[HN Gopher] Higashiyama Atsuki and the "between-legs effect"
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Higashiyama Atsuki and the "between-legs effect"
Author : patrickscoleman
Score : 314 points
Date : 2023-08-24 23:55 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nippon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nippon.com)
| jwestbury wrote:
| Struggling a bit to find the quote, but in Ken Burns' National
| Parks documentary, it mentions that John Muir used to bend over
| and look at things between his legs in order to see "the upness"
| of the world.
|
| Interesting to see that there's research showing a real effect
| from this!
| [deleted]
| aszantu wrote:
| recently learned about postural restauration. seemingly the teeth
| and the hip-flexors are connected via the vestibular system.
| Which means, you can do all the excercises, chirpractics, yoga
| and so on, and still suffer back pain, because the hips don't
| relax.
|
| The demonstration was: molars and canines have to have contact,
| if they don't the vestibular system is out of tilt, put a piece
| of plastic between them, hip flexors relax, hips get their
| mobility back, back pain goes away.
|
| Tried it... worked!
|
| edit:linebreak
| jmholla wrote:
| I'm a little confused by your phrasing:
|
| > The demonstration was: molars and canines have to have
| contact, if they don't the vestibular system is out of tilt,
| put a piece of plastic between them, hip flexors relax, hips
| get their mobility back, back pain goes away.
|
| Does that mean if they aren't touching, your hip flexors relax?
| Or the piece of plastic makes your molars and canines touch
| which causes your hip flexors to relax?
| aszantu wrote:
| When molars and canines touch, the hip flexors can relax.
|
| When you lost a tooth or had a correction in your youth, they
| might not fit correctly.
| shot_codes wrote:
| Very interesting. Do you by any chance have some supporting
| resources that you would be willing to share?
| aszantu wrote:
| just some youtubes and this
| https://www.posturalrestoration.com/
| jxf wrote:
| While the Ig Nobel prizes always have a quirky bent to them, I'm
| glad that they have a focus on this kind of basic science
| research. Sometimes understanding the simple things more deeply
| makes all the difference.
| nadermx wrote:
| Ah, the award made by the a former editor-in-chief of the Journal
| of Irreproducible Results and organized by the scientific humor
| magazine; Their moto is cool, makes you laugh then makes you
| think.
| emtel wrote:
| I was lucky to attend the ignobel award ceremony the year that
| the peace prize was awarded to the creator of the Stalin World
| amusement park. This was also roughly the same time period that
| the annals of improbable research founded the Luxuriant Flowing
| Hair Club for Scientists.
|
| I'm sad that these important awards have never gained wider
| recognition, but perhaps they are too far ahead of their time.
| drtgh wrote:
| IMHO, given the head is upside down, the ciliary muscle of the
| eye is having more difficulties for to freely adjust the
| crystalline lens due the blood pressure increment.
|
| So I think the effect described in the article sounds more like a
| lack of strength, or a strength adapted to lower pressure
| conditions, while adjusting the lenses.
|
| has this been checked?
| pharrington wrote:
| You will _never_ convince me that this article 's nothing more
| than an elaborate prank by an old dude to get someone to take an
| _absolutely sick_ ass pic.
|
| [Higashiyama demonstrating between-the-legs viewing]
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Is there something wrong with me or my brain? I looked through my
| legs in my living room and the distances and colors seemed the
| same as right side up.
| cstrat wrote:
| I would think the rush of blood to your head and eyes plays
| part in this phenomenon (if it really is a thing...)
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Worked for me. Couldn't it be something about the framing of
| the legs leading to a different processing of perspective?
| john2x wrote:
| When I was learning to draw, one technique to help spot
| errors is to flip the drawing upside down. This made
| misaligned features, bad proportions, weird perspective
| issues immediately jump out.
|
| Maybe it's the same effect.
| numpad0 wrote:
| You can do left to right for jpegs too. It's astonishing it
| works.
| SamBam wrote:
| Art teachers also have people copy existing art upside
| down, or turn their still life upside down (if possible).
| By trying to reproduce something upside down, your brain
| doesn't do as much pre-processing and chunking into
| preconceived shapes, and you're forced to actually look at
| the shape of the thing.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| It sounds like the 'prism-goggles' from the article's
| experiment control for the effect of just looking at it
| upside down. Clearly what's needed is to hang some students
| by their feet and send some others to space to see if it's
| the inner-ear effects or the posture that changes your
| perception :P
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Also potentially the increased cranial pressure changing the
| size of the eyeball?
