Blink and you’ll miss it. Don’t blink, and you’ll still miss it. Axel Adler’s illusions will make you doubt your own eyes.
Axel Adler has been talking for over an hour when he gets up and walks over to a side table. But not to get a cup of coffee though. He returns with a small spoon in his hand. Walking back to us, he mutters something under his breath, cursing the spoon for being difficult to bend. “What’s this made of? Solid iron?”
No Uri Geller tricks here, in other words.
He sits down and holds the spoon upright, between his thumb and index finger and wiggles it.
“Anyway, you can see the optical illusion, it looks like the spoon is made of rubber, right?”
I nod and frankly I’m a little bit excited, because I get it now. It’s just an illusion!
“So now, if I do this,” he says, holding the spoon with both hands by its tip and neck, and making bending moves with his fingers, “…it looks like the spoon is bending, but that’s just your eyes playing a trick on you,” he says.
Three seconds later, he holds the spoon in his hand.
It’s bent.
Which is exactly what was supposed to happen – except that it was supposed to be merely an optical illusion.
Adler smiles and puts the spoon away.
“You see,” he says, with a smile. “You can’t really trust your eyes.”
Nor should you trust a magician, and Adler is a good as they come.

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