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During the wake for a distant relative a few weeks ago, those in attendance were treated to a mesmerizing spectacle of sorts, courtesy of my wife’s 8-year-old niece.

At the insistence of her proud father, Felicia repeatedly showcased an apparent ability to read. Blindfolded. With her eyes covered by the hands of curious aunts and uncles, Felicia “read” leaflets, newspaper clippings and the serial numbers off random banknotes.

Always the skeptic, I handed Felicia an English-language biography of an American rock band that I was reading. She ran her hands over the page, “smelled” it and slowly “read” the first page without hesitation.

Hearing a blindfolded kid rattle off song titles such as “My Valuable Hunting Knife” and “Man Called Aerodynamics” made me take a second look and reconsider the seemingly bizarre demonstration as more than a mere parlor trick.

Felicia, along with her 12-year old sister, Fanny, is just one of many children who are part of a new trend often referred to as “midbrain activation,” a method of teaching that claims to enhance the link between the two sides of a child’s brain and develop cognitive abilities that may be considered at the very least extraordinary, and by most people impossible.

So what’s going on here? With parents incessantly showcasing their children’s apparent newfound abilities to friends and relatives, rapid word of mouth has been the most effective marketing tool for schools promoting methods to achieve them, such as the Genius Mind Consultancy, which has been in Malaysia for about five years and started opening centers in Indonesia last September.

Guiro, the father of a 9-year-old boy enrolled at a GMC center, said: “My wife and her friends were constantly talking about it and bragging about how some of their children now had supernatural powers. Of course I was intrigued.”

What schools such as GMC offer is a one-and-a-half-day session where the child’s “middle brain” will be “activated.” They only accept children aged 5 to 15.

After the sessions, depending on the talent of each child, they will purportedly come home with newfound skills, mostly consisting of the ability to perform routine tasks without using their sense of sight. GMC specifically discusses blindfold reading.

This supposed skill, also known as the Bronnikov method after a Russian who popularized a version of it, has the scientific-minded up in arms; they point out that it is biologically impossible, that it is explicable by “peeking” — because it is always demonstrated with blindfolds and with the reading material directly in front of the subject, there is scope for cheating — and that there is no evidence of it working under rigorously controlled conditions.

That doesn’t seem to have quelled the hype, and session-leaders are keen to stress a less controversial issue, that of enhancing standard cognitive skills in children.

According to Ovi, the process is about “normalizing” the brain. “When we are born, all parts of our brain, including the middle area, work in balance. But as we grow up, we tend to rely on only one part of the brain,” she said.

This is the explanation that schools like GMC give for only taking kids up to 15 years old. Anyone older, they believe, is already dependent on only one side of the brain. “We build the bridge between the left and right brain,” Ovi said.

The learning part of the training consists of rehearsing physical gestures said to rely on midbrain activity, such as simultaneously working the right and left hands with different movements.

For instance, rubbing the right hand on the right thigh while the left hand is pounding on the left thigh — all the while rapidly alternating the movements between the two hands.

Ovi, who has been accepted by GMC as a practitioner for the Kemang Pratama area in South Jakarta, explains that the two days of sessions are far different from typical classroom lessons. Much of the time is spent watching humorous videos, such as cartoons or gag shows.

“It’s to get the children in the right frame of mind,” Ovi said, adding that children who are in a happy state of mind will be more conducive to learning “midbrain” skills.

Nirmala Dewi, who owns a GMC-licensed school in Bekasi, says that the learning portion also consists of listening to “music” consisting of random sounds — “Like helicopter noises,” Nirmala said — and ends with a classical movement  “to calm the children’s nerves.”

After a few days, she claims, most of the children will have their midbrain area activated. They will have skills, which, apart from reading blindfolded, include riding a bike and maneuvering through obstacles and even — serious skeptics should perhaps blindfold themselves at this point — “something akin to prediction.”

Nirmala gives the example of the child of Aditya Herpavi, the host of the Indonesian version of the game show “Deal or No Deal,” who enrolled in a GMC class. “The child was watching an episode on TV with his mother and asked her, ‘Mom, do you know how much money is in daddy’s pocket? I do,’ ” Nirmala said, referring to the portion of the game show where the host withholds a varying sum of money in his pocket. “The child said Rp 9 million [$990], which turned out to be correct, and then said the next amount, which was also true.”

Nirmala gave another example involving a child telling his mother to close her car door as she was putting shopping bags into the trunk because “a motorcycle will be passing” and would hit the door if it were open. The mother closed the door in the nick of time to avoid the motorcycle.

GMC, however, does not officially promise that children will develop any types of predictive skills.

What it does promise, through the so-called activation of the middle brain, is heightened perceptive awareness, hence the “reading” without actually seeing.

Ovi is quick to point out that the crowd-drawing skills are not the end goal, but just a showcase of the children’s increased perceptive awareness.

She recalls the story of a 5-year-old obsessed with Rubik’s cube, who would take four to five minutes to solve the puzzle before enrolling at a GMC. “His parents told me that now it only takes him a minute,” Ovi said. It was not clear how much time the child had had to learn the cube’s routine moves and practise getting his time down.

According to her, the end goal is to have a child who is more perceptive of his or her surroundings. “A child who is hyperactive will become calmer and more compassionate toward others,” she added, citing some behavioral examples and saying that “the real proof is in the drastic increase in the academic achievements of the students in school.”

So far, the results appear to have been mixed. Julia, mother of 7-year-old Joe, said she enrolled her son in GMC hoping it would improve his academic performance. “We have not yet seen any significant improvement in Joe,” she said.

Benny, whose two daughters also enrolled in a GMC session, says that while he has seen a change in his daughters’ attitudes — they are calmer and wittier — their academic skills are the same.

Nirmala says she understands how some parents may be skeptical. She was one of them, especially with regard to the methods used.

“My friend told me about GMC and I was hesitant at first. But since the parents are allowed to see the lessons firsthand, I saw that there was nothing involving hypnotism, the mystical or anything that was dubious,” she said.

Ovi explains the whole process as “mapping” of the brain, where the process of “regulating the brain” transpires.

But what do the children actually “see” when they close their eyes or “smell” when they sniff an object?

Fanny, 12, says that she is “able to see something, but it’s hard to explain.”

Felicia, a little weary of people asking her about her skills, says that she “feels” something when she reads blindfolded, but “cannot explain it.” She assures me that she is not peeking in any way.

Wina, Felicia’s mother, says that her daughter experienced nosebleeds during the “activation” process. “I found out about her nosebleed when I came to pick her up from class. She was sitting alone in a separate room from the other students. When she saw me, she said that she wanted to go home,” Wina said.

It turns out that Felicia’s nosebleed, which lasted on and off for a few days, began during a “speed reading” session. “She was also throwing up for a few days following the ‘activation,’ ” Wina said.

She added that she was also skeptical at first and asked her daughters if they were taking a peek when they started to show off their newfound skills. No, they said.

Whatever the case may be, there’s no denying the current hype. It doesn’t hurt that GMC has held a string of high-profile publicity events.

“We had an event a few months ago” Ovi said. “More than 500 students rode their bicycles blindfolded through the Thamrin area [which was closed for the event]. And more than 600 participated in a blindfold-drawing competition.”

Whatever your view, the idea of 1,000 blindfolded kids doing tricks is a work of marketing genius, at least.