Everyone knows that you can look ten pounds thinner with a well-known slimming trick: clothing with vertical lines elongate your shape and give you a more svelte appearance, right? Wrong! Vision scientists Peter Thompson and Kyriaki Mikellidou say that what we learned about wearing vertical stripes, and not wearing horizontal stripes, is exactly backwards. Vertical stripes on clothing make the wearer appear fatter and shorter than horizontal stripes do. Horizontal stripes actually make objects appear taller and narrower. This phenomenon was reported by German physicist and physician, Hermann von Heimholtz, 150 years ago. Heimholtz’s report never got picked up by clothing designers, but now we know that he did indeed have a great eye for fashion (Scientific American Mind, July-August, 2012).

I love it when long-held assumptions are challenged and proven wrong, partly because it encourages me to test some of my own assumptions. We grow up thinking and learning…