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| I think you need to try outside so the distances are greater.
|
| Or it's all a practical joke and you have to do it outside so
| people will laugh.
| derekp7 wrote:
| There is most likely something to this. A dramatic example
| I've seen is where you take a picture of a head, and invert
| the mouth and view the picture upside down (so the head is
| pointing down, but the mouth is still right side up). It
| looks slightly off, but no more than any other picture that
| has been altered.
|
| Now flip the picture back around right side up (mouth upside
| down) and if you aren't expecting it then it will quite
| likely make you jump back in horror. It actually hits some
| deeply rooted part of our primitive brain that just messes
| you up. (I just looked this up again, it is the Thatcher
| effect, and to me it is more frightening when the face is
| smiling).
| kaftan-permans wrote:
| Here's a demonstration with some more info:
|
| https://michaelbach.de/ot/fcs-thompsonThatcher/
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of the copypasta that's says the "uncanny
| valley" indicates that in some time during our evolution we
| had good reason to identify something that looked human
| _but wasn't_.
| Sharlin wrote:
| See also the "vampires" in Peter Watt's excellent
| _Blindsight_. In fact I thought the novel did refer to
| uncanny valley but apparently it doesn 't, at least not
| with those exact words.
| [deleted]
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| It works to resolve why the moon seems huge when it's near the
| ground but small up by itself.
|
| Error of perception, not changing size of the moon obviously.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| > That is, the vertical measurement appeared longer than it is in
| reality. But when I had them view it while lying on their side,
| some of them reported that the vertical and the horizontal
| lengths looked the same. In other words, we discovered that when
| lying on one's side, the horizontal-vertical vertical illusion
| does not occur
|
| Anyone with a vertical monitor can tell you that :)
| dbtc wrote:
| Every time I rotate mine to vertical it becomes GIGANTIC
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I had heard of using this technique to show that the moon
| appearing larger on the horizon is just an optical illusion. If
| you look at it through your legs, it appears much smaller.
|
| Also heard lying on your back and looking at the moon nearly
| straight up makes it look larger, but it didn't have a noticeable
| effect when I tried it.
| dmbche wrote:
| "The prize he was awarded was a large clock that was equipped
| with a hand that indicated the sixty-first second -- the "leap
| second"--and minute and hour hands that puzzlingly indicated
| seconds. The prize money was $10 trillion, although the unit of
| currency was not US dollars but rather Zimbabwe dollars, which
| had been discontinued at the time he received the prize. In fact,
| the prize money was worth about Y=170."
|
| I love the Ig Nobels
| [deleted]
| planede wrote:
| The prism goggles experiment is interesting, however is the
| effect of perspective ruled out? When looking between the legs
| the eyes are closer to the ground compared to just looking ahead
| while standing up, which could possibly explain why farther away
| objects look smaller.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This stuff seems more important than the prize indicates. It
| points to the physical body being as important as the mind's
| internal state when it comes to one's sense of self and the world
| around oneself. Also I like this statement:
|
| > "Higashiyama has misgivings about current-day psychology. Many
| studies place importance on overt, conscious actions like seeing
| and listening. And some psychologists conclude that people are of
| one personality type or another based on questionnaires that lack
| evidence, and which are therefore indistinguishable from fortune-
| telling."
