Incredible Vanishing Head Illusion
tags:
Stumble ThisIMPORTANT: Cover your RIGHT eye, and look with your left eye. The blind spot of your left eye is to the left, so this is really important, but is not emphasized in the video., distance from screen (in full screen) should be 50-60 cm (20-25 inches)
Created by Richard Wiseman
http://twitter.com/RichardWiseman
http://59seconds.biz/
Created by Richard Wiseman
http://twitter.com/RichardWiseman
http://59seconds.biz/
|
▲
0
▼
|
|
Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things Book added by: BicycleRepairMan 
|
Note: It DOES NOT work if you cover the wrong eye,because your blind spot is to the left of your left eye, and to the right of your right eye.
So you HAVE to cover your RIGHT eye and LOOK at the cross with the LEFT EYE. if you want to try the other eye (or if are blind on your left eye), focus on a point to the left of your screen in equal distance to the head as the X
Yeah, it took me more times than I want to admit. But it worked. Interesting.
It's not brain, it's eye.
It's not magic, not a mystery and not psychology, it's basic biology.
It's not an illusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_disc
God made a design mistake in the human eye. He corrected this mistake in his octopus release.
Adding video to channels (Science) - requested by xxovercastxx.
It's not brain, it's eye.
Our brain "fills in" that blind spot most of the time, which is why it takes an experiment like this to discover it.
It's not magic, not a mystery and not psychology, it's basic biology.
Nor is spoonbending, levitation, cardtricks,or vanishing acts "magic". I dont think magic even exists, but this, like the above mentioned tricks and illusions, has that "wow, thats magic!" feel to it, so I placed it in magic. It also feels mysterious, and I never mentioned Psychology.
It's not an illusion.
Our blindspot isnt, but the feeling that we dont have one IS actually an illusion, because, as I say, our brain "fills in" that blank spot, and thats actually also demonstrated with the black stick in the video.
Heard about the blindspot before, and that it could be easily pointed out to someone, but never knew how. This seems to be working for making my fingertip or webcam vanish as well, now that I know roughly where it is. Fun to move things in and out of the spot, watching them disappear.
Its also fun to do the trick on others, get a pencil with a red rubber on the end (or something similar), tell them to cover their eye, look at nose with the other. Move the pencil slowly around the area where their blind spot should be, which should be on eye-level and slightly to the side.
And how do you think we interpret these signals? With our feet? The blindspot by itself is really just a function of the eye, yes, but our ability to detect a continuous bar when our eye is utterly incapable of doing so could only be thanks to our wonderful pattern-seeking brain.
If you've got a horizontal bar and you cut out a chunk in the middle and then stitch the remaining ends together, what would you expect it to look like? Seems like a stretch to call this #brain to me, but fair enough.
>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
I dont think magic even exists, but this, like the above mentioned tricks and illusions, has that "wow, thats magic!" feel to it, so I placed it in magic. It also feels mysterious, and I never mentioned Psychology.
I guess I don't feel it's magic because it's not deliberate. It's not sleight of hand or smoke and mirrors or whatever; they're just pointing out an anomaly. They've given it sort of a magic presentation, I'll give you that. In fact, that sort of bothers me.
#mystery is "Videos that deal with unsolved mysteries, crimes, or the unexplained." Don't feel it fits despite the "Woah! How'd that happen?" response it might illicit in some.
You didn't label it psychology but they call it such twice in the video. That, of course, is just ridiculous.
The brain is much more involved than that: it is the reason we usually do not notice our blind-spot, because it fills in that spot. if it was just our eyes, we'd see two black spots on either side.