Brain Games, the TV show

Our niece and her family are visiting for a few days. That's the best thing about living in a vacation destination, or at least within easy driving distance. (In our case, metro Denver, home to umpteen microbreweries and just minutes from breathtaking scenic wonders and fresh spring powder for skiing.) We get to see friends and relatives without having to make the hours-long journeys to their towns.

And those friends and relatives always bring gifts.  You know. That particular brand of hot sauce or syrup or coffee that you can't buy here. The chance to see babies live and in person -- babies that you usually only see on Facebook. New ways of doing things. Books and movies and TV shows they think you'll like because they like them.

This visit, I've learned a much less labor intensive way to cook bacon; our cat likes baby toys almost as much as he likes aluminum foil balls and infinitely better than he likes babies; and there's a really fun TV show available on Netflix -- Brain Games.

Brain Games explores how our brain works and what its limitations are. It's still in production and available on the National Geographic Channel, if you have the right cable package. We don't.

Last night we watched the second episode (first season) of Brain Games. It spotlighted the natural human susceptibilities to misdirection and arrogance. As a mystery writer, I find those proclivities most useful. Not that I want readers to see them in themselves, but in my characters. Of course my readers are too smart to be misdirected into suspecting the butler or Colonel Mustard with a candle stick in the library.

In this episode, Brain Games invites us to try several exercises that test our ability to attend to more than one thing at a time -- multitask. Something most of us think we're good at.

My favorite one tasked us to count the number of times dancers in blue stepped into the spotlit areas.

Four of the eight dancers wore blue and there were two spotlit areas. Simple, right? We could do that. We watched, each of us counting -- silently, of course. This was a competition. Yup, we're that kind of a family.

And at the end, the host asked if we'd seen the penguin. The penguin? What penguin? None of us saw any penguin. Until the instant replay. (He never did tell us how many times the dancers in blue entered the spotlit areas.)

That penguin, dear friends, is why humans in the real world make unreliable eye witnesses.

And coincidences? Yes, things completely unrelated to a story (like the penguin) do just happen to occur at the same time and in the same place but we may not notice them. In fact, probably won't.

And don't need to, unless we're watching , Brain Games.