A Hole in the Head Read online

  There are a virtually infinite variety of preventives against the evil eye: spitting, gestures, charms, incantations, and amulets that vary from community to community. Some appear to be very old, such as making the sexual gesture, “fig” or “fico,” by putting the thumb between the first and second finger, which is reported to be of Roman origin and is still common in older Italian and Jewish communities in New York. Again among older, more traditional people in this country, when a child or valued object is praised, the praise is often coupled with such phrases as “God bless it” among Irish and Italians and “keinahora” (no evil eye) among Jews.20 (See figures 3.3 and 3.4.)

  Figure 3.3

  Drawings of evil eyes. Illumination accompanying a prayer against the evil eye on an Ethiopic scroll in the collection of Princeton University (Isaac, 1980). From The Princeton Collection of Ethiopic Manuscripts, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

  Figure 3.4

  Amulet against the evil eye (Courtesy E. Isaac). The Hebrew inscription exhorts the evil eye to keep away. Sometimes a representation of an eye is found instead of a central text. Among Jews this configuration is known as a hamesh hand or hand of Miriam, and among Arabs as a hamsa hand or hand of Fatima. It is found both in this bilaterally symmetric form and in a more realistic one with only one thumb. Similar amulets and wall plaques are readily found in the Middle East and in “New Age” shops around the world.

  There have been a number of different interpretations of the resiliency and power of the superstition of the evil eye, ranging from the psychoanalytic to comparison with gaze aversion in primates.21 What is clear is that the evil eye is the most widespread example of belief in something coming out of the eye, a very powerful extramission belief indeed.

  Love Beams

  My lady carries love within her eyes;

  All that she looks on is made pleasanter,

  Whatever her sweet eyes are turned upon,

  Spirits of love do issue thence in flames

  In such eyes as hers are

  One surely stands whose glance can murder men

  For me, out of her eyes comes the sweet light

  That makes me heedless of each other lady;

  These quotations from four poems of Dante Alighieri are in a tradition of love poetry extending from the classical poets through Arabic poetry to the Renaissance and beyond.22 In this tradition the eyes of the Lady shoot arrows, darts, or fiery beams to induce love in the beholder, a tradition that has been termed the “the aggressive eye topos.”23 This theme seems to derive from Plato, as in the passage about his extramission theory of vision quoted above from the Timaeus and in his discussion of love in the Phaedrus.

  There often seems to be a close affinity between the evil eye and the love arrows that the eye sends in the poetry of courtly love.24 Indeed the third of the above quotes from Dante may be an example of this. On the other hand the eye beams in Donne’s The Extasie seem more innocent and mutual than deadly or envious:

  Our eye-beams twisted and did thred

  Our eyes, upon one double string;25

  Other quotes illustrating beams of love issuing from the eye are given in box 3.2.

  Extramission among Schoolchildren and College Students

  Piaget observed that children seem to think that seeing involves something coming out of the eye and even noted the similarity of this view to pre-Socratic extramission theory.26 Inspired by Piaget’s observation, Gerald Winer and Jane Cottrell carried out an extensive and systematic examination of the views of children and adults about the nature of vision and particularly whether it involves something going out of the eye or something entering the eye.27

  When they asked whether something goes out of the eyes in the process of seeing, 57% of elementary school children and 33% of college students said yes. When asked to choose among “in,” “out,” or “both” as answers, 75% to 80% of the children and 24% to 33% of the college students gave one of the two extramission answers (“out” or “both”). Furthermore, among those who choose extramission about 90% of the schoolchildren and 77% of the college students thought the eye’s output aided vision and 59% to 63% thought it was necessary. Winer and Cottrell found essentially the same level of belief of extramission under a great variety of different conditions and ways of asking the question, for example whether the questions or answers were verbal or pictorial, oral or written, and whether they were about luminous or nonluminous objects.28

  Winer and Cottrell found that from the third to the eighth grade, the belief in extramission tended to decline and the belief in intromission tended to increase, a change that was more pronounced in the college students. However, the incidence of college students believing in extramission was little changed “as a function of having received lessons, reading and tests on perception in introductory psychology classes” or “having received readings on visual perception, immediately prior to [the] tests.”29

  There has been considerable research on “naive physics” indicating that children and adults often have erroneous beliefs about such things as trajectories of falling objects.30 However, there is little in ordinary experience that would contradict these “naive” or “intuitive” views nor are the correct views normally taught in elementary school. By contrast, antiextramission experience such as the discomfort from looking at a bright light is common, and the elements of vision such as the inversion of the image on the retina are repeatedly taught in school. As Winer and colleagues put it after more than twenty studies on the subject, “the source and apparent strength of extramission beliefs in children and adults is somewhat of a mystery.”31

  Box 3.2

  Love and Extramission

  The flaming rays of your lightning-like eye,

  Instantaneously pierce my heart

  —Olivier de Magny (Donaldson-Evans, 1980)

  For your eyes, lady, caught and held me fast

  —Francesco Petrarca (Lind, 1954)

  The sparkling Glance that shoots Desire,

  Drench’d in these waves, does lose its fire.

