Folk Illusions

Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception

K. Brandon Barker, Claiborne Rice

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041111
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

"[A] well-researched and well-written book... linking traditional folklore studies to current scientific research and to thinking about human behavior." — American Journal of Play Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell—these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed. "With clear focal points, sound and carefully explained methodology, and thought-provoking, substantial analysis, this book makes an excellent contribution to children's folklore and related fields." —Elizabeth Tucker, author of Children's Folklore: A Handbook "A compendium of perceptual illusions, gathered from performers across the country, sorted into formally related perceptual categories, and analyzed under various theories of perception." — Journal of Folklore Research

1

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT SEEING IS (NOT ALWAYS) BELIEVING

LIKE MOST SCHOOLS, ST. CECILIA CATHOLIC MIDDLE SCHOOL in Broussard, Louisiana, educates its youth according to a system of time slots. Students gather in assigned classes for daily lessons: English and language in the morning. Then history, then religion. Geography and science in the afternoon. Teachers present regimented educational programs around necessary breaks for eating, for Mass, and for some free play. The playgrounds offer release for nine-, ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old girls and boys who greatly desire time and space to live in the moment, free from the weight of learning objectives. But then again, those of us who remember middle school well know that play is not confined to the playground. Who doesn’t recall silly, handwritten notes passed around the classroom? Or the reshaping of homework assignments into aeronautical paper masterpieces? Or weirdly contorted faces of mockery aimed at the teacher’s back? Play finds its way into most aspects of youthful school days.

Less obvious to the energetic children and to their adult authorities is the inverse truth that education is not confined to books and lesson plans. A good deal of what youths come to know about the world, about each other, and about themselves is learned during the kinds of social interactions that we adults usually call play. We observed an excellent example of this fact at St. Cecilia in the spring of 2011, just before Ms. Hesse’s eighth-grade science class. The bell had just rung, and students were settling in for their daily lesson on the Milky Way. Plastic models of Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and the other planets hung from the ceiling. Since Ms. Hesse’s room was set up for scientific experimentation, the room held no school desks. Students instead sat facing each other across rectangular tables. One boy, who was sitting in front of his friend, held his pencil between his thumb and his index finger. He held it at eye level, about a foot from his face, and began to wiggle the pencil up and down, over and over. The boy was performing the Rubber Pencil illusion. It’s possible that several weeks earlier, his classmate sitting just in front of him had shown him how to hold his pencil this way. Maybe his classmate had also shown him how to wiggle his pencil so that it appeared to bend as if made of rubber. Regardless of how the boys learned the trick, neither looked away from this rigid pencil magically and inexplicably bending up and down right in front of their eyes. The boys only stopped staring at the illusion when Ms. Hesse instructed the students to get out their textbooks and to turn to the chapter on our solar system.

From a more scientific point of view, this is what those boys “demonstrated” as they performed Rubber Pencil that day: When humans observe a rigid rod undergoing simultaneous translational and rotational motion in an arc of approximately 110° and at a frequency of approximately 2.5–3 cycles-per-second, humans perceive that rod to be elastic as if made of rubber. The first experimental study of Rubber Pencil was not published until 1983, by James Pomerantz. Pomerantz, who clearly understood the folkloric nature of the activity, begins his article with a reference to the tradition’s popularity: “The ‘rubber pencil illusion’ . . . is a striking visual phenomenon that has gone unnoted in the scientific literature on human visual perception, despite its familiarity to many laypeople” (1893, 365).¹ In Pomerantz’s analysis, the Rubber Pencil illusion occurs due to the nature of the afterimages that appear during a human’s visual perception of moving objects. The densest afterimages occur in the middle area of the pencil, and the least dense afterimages occur at the pencil’s ends. These varying densities produce a unified perception of bending.

Pomerantz does not tell us about how he first came to discover the Rubber Pencil illusion, so we are left to guess whether or not some childhood friend demonstrated the activity to a younger version of the scientist. He does add, though, that stage magicians, who have long performed the trick, do not seem to understand the “scientific” principles behind the illusion. The scientist quotes George Gilbert and Wendy Rydell—authors of Great Tricks of the Master Magicians (1976)—who describe the Rubber Pencil illusion in this fashion: “There’s no trick involved here; it just works that way” (131).

