The Amazing Floating Finger

The Amazing
Floating Finger

Just like magic —
watch your finger float
in the air!





What You Will Need:

• Your Hands
• Your Eyes

What You Do:

• Touch your two index fingers together, then touch the joined fingertips to your nose.
• Look at something in the distance over the top of your fingers.
• While looking in the distance, slowly push your joined fingers away from your nose, but keep staring at the same distant point during this process.
• As soon as your fingers are about a hand's-length away from your nose, you should see a surprise! Instead of seeing two joined fingers, you will see a piece of finger floating between your two fingertips! Just like magic!

The Science:

Special muscles change the shape of the eyes' lenses as focus is shifted from close to faraway objects. Usually, the brain receives just one set of signals at a time to analyze — either a close-up or a distant view. This illusion appears because the eye is sending two separate sets of signals to the brain at the same time — those for the close-up image and those for the distant view. Pretty cool!