Question: It hovers in mid-air, it's a startling vision, few people have seen one, most can't explain it, it's not a UFO. It's a "floating finger sausage." Ever lay eyes on one?
Answer: Point your index fingers toward each other about 5 inches in front of your eyes, with the tips half an inch apart. Now look between and past your fingers to the wall beyond. Can you see the disembodied chunk of finger, sausage shaped, with a nail at either end, floating between your fingertips?"Retinal disparity" creates the illusion, says Hope College psychologist David G. Myers, with your right eye seeing a slightly different view from your left eye, more pronounced for nearby objects. This is used in making 3-D movies and "Viewmaster" 3-D scenes, where a pair of cameras set a few inches apart simulate depth perception.
Observe that you can wiggle the sausage or shrink it or enlarge it by shifting the distances to and between your fingertips. But you can't cook it.
Question: Do you know somebody who knows somebody who knows Bill Clinton? (We're talking first-name basis here.)
Answer: We're betting you do. Here's why: If you think in terms of your social network extending outward to the people you know, then to the people they know, etc., you'll find it takes you only five "steps" on average to "get to" just about anybody.
Here's how this works for us coauthors: Brothers Bill and Rich have a New York friend whose brother-in-law lives in Washington, D.C., and has worked for several presidents, including Clinton. That's just three steps to the Prez.
The explanation lies in the explosive mathematics of geometric progressions: If you know 500 people and each of them knows 500 others, each of whom knows 500 more, your network includes 125 million people in just three steps. (In actuality, there would be lots of doubling up here, but the number would still be enormous.) One more step pushes your network number up well beyond the population of Earth.
Question: In what sense may lost limbs, fingers or toes "hang around" long afterward?
Answer: In "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," clinical neurologist Oliver Sacks tells of a sailor who, having accidentally cut off his index finger forty years earlier, still felt it bolt forward at times into the extended position it was in right before the fateful chop. Sometimes when moving his hand to his face, he'd be seized by the fear that this missing finger was about to poke out his eye.
Other patients with pains in a limb before their accident continued having the same pains after the limb was gone. One man with an ingrown toenail before losing his leg was for years afterward tormented by the "nonexistent" toe and nail.
A man with a missing foot felt various pains "there," which usually disappeared when he strapped on his prosthesis and began walking around.
Then his uncomfortable "ghost foot" would transform into a "good phantom" that helped direct and animate his walk. Sacks suggests these phantom sensations may often be essential for patients learning to use an artificial limb successfully, as they allow extension of the body-image into the lifeless part. One patient described having to "wake up" his phantom leg each morning with sharp slaps to his stump before he could strap on his prosthesis.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at (strangetrue@compuserve.com).