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Weekend


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March 4, 2005

Strange But True!

  • A weekly column of incidental information, off-the-wall observations and other random facts about the world.
    • By BILL SONES and RICH SONES, Ph.D.
    Special to the Journal

    Q. If you were to draw a centerline down Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa, what eye-catching body part would it pass through? See where this might be heading?

    A. When vision researcher Christopher Tyler did this with face-on portraits from 265 artists spanning six centuries, he was looking to find subtle differences in the two facial halves, due to right-brain/left-brain differences in each artist. He found something totally surprising instead: In drawing the dividing centerlines, he noticed how often these ran right through one of the eyes of the subject, as with the Mona Lisa's left eye at horizontal dead center! ("American Psychological Association Monitor")


     
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