The new show follows the changes in journalist Sean Rix’s mind at the beginning and end of the year. Ricks aspires to be a superhero.
How would you manage without your vision?
Reporter Sean Ricks travels to Los Angeles to play blindfold hockey. The brain struggles to create mental maps without the sense of sight. What’s different?
In the first episode of Superhumans, Sean Ricks meets a blind sensory coach who enjoys skateboarding in Los Angeles. How far does Ricks manage to stretch his sensory abilities? At the same time, we dive into the mind and its imagined limitations.
In a five-part program series, brain researcher Katri Sarikivi sends Ricks to meet real-life superheroes and top coaches. The program tracks changes in the human brain with the help of brain images taken at the beginning and end of the year.
The program came from the idea of director Jaro Asikainen, says Ricks.
– He asked if you would be ready to go on a one-year human experiment. I myself was excited that there is potential here to challenge myself, and whether it can be done on a deeper and more sustainable level.
The shooting of the first episode of Superhumans is slated to begin in early 2022. Among other things, Rix can be seen in Stockholm in a memory maze and as a surprise performer at a top singer’s concert.
“I didn’t realize how much I could draw from inside,” Ricks says.
– A lot of things that have not been my business turned completely upside down.
Researchers measure Ricks’ brain activity before and after the Katri Sarikivi challenges. Photo: Yale
Brain researcher Katri Sarikivi was present throughout the event. In each episode, Sarikivi throws down a challenge and helps explain what’s going on in Rick’s head when he learns Skill X. And what it means in body and mind.
In Los Angeles, Ricks wore a blindfold for several days and was unable to see. Earlier, in his homeland, Sarikivi measured his brain’s excitatory responses. After the challenge, it was observed that there were changes in the brain.
– The auditory system processes sound in a completely different way than before. It notices such small changes in voice more sensitively, the researchers explain in the Saariqivi program to the altered results of Ricks’ brain.
Ricks observed that you can experience things richly by looking at them without judging them.
– I rarely thought about how something felt or smelled. It felt like the world of experience inside my head was a crazy place, much better parts too.
He says that supernaturalism no longer seems such an impossible idea.
The point is not that I will become like a teacher, but that there is something supernatural in everyone. The biggest learning has been that experts have dumped an uncontrolled amount of dune in front of it.
Perhaps the most important observation in creating the program, according to Ricks, was that you can experience things in a new way. You can even discover a whole new world in the local woods.
The world is full of opportunities now. It limits life if you think it’s not my thing. The world is no longer as closed to me as it used to be.
Superman starts Tuesday 16.5. On TV1 channel at 20:00.
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