Eli5 what makes it harder to walk on a beam above emptiness then to walk on the street? Only mind trick?
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Lets leave the psychological components out of this for a moment. I have worked in a circus. All acts basically require the ability to balance. Every artist will tell you that they balance according to sight. Which has often lead us to put reflecting tapes, pointed markers, set up lights, what have you, so that the artists can find a spot to focus on during their act, which is what they use to stay in balance.
Our sense of balance has a lot to do with our sight, especially when we are moving. We choose a point of refrence and focus on that, then from that we get additional information about how we are moving and use that to adjust our balance. Try walking downhill blindfolded, it is really hard.
So as long as you choose a point in the distance to focus on, you can easily walk on quite narrow paths.
This is a trick which helped me a lot when I worked as a welder installing scaffolding at a shipyard. The platform pieces were 300mm wide. And when assembling the tall scaffolding the levels were
usually made of 2×2 meter squares, and had two platforms on both sides lenght wise. You quickly learned to walk on these and the trick was look forwards, not down.
Funnily enough the one time I had never struggled to balance was when I welded.
If you go with confidence, keep your head level and look forward to a point, you keep your balance. But even the best balance artists will struggle to stay upright without a point to focus on. Which is why true blindfold tricks are hard and rarely done.
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