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I Require A RATIONAL Explanation for Levitation

Alice Shortcake said:
The explanation is so simple I'm surprised you haven't stumbled across it yourself. It isn't difficult to lift a person in this way when their weight is equally distributed by the people doing the lifting. However, I would question the accuracy of your memory that you lifted the person above your shoulders - I doubt if that's possible.
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Actually I quite clearly recall going above the shoulders. I can't see why that would not be possible.
 
We edit childhood memories all the time; they are not to be trusted. I've mentioned before that Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his essays, related two cherished childhood memories that were proved to be false when he was an adult.
 
Your assigning a ritual like quality to the girl in this case that didn't really exist, but through the power of wanting to believe you could very easily convince yourself that she had to be there to do this "magic" because you had tricked yourself into thinking it was magic instead of a simple party trick.

Your personal childhood memories are in no way "empirical evidence."
 
Pakistan or not, this is a common parlor/party trick here in the U.S. If this is a unsolvable mystery for you, probably most everything in life will be.

Of course, when I googled it, the top explanation said that: "This levitating trick is really quite scientific and not paranormal in nature it has to do with HUMAN DIAMAGNETISM GRAVITY ANTENNA LEVITATION." So maybe P.T. Barnum is still right.
 
Confused Skeptic said:
I've witnessed it, multiple times (and no, I wasn't on acid).
And I'm not talking about any magician's trick here....
It wasn't like floating 6 inches off the ground.

Me, and and others were ALL levitated, by a girl,
-multiple times- on separate occasions,
at least 4 feet off the ground.


Details:


This was when I was a kid, probably around 10, back in Pakistan. The kid who lived next to my grandfather's house had an older sister that used to do this to us (secretly). We would sit in a circle around and one person would lie on the ground with pillows on the floor.

She would silently say some "prayer" to herself (but we all thought it was "black magic") and then everyone would say "light as a feather, stiff as a board" 3 times. Then we would lift the person gently off the ground, with only our index and middle fingers, until our arms would reach higher then our shoulders.

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Old, and I mean OLD party trick.
No prayer involved.
I've done that myself.
Your memory has added details to flesh the story over the years.
 
Yeah, this one's old as the hills. The real key is in the synchronized chanting right before the lift. You repeat the phrase a few times, which ensures that everyone will lift at the same time. You'd get the same result if everyone said "3-2-1-Lift," or whatever. All the praying, etc. that the girl at the head did was just smoke.
 
I remember something very similar to this when I was at primary school; this was supposedly something spooky, and had to be done without the teachers finding out. One part, which hasn't been mentioned in the accounts above, was that before the lift, everyone placed their hands on the head of the person to be lifted and pushed down. I think this makes it feel that the lifting immediately afterwards is much easier, as you then use the opposing muscles.
 
InfidelSavant said:
This is the only reasonable response I can come up with.

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Hi, IS. For embedding youtube, the code is just the 11 characters after the '=' sign in the address, like so:

[yt]ZDNgmdGMpuY[/yt]


Hadn't seen that duo before. Quite funny. :p
 
Robin said:
Actually I quite clearly recall going above the shoulders. I can't see why that would not be possible.
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Perhaps we weren't trying hard enough!

zooterkin said:
One part, which hasn't been mentioned in the accounts above, was that before the lift, everyone placed their hands on the head of the person to be lifted and pushed down. I think this makes it feel that the lifting immediately afterwards is much easier, as you then use the opposing muscles.
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There are New Age nitwits who think that the pushing action "removes energy", thereby making the lift possible...
 
zooterkin said:
I remember something very similar to this when I was at primary school; this was supposedly something spooky, and had to be done without the teachers finding out. One part, which hasn't been mentioned in the accounts above, was that before the lift, everyone placed their hands on the head of the person to be lifted and pushed down. I think this makes it feel that the lifting immediately afterwards is much easier, as you then use the opposing muscles.
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.
Yes...
That's the way we did it 60 some years ago.
 