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Some of the prizes are for satire, but many Ig Nobel prizes are
| for research that sounds absurd but actually had a valuable
| discovery of some sort. Despite the jokey vibe they do try to
| give attention to things which deserve the attention.
| thedailymail wrote:
| Just a few days ago I was reading "Thinking with demons," an
| excellent history of ideas about witchcraft in Europe, and was
| struck by the following passage about a 16th century drawing of
| three witches by Hans Baldung Grien:
|
| _Informing everything in the scene, and establishing
| iconographically that it is indeed a scene of witchcraft, is the
| gesture of the witch who, bent on one knee, stares backwards at
| the world through her own legs. According to a contemporary
| German proverb those who adopted the pose would be sure to catch
| sight of the devil. This is perhaps the reason why the motif is
| also found among the monsters and devils who populate two widely
| separated versions of that most demonological of picture
| subjects, the temptation of St Anthony--those of Hieronymus Bosch
| (c. 1490s) and Jacques Callot (1635)._
|
| So it was fascinating to learn from this news article that "There
| are also regions of Japan where the folklore says that one can
| see ghosts, the world of spirits and demons, or the future by
| looking upside down through one's legs."
| tome wrote:
| This seems to be the drawing in question
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witches_%28Hans_Baldung%29
|
| But where is the witch described in the passage? I don't see
| anything like it.
| Obsnold wrote:
| I think it's this one:
|
| https://www.mediastorehouse.co.uk/fine-art-
| finder/artists/un...
| tome wrote:
| Ah yes, obviously that one, thanks!
|
| Black marks for Google and Kagi, both of which found "The
| Witches" instead of "Three Witches".
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is oddly modern looking for being 500 years old.
| deathlight wrote:
| How about these
| https://egyptiangeographic.com/en/news/show/333
| nerdponx wrote:
| These are even cooler. The paintings don't necessarily
| "modern" as much as the _people in the paintings_ look
| modern.
|
| I've never seen something so old that was so effective at
| bringing people to life in a way that I could relate to
| so immediately.
|
| They must have been tremendously effective in their
| original function as funerary portraits. I was lucky
| enough to see several of these at the Metropolitan Museum
| of Art in New York, and I stood there looking at them for
| a very long time.
| runesofdoom wrote:
| I have read (though I can't cite a source at the moment)
| that what is sometimes taken as limits on
| talent/skill/material limits on medieval art was more
| often a stylistic _choice_.
| belter wrote:
| A less enigmatic explanation, for other citizens who do it a
| lot, mostly when they more than 14 months old:
| https://adailydoseofmom.com/baby-bending-over-looking-throug...
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > The horizontal-vertical illusion is a phenomenon in which the
| vertical line appears longer when a horizontal line and a
| vertical line of the same length are drawn. For example, it has
| been shown that when a building that is in fact 10 meters both
| along its frontage and in height is viewed, it seems to the
| viewer that the height is 1.4 times the width, making the
| building look 14 meters tall.
|
| The first sentence is manifestly false. If you take the example
| image in the article and rotate it 90 degrees, so that the red
| line is horizontal and the black line is vertical, then it's
| still the red line that looks longer (admittedly I find the
| effect is a bit weaker). What's really going on is that the
| impact of black line's length is reduced by having something
| halfway along it, while the red line is unbroken.
|
| Either the image represents a different illusion or (and I guess
| this is really it) it's not that vertical lines _necessarily_
| look longer, it 's just that, in practice, they're more likely to
| be unbroken (like the red line) while horizontal lines are more
| likely to have other things visually impacting their apparent
| length.
| belter wrote:
| You rotate the image but maintain the black line halfway and
| not centered? How is that a falsifying example of the first
| phrase?
|
| "Is the Horizontal-Vertical Illusion Mainly a By-Product of
| Petter's Rule?" - https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/1/6
| Supermancho wrote:
| As I understand it, rotating the image is not the same as
| inverting your head via bending. The issue is purely
| biological, if it exists at all.
| koromak wrote:
| The experiment with the 10m square building shouldn't have this
| problem, if it holds true.
| [deleted]
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| It seems like professor Higashiyama is really conducting research
| in perception, not so much psychology, as it is understood
| popularly. He also seems skeptical of what is commonly er
| perceived as psychological research- and I share his skepticism.
