The Science of Illusions

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 344 pages
• Published by: Cornell University Press April 19, 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0801437709
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0801437700
• Book Dimensions: 7.9 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
What is illusion? In his thoroughly fun book The Science of Illusions (trans. from the French by Franklin Philip), Jacques Ninio (Molecular Approaches to Evolution), senior research scientist at Paris's Centre National des Recherches Scientifiques, teases his readers with the following possibilities: "The illusion of always being right"; "The sound of the ocean in seashells"; "The brilliant spray of fireworks, after the explosion, goes out in all directions. But all the bursts seem to stream back toward us." This animated work about our fascination with illusions from the age of Euclid to today is filled with witty and accessible explanations accompanied by more than 100 mind-boggling visuals that will keep readers turning the book upside down and sideways again and again.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Reader Reviews
Optical illusions are profound; they indicate that at the most basic level, seeing can lead to believing in things that are not true. Even more deeply and disturbingly, they show that we don't respond to or make judgements on an objective reality "out there," but only upon how our particular neurons process information. From France, _The Science of Illusions_ (Cornell University Press) by Jacques Ninio (translated by Franklin Philip) collects lots of visual illusions, describes auditory and tactile ones, and attempts to make sense of what it all means. There is not deep science in this book, and that is of necessity. You may remember the optical illusion of two parallel lines that are actually the same length, but because of something added to them, one looks definitely longer and one is definitely shorter. There are different reasons that have been proposed for this illusion, most of them complicated, some of them no longer tenable, several far-fetched but as yet unrefuted. It is probably better for us laymen to wonder at the puzzling pictures and let the neuroscientists sort out all the circuitry, and when they get it all down, they can get back to us. Ninio has indeed covered many sorts of illusions, including magic, but also such things we now take for granted as movies. It used to be that people shown a movie of a train coming at them would scurry out of its way, but we have seen enough movies by now to know that illusion for what it is. Ninio has concentrated on visual illusions because, of course, they can best be shown in a book. But also, as he points out, visual input is supreme, trusted more than other senses. People shown a film of someone saying "ga-ga" while the soundtrack says "ba-ba" will wind up hearing a hybrid "da-da" with their eyes open and "ba-ba" with their eyes closed. Everyone has had the experience of sitting in the old-style movie theater with one speaker behind the screen, and finding that the sound seemed to come from the location on the screen of whatever person or thing was shown making it. A ventriloquist, of course, easily makes visual cues of origin overcome auditory ones. The optical illusions here represent some of the old classics, as well as new ones, because new ones are being invented all the time. One of them was so strong that I believed there was a misprint when an explanation claimed that two parallelograms were the same size, so that I had to measure them, and even after that, I had to copy the page and cut the parallelograms out and compare them that way; they still do not look nearly equal. Other illusions here present obvious but invisible white shapes, or scintillating black spots that are not there, or even circuits that seem to have matter flowing around and around their printed images. This book is a wonderful funhouse.