CURIOSITY LAB 5
Can you find the invisible stories your brain is making up?
In this workshop, we’ll explore how our brains are always busy. We will start to listen to and question the thoughts that randomly pop into our minds.
Game: Noodle Doodle
Supplies: Paper, markers
Each player places a piece of paper on top of their heads. Listen for instructions for what to draw. Draw the picture as best as you can without taking it off your head to look at it. When time is up, share your picture!
Think + Learn:
Group Agreements
In these workshops, we’re getting curious about ourselves and our world. It takes a lot of bravery to share who we are with each other, to talk about our feelings, to admit when we don’t know something or made a mistake. It can even take bravery to ask questions.
Let’s do our best to respect each other’s bravery, identities, and experiences.
Click through the slideshow to read guidelines to help us do that, or click here to watch a video that explains our group agreements.
Experiment: Slime Lab!
Grown-ups, read this first.
Are you a magician in the kitchen? If not, you will be soon! Get ready to make some ooey, gooey, deliciously mesmerizing slime!
This isn’t any old slime though. This slime has a special power. Once you’ve made it, you’ll have to experiment to figure out what it is.
First place some dish towels on your table to protect it. Then follow these directions.
Did you figure out what the slime’s superpower is?
If not, ask your grown-up for some hints.
Isn’t it so interesting how the superpower is there the whole time, even though we can’t see it all the time?
Once you’re done playing with it, put the slime away. Help clean up your area – put away all the materials and wipe the table.
And – please give your grown-up a high-five or a hug. Letting you make slime is kinda a big deal.
Read: Guess Again by Mac Barnett + illustrated by Adam Rex
Chat: What did you think about the book?
Did you like that book?
What happened? Why were we all surprised? Why were we all finishing the rhymes and expecting the same answers to the rhymes?
Our brains are always looking to make sense of the world and to do that we’re using information we have learned to make predictions. All the time. We don’t even notice we’re doing it. Our brains take the patterns we’ve learned and fill in the blanks. Of course, the story we just read is a little bit silly. Now we’re going to read another story about what this might look like in real life.
But first, let’s take a break!
Game: Link + Laugh
You need partners for this game. Pairing people of similar heights will make the game easier; pairing people with very different heights will make it more challenging.
- Have partners sit on the ground back to back and link arms.
- If there isn’t an even number of people, have the people not playing cheer for everyone else.
- The object of this game is to see how many times partners can stand up and sit back down within one minute without unlinking their arms.
- Change partners and try again.
Think + Learn with creator Christian Robinson
The story we’ll be reading takes place on a subway train. Is being on a train a mirror, a window, or a door for you? If you haven’t been on a train before, you can watch this video to get a taste of what it might be like.
Now we’re going to watch a short video where the illustrator of the book, Christian Robinson, introduces the book.
- For time purposes, you can start at 4:22 into the video, where Christian introduces the book Milo Imagines the World. Be sure to stop on the dot at 6:55 to avoid giving away the ending of the book.
- In case you’ve got extra time, skip to 10:45 where Christian Robinson offers a tour of his studio.
In the video, Christian references assumptions and stereotypes. You can choose whether to introduce those definitions now, after reading the book, or later in the session. We think it might work best after reading the book and after discussing the definitions in the “Chat: How are all these things connected?” section below.
Read: Milo Imagines the World by Matt de la Peña + illustrated by Christian Robinson
Click here for an important note to parents & caregivers.
- What did you think and feel while reading this book?
- Did you notice any mirrors, windows, or doors for you?
- When you see other people, do you start imagining where they’re going and who they are?
What can we learn from Milo?
- Some of the guesses, thoughts and pictures came to him automatically.
- Milo realized that he was making guesses but that he didn’t really know whether the guesses were right or wrong. Why do you think his brain came up with his first drawings? Perhaps think back to what you started learning about culture in Workshop 4.
- What did Milo do to imagine something different and create new drawings?
Chat: How are all these things connected?
