, to kind of send you down that rabbit hole,” Silva says.
“Reality, the way you see it, is really much more like looking at a TV screen than looking out the window. Your eyes are not windows, they are (a) camera lens. And they are turning everything that comes in into electrical signals that your brain then interprets and turns into reality.”
You won’t get a simple rundown of the card tricks and experiments featured on the series during a conversation with Silva. The Atlantic once referred to the Venezuela-born filmmaker and “performance philosopher” as a “full-time walking, talking TED Talk.”
His TV experience includes a stint on Current TV, the cable network run by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore. He’s a fellow at the Hybrid Reality Institute, which examines the symbiosis between man and machine. So chats with the amiable host tend to stray into heady territory about where science and philosophy meet.
Studying the brain, Silva reckons, is a brave new world where all these elements merge. And we are just getting started.
“Our capacity to look into our own brains is increasing exponentially,” Silva says. “The instruments with which we can peer into the very fabric of consciousness, the operating system of the mind, so to speak, is something we can look into more and more. MRI scanners are becoming exponentially more powerful.
“In Europe, they have the billiondollar brain-mapping initiative where they are trying to literally reverse-engineer the brain digitally.
In the U.S., Obama is spending all this money to map the brain. So it’s kind of like the final frontier.
The brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. It has more complexity than anything else we know and we are only now really starting to get a grasp of its inner workings,” Silva says.
“It’s a very good time to be doing a show that celebrates ‘Well, here’s what we know so far.’”