zooterkin said:
...everyone placed their hands on the head of the person to be lifted and pushed down. I think this makes it feel that the lifting immediately afterwards is much easier, as you then use the opposing muscles.
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That's what I used to think, but most of the videos I see are like this one, where the hands do not touch, just stacked with spaces between.
 
zooterkin said:
I remember something very similar to this when I was at primary school; this was supposedly something spooky, and had to be done without the teachers finding out. One part, which hasn't been mentioned in the accounts above, was that before the lift, everyone placed their hands on the head of the person to be lifted and pushed down. I think this makes it feel that the lifting immediately afterwards is much easier, as you then use the opposing muscles.
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That's how I remember it being done, with the hands on the head part. As soon as I saw it done at a party at my parents' house, I couldn't wait to go to school and try it. Worked every time.
 
As a youth, we used to do the 'hands clasped over the head, then quickly lift' variety. Our explanation was we held the hands over the head to 'sync' up our energies.

I think there are a few things at work: As often stated already, underestimating the distributed weight and underestimating the strength required; Suggestion; an initial maximum effort (anticipating a heavy load). I think it was the initial maximum effort that made it feel as if the person was floating away. I recall the 'floating' effect faded rather quickly.

I also recall that this was done later in connection with testing energies, like we've seen recently with the miracle balance wrist band. Our insurance agent was into woo, sold every supplement ever invented by man. First, he would perform the childhood trick being discussed. Then he did an 'energy' test like the 'miracle balance bracelet', where he would place a substance on your stomach (while you are laying on your back), then test the strength of your arms. Put nothing, and you have normal strength. Placing Sugar on stomach makes you weak. He would assure everyone he was using the same strength. In fact, anyone could do it, and it 'worked'. He would use this 'test' to find/demonstrate which vitamins you needed, at what dose. Coincidentally, he sold the vitamins.

My mom bought it all, hook, line, sinker, fishing pole, and boat.
 
Confused Skeptic said:
We could never manage to do this by ourselves.
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How do you know?

If it was simply a case of dividing the weight around, then one girl wouldn't make a difference.
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Yes it would. For example 100/6 is a different value than 100/5.

If it was actually levitation, why would you need ANY people lifting with their fingers? Why not just do the talking/praying part?

Really, if one more person doesn't matter, then why would you need anyone lifting at all?
 
Confused Skeptic said:
I'm in china right now and youtube is banned
So I can't really check what these people are doing.

We used to lift each other -above our shoulders-
-WITHOUT- feeling any pressure on our fingers.

As soon as everyone would open their eyes, the person
would suddenly become heavy and fall.

Question: What caused the sudden change in weight?
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Have you considered that your perception might be fallible?

Have you ever been to a magic show and seen a professional magician vanish something? Just because it looked like something vanished, doesn't mean that is the case.

Similarly, have you never experienced optical illusions (one category of perceptual illusions)? Some of them can be astounding. In this one, for example, purple dots seem to vanish--gobbled up by a green dot. In fact, the purple dots never vanish, and there is no green dot at all!


So you are concluding prematurely that there was a change in weight.

What would you need to do to reach the conclusion validly that a person's weight is changing?
 
Bikewer said:
We edit childhood memories all the time; they are not to be trusted. I've mentioned before that Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his essays, related two cherished childhood memories that were proved to be false when he was an adult.
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One advantage I have is having many siblings. I'm one of 10 siblings (and I'm 49 years old now). It's plain from comparing even very vivid memories that often my account and that of others is completely wrong. So I KNOW at a gut level that my memories aren't trustworthy.

There's also really good science to support the plasticity and fallibility of memory so we don't have to rely on anecdotes!
 
Confused Skeptic said:
Question: What caused the sudden change in weight?
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If the person being lifted kept himself "stiff as a board" while lifted, and then relaxed slightly at this time, the leverage would change dramatically.

Think about it this way: You can lift a book by supporting it with two fingers (one under each of two diagonally opposing corners). But you can not lift a stack of papers of the same size and weight up from a flat table this way, no matter how strong you are.

ETA: Well, you CAN, but I'm just trying to illustrate a point.
 
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