You Can Always Believe Your Eyes…Can’t You?
In 1846, Calvert Richard Jones, a colleague of William Henry Fox Talbot (the inventor of the first practical method to reproduce photographic images), took a picture of five Capuchin monks on a rooftop in Malta. Four monks were standing together; the fifth was behind them and separated. According to the “History of Photo Editing” webpage, “Jones did not like how this fifth monk destroyed the integrity of the scene and painted over the figure on the negative using Indian ink. In a positive print, the place where the fifth monk stood began to look like a white patch of sky.”
Thus, photo manipulation began. So, my question (and Sigmar Polke’s in the featured image) is “no.” As it turns out, the answer is no not only because photographers, artists, and certain nefariduals [nefarious individuals] like to alter images for fun, profit, or the joy of blatant connivadastartudiness [the quality of being a treacherous, conniving coward], but because, among other factors, of something called the McGurk Effect (which I hereby dub the “MGE”).
The MGE
was first described in 1976 in a paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, titled “Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices” in Nature (23 December 1976).[5] This effect was discovered by accident when McGurk and his research assistant, MacDonald, asked a technician to dub a video with a different phoneme from the one spoken while conducting a study on how infants perceive language at different developmental stages. When the video was played back, both researchers heard a third phoneme rather than the one spoken or mouthed in the video.
Wikipedia, “McGurk Effect“
Whaaaa??? Fortunately, I don’t have to break that down because Huffpost contributor Paul Anthony Jones has already done so. Jones writes that “if the information being provided by our eyes and our ears don’t match, then our brain doesn’t quite know what to do. So watching a video of someone saying ‘far’ while hearing audio of them saying ‘bar’ leads to some considerable confusion.” Sometimes, the brain jettisons what it’s hearing and just goes with the visual information. At other times, “the brain mixes the two conflicting streams of information together, thereby convincing itself that what it’s seeing and hearing is, in fact, neither of the things it’s actually seeing or hearing.” In the experiment, the researchers heard “var” instead of “far” or “bar.”
So, given the MGE, I have to alter my original question to “We can always believe what we see and hear…can’t we?” And the answer again is no. In an ad for ordering a made-to-order essay titled “When can we trust our senses to give us the truth?” (yes, that’s really a thing), ArtsColumbia tells us “we make mistakes all the time and so do our senses.” They offer the example of the proverbial magician sawing a subject person in half. It looks real, but we know it’s not real. We know it’s not real because “we back everything up with reasoning and logic.” That statement immediately dredged up the idiom “Who’s we? You got a mouse in your pocket?” Oh, boy. I am (we are) in so much trouble.
(Thanks and a tip of the hat to our friend Jill for giving me the ideark [idea spark] for this blog. “Write something about photography,” she told me. And I did…sort of.)
(Originally published on RatBlurt™, October 23, 2021.)
