Talent shows can be a lot of fun. Sometimes acts fall flat, but quite often the performers do a pretty good job, whether they’re singing, dancing, playing an instrument, doing a magic trick, or a circus act. Amateurs who know their stuff can really dazzle an audience.
A group of seven ladies came up with an amazing talent show act, like none you’ve ever seen before. When they make their way on stage, they’re wearing sunglasses and costumes split vertically into black halves and white halves. They’re about to do a unique performance based on optical illusion!
So how do optical illusions work? Let’s take it step-by-step. When light bounces off an object and enters your eye, special cells turn the light into electrical impulses. These travel along the optic nerve to the part of your brain that processes visual information which then does its best to make sense of it before passing along a mental “image” that the rest of your brain can work with.
All that might only take a tenth of a second from start to finish, but keep in mind that in the meantime, more light has been entering your eyes. In just that fraction of a second, a massive amount of information has been streaming back to your brain’s visual “processor.” It can’t keep up with it all — it would be like trying to gently sip water from a fire hose — so it uses shortcuts, trying to focus on what seems important. What an optical illusion does is present a blend of the expected and the unexpected, throwing the shortcuts a curveball and causing your brain to see something that isn’t really there.
As you’ll see in the video posted below, the seven dancing ladies have come up with a simple but brilliantly effective way to create an optical illusion. Before you know it, you’ll lose track of whose leg is moving where!
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