  —Andrew Marvell (Gardner, 1957)

  What joyes shall seize thy soul, when she

  Bending her blessed eyes on thee

  (Those second smiles of Heav’n) shall dart

  Her mild rayes through thy melting Heart

  —Richard Crashaw (Gardner, 1957)

  Love-darting eyes . . .

  —John Milton (Bartlett, 1956)

  Then flash’d the living lightning from her eyes,

  And screams of horror rend th’ affrighted skies.

  —Alexander Pope (Bartlett, 1956)

  If beams from happy human eyes

  Have moved me not;

  —Robert Lewis Stevenson (Bartlett, 1956)

  Lesbia hath a beaming eye

  But no one knows for whom it beameth.

  —Thomas Moore (Oxford Dictionary)

  Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went

  Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent

  —Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oxford Dictionary)

  A lover’s eye will gaze an eagle blind

  —William Shakespeare (Oxford Dictionary)

  The Feeling of Being Stared At

  In 1898 the distinguished professor of psychology E. B. Titchener wrote in Science:

  Every year I find a certain proportion of students, in my junior classes, who are firmly persuaded that they can “feel” that they are being stared at from behind, and that a smaller proportion believe that they have the power of making a person seated in front of them turn around and look them in the face.32

  After much discussion of this feeling (after all, he was the great champion of Introspection psychology) Titchener concluded

  I have tested . . . the “feeling of being stared at,” at various times, in a series of laboratory experiments conducted with persons who declared themselves either peculiarly susceptible to the stare or peculiarly capable of “making people turn around.”
As regards such capacity, the experiments have invariably given a negative result.33

  A later study followed this up and found that 68% to 86% of the students in a college class claimed to have the feeling of being stared at.34 Since this “feeling of being stared at” implied some sort of belief in something coming out of the eye, that is, an extramission view, Cottrell and Winer included questions about staring in some of their studies of extramission described above.

  Confirming the earlier studies, they found that 93% of college students said they could “feel the stare of other people.”35 Surprisingly, the proportion giving this answer went up with grade level, so that the percentages for the first, third, and fifth grades were 68%, 75%, and 80% respectively. This belief in feeling stares was clearly different from some kind of belief in extrasensory perception since “thinking about a person was not necessary to having one’s gaze felt by another.”

  The finding that the ontogenetic trend for belief in the ability to feel stares was opposite to that for the belief that there are emissions from the eyes implies that the two extramission beliefs are somewhat different. Apparently, the belief in the efficacy of staring is more developmentally advanced than the belief that vision involves something leaving the eye.

  COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

  There are several cases of striking similarities between the beliefs of children and naive adults and the theories held by premodern scientists. One example concerns motion. Naive or intuitive ideas about the motion of inanimate objects (such as the path of an object dropped by a moving person or of an object emerging from a curved tube) very closely resemble the “impetus” theory held by fourteenth-century Aristotelians.36 Another example is the relationship between heat and temperature. Very similar ideas about the identity of heat and temperature are held by naive moderns as were held by a group of seventeenth-century Italian scientists forming the Accademia del Cimento and known as “the Experimenters.”37

  Is the belief in extramission among children and many naive adults another parallel between the ontogenesis of cognition and the history of science? Certainly there are similarities between Greek extramission theory and naive beliefs about vision. However, the parallels between the stages of ontogenetic development and historical development of visual science may be somewhat less compelling than for motion and heat. Before Alhazen, intromission theories, however incorrect, were held over the same time period as were extramission theories. Furthermore, at least one type of extra-mission theory, that of belief in the detectability and efficacy of staring, increases rather than decreases with general cognitive development.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The decade since this article was written has been a good one for Ibn al-Haytham (known in the West as Alhazen). The first three books (“On direct vision”) of his pioneering Kitab al-Manazir or Optics were finally translated into English with commentary.38 A version of this work had been available as a Latin manuscript by the end of the twelfth century, and was printed in 1572 as De Aspectibus. The first five books (of seven) of the Latin translation were recently translated into English, making the most important book on optics and visual science until the seventeenth century now readily available with detailed glosses.39 Ibn al-Haytham was given a glowing portrait in Science, which stressed his work in mathematics as well as optics.40 A hagiographic account on Wikipedia claims he was “the originator of experimental science and experimental physics,” and the “founder of experimental psychology.” The article ranks Optics with Newton’s Principia.41 Ibn al-Haytham has craters on the moon named after him, and his portrait is on the current Iraqi ten-thousand-dinar note (figure 3.5) and in a New Yorker cartoon of that note.

  Ibn al-Haytham and David Hockney

  Ibn al-Haytham has become involved in a major controversy about the development of realistic painting in Europe. The contretemps began when the British (and California) painter David Hockney suggested that the sudden arrival of photorealistic painting in Europe around 1420 (as in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding and Cardinal Albergati) was due to the use of optical devices. The physicist Charles Falco came to his support and suggested that a concave mirror and later a convex lens had been the optical aids used. Falco further suggested that the use of these optical instruments came from Alhazen’s De Aspectibus.42

  Figure 3.5

  An Iraqi ten-thousand-dinar note showing Alhazen. The diagram is from Alhazen’s copy of an Arabic translation of the Greek mathematician Apollonius’s Conics. Apparently, Alhazen earned his living by copying translations of Greek mathematics books (Sabra, 1983).

