Stand in the doorway with your arms to your sides.
Lift your arms so that the backs of your hands are pushing against the sides of the doorframe.
Try and raise a sweat and push hard on the doorframe, PUSH...push...push for around 30 seconds, the harder you push, the better the effect.
Now step away from the doorway and relax. Your arms should float up without any effort from you.
What's happening?
Muscles move because your brain tells them to. When your brain gives your arm muscles the message to move, it sets off a series of events. Firstly, an electrical message travels from your brain to the muscles in your arm. This message is then read by the cells of that muscle.
You would normally expect to find calcium in your bones or in milk and nuts, but it is also in muscle cells where it is found in very small stores. When these stores receive the message from the brain, they release the calcium into the cells. This calcium then makes the cells contract and the muscle move.
When you move away from the door frame and stop pushing, the muscle cell stores start to take back the calcium. This allows the muscles to relax.
In the case of 'Arm Levitation' however, there is still a high enough concentration of calcium in your muscles to trigger movement. For 30 seconds, you have sent a constant stream of electrical message that has released loads of calcium into the muscle cells. So even though the message from you brain has stopped, your arms will lift themselves away from your sides!
Applications
Both the heart beat and body movement depend on the release of calcium from stores inside the cells. For heart muscle and body to function there needs to be careful regulation of calcium levels. To do this, there are proteins in the cell that let the calcium in and out of cell stores.
In the future, muscle related disease such as heart failure and muscular dystrophy may be treated using synthetic proteins that have the ability to regulate calcium levels in both body and heart muscle.
Try and raise a sweat and push hard on the doorframe, PUSH...push...push for around 30 seconds, the harder you push, the better the effect.
Thanks to Beth Askham of the Shell Questacon Science Circus for her remarkable abilities of levitation.