| FTA:
|
| >> Many studies place importance on overt, conscious actions like
| seeing and listening. And some psychologists conclude that people
| are of one personality type or another based on questionnaires
| that lack evidence, and which are therefore indistinguishable
| from fortune-telling.
|
| >> "So, people have biases in their understanding," explains
| Higashiyama. "The same importance as placed on sight and hearing
| has to be placed on physical information as well, and conclusions
| must be based on evidence. Researchers need to be aware of the
| fact that the field of psychology runs the risk of changing
| people's lives."
| user_named wrote:
| That's a very verbose akshually you have there
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Scepticism is great, but that's perhaps not how I would
| describe praising a quote from an Ig Nobel prize winner that
| discards the entire field of personality psychology just
| because it happens to align with what you already believe.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| To clarify, I'm skeptical of the same thing he expresses
| skepticism about, not of his skepticism.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| The perception article in Wikipedia[1] is part of the
| psychology series.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
| jmpeax wrote:
| What is the significance of "Ig"?
| slater wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=ignoble
| [deleted]
| fulltimeloser wrote:
| When I see Ig it reminds me of grade we had in school LG, "lite
| godt" (that would translate to a grade D I think). Ig looks
| like LG written in small caps.
| joker_minmax wrote:
| "Ignoble" means that something is not noble, so they're just
| parodying the name of the Nobel prize with a play-on-words
| (edited for clarification.)
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| From Latin, meaning the lack of something.
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| Made me dream up the (it turns out) false etymology of
| "ignite" deriving from ig-, lack of, and nite, nonstandard
| spelling variant of night, combining to mean "remove
| darkness."
| yawboakye wrote:
| (for readers wondering where then does ignite come from? it
| comes from _ignire_ , latin which roughly translates to to
| set on fire, _ignis_ being the latin for fire. the verb has
| a derivation similar to how we google, googled)
| mr_toad wrote:
| Well the Romans loved their false etymologies, so it seems
| fitting.
| SamBam wrote:
| Can you explain? I didn't even know Romans thought about
| etymologies.
| mr_toad wrote:
| They put quite a lot of though into it, and so did the
| Greeks. They thought that the origins of words could shed
| light (sometime divine light) on meaning, and they used
| etymology to tell stories and offer moral guidance.
|
| The problem is that many classical (and later) scholars,
| historians and poets were prone to uncritically repeating
| stories without doing any fact checking, or just making
| stuff up to fit the narrative. The same is true for their
| etymologies.
|
| Socrates and Plutarch in particular have reputations for
| their imaginative etymologies.
| vermilingua wrote:
| ignoble /Ig'n@Ubl/ adjective
|
| 1. not honourable in character or purpose.
|
| 2. of humble origin or social status.
|
| It's a play on words, the Ig Nobel prize is the ignoble cousin
| of the Nobel prize.
| [deleted]
| jbandela1 wrote:
| It would be interesting to repeat the study using American
| Football centers.
|
| They spend a significant portion of the game looking back between
| their legs, and in addition need to be able to judge accurately
| to hike the ball so the quarterback gets it correctly, especially
| when he is in the shotgun position.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| I think centers looking between their legs is only true for
| long-snappers hiking the ball to punters and place kickers.
| Otherwise, even for the shotgun, centers are looking ahead.
| keyle wrote:
| Fantastic read! I'm so glad that there is recognition for these
| types of quirky research, rooted in humanism.
|
| I never heard of Ig Nobel Prizes before.
|
| ref. Ig Nobel Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize
|
| ref. Winners list
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners
| mmastrac wrote:
| They've been around since the early days of the internet,
| slightly younger than the Darwin awards.
|
| You're one of today's lucky 10,000. :)
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Just in case, to explain the number: https://xkcd.com/1053/
| nayaketo wrote:
| I also became one among the 10,000 just now.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| Lucky you. Don't miss the Ig Nobel award ceremony
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfzs8ZIPVIA
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| They used to get a lot more attention, even mentioned in a lot
| of main stream media. Not sure why, but I don't recall hearing
| much about them even on "nerd" sites in many years. I just
| occasionally think to look up and see what's won.
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