Courses

We spend our lives trying to get a grasp on "reality", but anyone who has ever seen a rubber pencil, read a Magic-Eye kids book, been tricked by a stage magician's sleight of hand, or watched a blockbuster film in three-dimensions knows that the "unreal" can be just as meaningful (and certainly just as entertaining) as reality. This course considers the very real roles that perceptual illusions have played and continue to play in a range of humanities topics-including philosophy, art, folklore, music, sports, magic, film, and food.

Interdisciplinary at its core, our discussions and coursework will oscillate between scientific and humanistic descriptions of illusory experience. We will introduce a range of perceptual and psychological mechanisms that give rise to illusions across different sense modalities, and we will survey specific illusions situated in a range of particular cultural contexts, including, for examples, the waterfall illusion at Niagara Falls, optico-geometric illusions in Greek architecture, size-weight illusions in children's Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board seances, trompe l'oeil in Renaissance painting, forced-perspective illusions on Reddit, auditory illusions in music, and anti-gravity illusions in Mooresville, Indiana.

At times, students will act as empirical scientists, investigating the psycho-perceptual mechanisms that give to illusions. At other times, students will take on the roles of the philosopher, or folklorist, as they articulate the interplay of illusion and reality in art. Class meetings will involve a variety of student experiences, including traditional lectures, student presentations, group workshops, secondary (and primary) research outings, and special assignments in which students will create and present their very own illusion!

Ultimately, students in this course will work to unpack bedrock humanistic questions-What am I? Who are we? What is reality?-manifest as illusions in culture.

This course is eligible for honors credit through the Hutton Honors College. 

Catalog Information: COLL-S 103  FRESHMAN SEMINAR IN A&H

Instructor:

Brandon Barker

Email:

barkerbr@indiana.edu

Department:

Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Brandon Barker is Assistant Professor of Folklore and Affiliate Faculty in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. While he specializes in American Folklore, especially folklore of the southern states and children's folklore, he publishes and teaches on a variety of topics in folklore and cognitive science, ranging from the phenomenology of Cajun dance and the folk psychology of supernatural legends to children's play with perceptual illusions and the science of animal cognition. He is coauthor of Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception (Indiana University Press, 2019) and coeditor of The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm: An Unlikely Intersection of Folklore and Science (Indiana University Press, 2021).

GenEd Information: Approved for the Arts & Humanities requirement of the IU Bloomington General Education program.