Folk Illusions

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.

1. This book explores the ways kids use traditional illusions, such as the rubber pencil illusion created by wiggling a horizontal pencil up and down in front of one's face, in their play.

2. This is ground-breaking work that brings together folklore methods of studying children's traditional games with neuroscience and psychology.

3. Contains a catalog of all 65 discrete forms of folk illusions, including many that have not been previously identified, giving researchers rich ground for better understanding brain development and perception in childhood.