I don’t think there are many people who would want to put a hole in their hand.
But, hey, if you’ve ever wondered what it might be like, this illusion can give you a pretty good idea.
By holding a tube to one of your eyes and holding your hand over the other eye for a few seconds, a ‘hole’ will appear in your hand.
Here’s exactly how to do it:
1. Roll up a piece of paper into a narrow tube
2. Put it up to your eye and look through it
3. Hold your other hand about two inches from the eye not looking down the tube
4. Look into the distance with both eyes for about 10 seconds. Don’t focus on your hand
5. Voilà – a hole will appear in your hand
Freaky right?
The illusion takes advantage of something called binocular vision, which allows us to perceive depth and see in three dimensions, The Daily Mail reports.
It happens because of a thing called binocular rivalry, which is basically when the brain is forced to make one of the eyes more dominant because it can’t match the signals it receives from each eye, and it’s been highlighted in a video by science writer Vanessa Hill, courtesy of BrainCraft.
Normally, our brain combines the images it gets from our eyes to produce three-dimensional vision. But if it can’t combine them because the images are different, it suppresses one of the images to make the other more dominant.
Want the full explanation? Here’s the video:
So, now you know…
