TFP WEEKENDS Sleight of Mind Why We All Need a Daily Dose of Brain Magic Website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-barry/ted-talk-hypnosis b 3728458.html Once, when my youngest child was still in kindergarten, I stumbled onto the scene of a disaster. The ship was sinking and drowning passengers were flung far and wide, except for the lucky few who had made it into the laundry basket. Oops, I mean the life boat. "How the heck do you expect me to make lunches today, if you use up my sandwich bags?" I demanded. My son Aidan looked up from the couch where he was conducting emergency rescue operations with all 28 of his stuffed animals. "But Mom, this is the Titanic!" he said. 'The passengers need those bags to breathe!" I looked again. Sure enough, some of the smaller animals had been stuffed into sandwich bags on the wide blue carpet, or rather, on the wide blue sea. The bags were life preservers, complete with oxygen. The first lesson of parenthood is that imagination can be a messy business. The second lesson -- and the most important one -- is that your imagination can create a kind of brain magic that is the essential ingredient for happiness. I was reminded of this recently when I watched the joyful Irish illusionist Keith Barry conduct a TEDTalk where he creatively deceives us into thinking he can perform feats like drive a car at top speed while blindfolded, shatter a coke bottle with a shard of glass and a dash of negative energy, and accurately predict where a spike was hidden beneath a series of paper cups. Barry is brilliant at convincing us that such things are possible, despite the fact that he admits right up front that "magic is all about directing attention." Why do we let him manipulate our minds so easily? Because we want to be deceived. Each of us desperately hopes, in some dark secret corner of our hearts, that there really is such a thing as second sight or voodoo magic. This isn't only because we love to be entertained