Like stage magicians, Ms. Hesse’s students could not supply a mathematical understanding of translational and rotational arc degrees or cycles per second attendant to a successful performance of Rubber Pencil, but Ms. Hesse’s students’ successful performances do raise the following question: What does the child performing Rubber Pencil know about the involved illusory perceptions? We have to admit that Ms. Hesse’s student successfully performed the required “translational” and “rotational” movements at proper intervals. We have to admit the boy successfully turned his rigid No. 2 pencil into an illusory, rubbery substance. His actions and his engaged classmate’s wonderment serve as proof.

Fig. 1.1. Five-year-old Calvin attempts to perform Rubber Pencil.

Scientific experimentation and mathematical description aside, Ms. Hesse’s childish philosophers examined eternal questions about reality as they performed the Rubber Pencil illusion. Experimental evidence suggests that infants as young as one or two months can recognize the difference between rigid and malleable objects, and there’s no doubt that Ms. Hesse’s eighth graders possessed a well-developed understanding of rigidity.² Most children who perform Rubber Pencil probably understand a good deal about the reality of the situation (i.e., the fact that the pencil is not turning from wood to rubber to wood). In 2014, we played Rubber Pencil with a group of seven-year-olds at a summertime day care in Bloomington, Indiana. As the children performed the trick, one seven-year-old yelled out, “It’s an optical illusion!” More than questioning the reality of the pencil, the Rubber Pencil illusion prompts introspective questions about the nature of the self. Seeing—in this case—is not believing; visual perception—like rubber—is malleable. The Rubber Pencil illusion is a lesson as much as it is play.³

As a cultural tradition passed along via word of mouth from child to child for generation after generation, the Rubber Pencil illusion is also folklore. The illusion saturates the communal understanding of visual perception for any group in which it is performed. When a child shows another child Rubber Pencil, the children do more than recognize an illusory tendency in their embodied perception: They recognize that the illusions can be produced for each other. They recognize that the experience can be intersubjective, that sharing the illusion can be fun. When the illusion is shown to someone new, the children play with the fact of knowing something about the new performer’s bodily perceptions that were up until that point completely unknown to that individual. The outsider to the trick turns insider before the look of astonishment disappears from her face. Spreading the word, knowledge begets play begets knowledge begets play.

Folk Illusions

The goal of this book is to identify and examine the shared aspects of embodied perception that children, adolescents, and occasionally adults communicate as they play with perception’s illusory qualities. It turns out that most people with whom we have worked know and have performed several activities like Rubber Pencil. Taken together, this group of activities constitutes a genre of folklore we have named folk illusions. We define folk illusions as traditionalized verbal and/or kinesthetic actions performed in order to effect an intended perceptual illusion for one or more participants.

Folk illusions present an excellent opportunity for the situated, socially contextualized study of perception during the marked years of social maturation and physical development, and while our methods are largely folkloristic, our search for the ways that culture affects the human body and embodied experience remains inherently interdisciplinary. A full understanding of folk illusions requires two generally separate kinds of data sets: folkloristic methods for gathering cultural traditions in the field and experimental methods for identifying and highlighting particular embodied processes (or systems of processes) attendant to any given intended illusion. Our work is folkloristic, but we could not have come to our understanding of folk illusions without taking seriously the controlled data sets that follow more traditional scientific experimentation alongside the data sets that can only be identified out in the real world—outside the confines of the lab.

We have spent eight years employing folkloristic techniques for observing performances and gathering remembrances of types of play that create a perceptual illusion for one or more participants. We have worked with college students, middle schools, Boy Scout troops, and preschools. We have organized fieldwork observations with groups as small as four children, and we have surveyed college courses with as many as three hundred late-teenage, early-adult students. We have found that many people can provide an example of a form of play that creates a perceptual illusion. Most of our work has taken place in two geographical areas of the United States: the Acadiana region of Louisiana and the hills of southern Indiana. Because we often work with university students, we have been able to gather some remembrances of folk illusions from twenty-one states and from nine countries on four continents. One ancillary goal of this book is to promote more fieldwork of folk illusions by scholars working in other languages and cultures.