  However, the consensus of historians of science, historians of art, and optical scientists is that the material and textual evidence and the detailed examination of the relevant paintings do not support the Hockney-Falco thesis.43 Furthermore, A. M. Smith, Alhazen’s primary student today, insists that there is nothing in Alhazen or the Pespectivist tradition that he founded that indicates any understanding of the use of mirrors or lenses to project images.44 Alhazen did build and experiment with a camera obscura (pinhole camera), and he and his Pespectivist followers were very much interested in what it revealed about the properties of light (as was Leonardo). However, it would be of no use in painting until a convex lens was put in the aperture and there is no evidence for that before 1550.45 In any case, there is no question that artists used optical projection devices as aids to their painting later, from the middle of the seventeenth century, such as Vermeer (1632– 1675) and Vanvitelli (1652–1736).46 There does seem to have been a lack of interest by art historians in the use of optical and mechanical aids in painting, but this may be reduced by Hockney’s provocative idea even if his specific proposal does not appear to be supported by the evidence.

  Undergraduates and Extramission

  Winer and Cottrell have continued and expanded their extraordinary demonstration that children, undergraduates, and adults believe, as did Alcmaeon and Plato, that vision involves something coming out of the eye. They showed that this extramission view persists among undergraduates even directly after reading and classroom instruction about vision. In fact, explicit instruction with diagrams and arrows that vision involves intromission and not extramission had only a transient effect.47 They speculate that the strength of extramission views may be related to the “outer-orientated” quality of seeing.

  NOTES

  This article, which first appeared in The Neuroscientist (5: 58–64 [1999], “The Fire that Comes from the Eye”) started as a review of Greek visual theory, but then Muslim optics, the evil eye, and undergraduate intuitions were added. The postscript extends the subject to a current controversy about early Dutch painting.

  1. Gross, 1998a.

  2. Theophrastus, 1917.

  3. Gross, 1998a.

  4. Plato, 1959.

  5. Cohen and Drabkin, 1958.

  6. Lindberg, 1976.

  7. Theophrastus, 1917; Lindberg, 1976.

  8. Lindberg, 1976.

  9. Lindberg, 1976.

  10. Lindberg, 1976.

  11. Lindberg, 1976.

  12. Lindberg, 1992.

  13. Lindberg, 1976.

  14. Gross, 1981.

  15. Lindberg, 1976, 1992.

  16. Lindberg, 1976.

  17. The quotations in this subsection are taken from Grusser and Hagner, 1990.

  18. All the evil-eye quotes are from Dundes, 1981.

  19. Dundes, 1981.

  20. Dundes, 1981; Gifford, 1958. The other day my young Princeton dentist said “keinahora” to me, explaining that it was his Jewish mother’s expression against bad luck.

  21. Dundes, 1981.

  22. Lind, 1954; Cline, 1972; Donaldson-Evans, 1980.

  23. Donaldson-Evans, 1980.

  24. Cline, 1972; Spence, 1996.

  25. Gardner, 1957.

  26. Piaget, 1979.

  27. Cottrell and Winer, 1994; Winer and Cottrell, 1996; Winer et al., 1996a; Winer et al., 1996b.

  28. Cottrell and
Winer, 1994; Winer and Cottrell, 1996; Winer et al., 1996a, Winer et al., 1996b.

  29. Cottrell and Winer, 1994; Winer and Cottrell, 1996; Winer et al., 1996a; Winer et al., 1996b; Winer and Cottrell, 2004.

  30. E.g., McCloskey and Kargon, 1988.

  31. Winer et al., 1996a.

  32. Titchener, 1898.

  33. Titchener, 1898.

  34. Coover, 1913.

  35. Cottrell, Winer, and Smith, 1996.

  36. McCloskey and Kargon, 1988.

  37. Wiser and Carey, 1983.

  38. Alhazen, 1989.

  39. Alhazen, 2001, 2006. The sources for the translation from the Arabic and for the Latin translation and the relationships between the two are discussed in Alhazen, 1989.

  40. Rashed, 2002.

  41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn al-Haytham, accessed February 28, 2007.

  42. Hockney, 2001; For citations to a series of joint papers by Hockney and Falco as well as Falco’s recent reply to his critics, see Falco, 2007a. Ibn al-Haytham’s contribution is proposed in Falco 2007b.

  43. A Web site presenting many sides of the debate on the Hockney-Falco thesis on the use of optical imagery in early Renaissance painting is http://webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/post/intro.html, accessed February 19, 2008, which includes essays by Hockney and Falco, their chief critic David Stork, and many others. Stork’s more recent arguments are Stork and Duarte, 2007, and papers cited therein. The evaluations of historians of science, which are largely negative on the Hockney-Falco thesis and are not well represented on this Web site, may be found in a special issue of the journal Early Science and Medicine (Dupré, 2005).

  44. Smith, 2005. Smith spent many years translating and explaining De Aspectibus.

  45. Kemp, 1990.