We’re going to stop here for a minute and think. What did we learn in each of the activities we’ve done so far?
- With the slime we learned that there was something present (a hidden color) that we could not see all the time.
- In the Guess Again! book we noticed that our brains were automatically primed to finish the stories in the way we expected.
- With the book Milo Imagines the World we saw that in real life our brains make guesses about people all the time.
How do you think all of these things are connected?
- We’re all still learning to look at things from different perspectives, and to challenge our initial guesses – our assumptions – to think about our thinking.
- Our brains are always looking for patterns and to finish the story using things we have seen or things we know.
What are assumptions?
Assumptions: a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof.
from Google Dictionary + Oxford Languanges
What about stereotypes?
Stereotypes: a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
from Google Dictionary + Oxford Languages
- Where do you think assumptions and stereotypes come from? Do we all have the same assumptions and stereotypes?
- What are some ways that we can help our brains keep from getting stuck on making assumptions? Let’s be like Milo and think about our own thinking.
Game: Balance the Ball
Measure out a distance of six feet. Players must pick up a ping pong ball and balance it on a spoon while walking and then drop it into a cup. For an extra challenge have players walk backwards with the ping pong ball.
See how many ping pong balls each player can transfer to a cup in one minute.
Think + Learn: Guess Who?
Here’s another kid-friendly access point for looking at assumptions.
Think + Learn: Can we trust our brains?
In Workshop 2, we looked at some optical illusions. Here’s another one you might enjoy.
In the video below, the square that you see moving is the same color the whole time.
What do you think?
Take a look at these two pictures. What color are the strawberries you see?
Now watch the first minute of this video.
Those strawberries sure do look red to us! It is so hard to believe that they are really gray.
Like the speaker in the video Robbie Gonzalez said, our eyes see that the strawberries in the picture are gray. But based on both the colors around the strawberries and our past experience with red strawberries, our brains transform the picture so that the strawberries look red. And this whole transformation happens without us even thinking about it.
Optical illusions are fun to look at, but why are we looking at them now? How do they fit into what we’re learning about today? Any ideas?
Optical illusions teach us that our eyes can see one thing yet our brain can take that information and create something that isn’t actually there.
Here’s another example (to enlarge the images, hold down the PC-“Control” key or Mac-“Command” key and press the “+” key several times. To get back to “regular size,” use the “-” key instead of the “+.”
These copyrighted works are by Akiyoshi Kitaoka; permission to reproduce them here is based on his blanket permission statement on June 23, 2005, with the warning that “This page contains some works of “anomalous motion illusion”, which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately.“
Do you see movement? Your eyes see a still picture, but your brain created movement.
Here are a few more fun ones:
Or try this one.
Which is your favorite?
Of course, we’re not really encountering many optical illusions like this in real life. So why does it matter?
We need to remember that our brains don’t see or understand the world perfectly. We need to remind ourselves that our brains come up with guesses or ideas about other people without us trying to think of them, and they might not be true.
It’s natural…that is how our brains work and those automatic guesses can help us sometimes. But we have to be aware that sometimes our brains create stories or ideas that are not true.
Take a moment to do a feelings check.
What questions do you have?
Make: A reMINDer
We’re going to switch gears a little bit and look at some sculpture art.
Barbara Hepworth was an artist; a sculptor in England. Here are some of her sculptures.
What are you noticing about her sculptures?
That’s right, a lot of her sculptures have “holes” in them.
What’s cool is that as you walk around the sculpture the view within the holes changes. You’re looking at the same landscape, but you’re getting a different view or perspective.
We can use this to help us remember that we don’t know someone’s whole story just by looking at someone’s face.
It can be hard to remember this as we go about our everyday lives – because our brains are always trying to finish the stories for us.
Would you like to add to any of these thoughts? Maybe YOU have a different perspective.
Let’s make something to help us remember to keep thinking about our thinking like Milo – a reMINDer.
This activity was slightly modified from one found at Tate.org