Why Folklore? Why Illusions?

In folklore and illusions, our work brings together two long-standing subjects of philosophical, scholarly interest. Professional folklorists cite the birth of their discipline in the works of nineteenth-century German philosophers and cultural linguists like Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and the well-known brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), and, of course, the systematic analysis of illusory perception permeates several philosophical traditions from antiquity to the present. At this point, however, we are not aware of any other folkloristic research program focusing on perceptual illusions, and while it is true that psychologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and others have worked at the intersection of perceptual illusions and culture—especially on the problems of cultural influence—we know of no works in those disciplines that focus on perceptual illusions in the context of situated cultural traditions, in the context of folklore.

Along with the older subjects of folklore and illusions, our project also grows out of a relatively recent surge of scholarly attention to questions of embodiment. Indeed, much discussion about what it means to be human has turned toward discussions of human embodiment. In general, the term embodiment signifies the physical manifestation of an entity or an essence in a discrete material form, and in the context of humanness, embodiment can loosely be understood as the manifestation of everything that it is to be a human within the boundaries of the material makeup and (inter)actions of that human body.⁴

At this point, the diversity of disciplines dealing with questions of embodiment has given rise to an equally diverse and impressively large literature on the subject. In recent decades, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists have attempted to isolate myriad mental processes of brain and body (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2005). Linguists—who have long studied the physiological processes of phonetics and audition—have set out to ground pragmatics, semantics, and even grammar in the body and the body’s interaction with the physical world (Goodwin 2000; Johnson [1987] 1990; Bergen and Chang 2005). Using theories of embodiment as a governing paradigm for theoretical analysis, anthropologists have started dissecting cross-culturally realized aspects of human life, such as religion, medicine, and food (Csordas 1990, 1994a, 1994b; Mol 2008; Sutton 2001). Clinicians are reconsidering psychological pathologies like anorexia, phantom limbs, and apraxia as psychophysical symptoms of mismatched body maps and body schemas (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1999; Maclachlan 2004). Folklorists have coined the term bodylore in reference to the study of the ways that cultural traditions act upon, alongside, and within the body (Young 1993; Sklar 1994, 2005).

One theme that runs consistently through cross-disciplinary studies of embodiment is the resounding call for a much-needed correction of older dualist, mind-body paradigms associated with philosophers like Plato and Descartes. Drawing especially from the philosophy of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, many of these studies argue instead for viewing the body as inexorably bound to the most abstract and ethereal aspects of the mind. Psychologist Raymond Gibbs describes embodiment’s place in contemporary sciences of mind as a necessary, ultimate ground: “People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical, cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action” (2005, 9). This is the first, and most important, way that theories of embodiment beneficially coincide with contemporary folkloristics’ methodological and theoretical leanings, for the best twentieth-century performance theories in folkloristics and other social sciences moved away from Cartesian dualism as much as they moved away from nineteenth-century textualism. Beginning with the premise that human minds are embodied, we deny—once and for all—abstractions that do not consider the subjective (and intersubjective), phenomenological experience of the folk during a performance. We deny the notion that folklore exists extracorporeally, like so many diffused Grimms’ tales hopping along from place to place on legs of their own. We ground performance in its attendant corporeal processes.

As a genre, folk illusions compel us to make central the phenomenological character of traditional performances that induce illusory percepts. Our work catalogs a number of folkloric traditions that have not been previously cataloged. For folklorists, to whom cultural diversity is certainly just as important as biological universals, the expansion of our catalogs remains an imperative descriptive task in and of itself. As of the time of this writing, we have identified seventy discrete folk illusions and another thirty or so variants. You can find our catalog of these folk illusions in the appendix at the back of this book. (It may be helpful to examine—even briefly—our catalog as a way of a...