March 11, 2023 • 42 mins
From heroes to sages to destructive monsters, various figures in Irish mythology are described as possessing eyes of seven or three pupils (or irises). We also see discussion of such marvelous eyes in Chinese traditions and in the writings of Pliny and Ovid. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the enigma of the triple eye. (originally published 03/29/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey you, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday,
the day of each week that we venture down into
the vault and retrieve an older episode of the show
for you. This one originally published on March twenty ninth,
twenty twenty two, and it's part one of our series
called The Three Pupiled Eye. Yeah. I remember this one
being quite a lot of fun, and I think we
(00:28):
discussed this idea as it pops up in a various
cultures and traditions and sources. But I think we do
get a little bit into some Irish legend so it's
a good topic to revisit as we launch ourselves towards
Saint Patty's Day. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
(00:48):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And you know, we recently did a couple episodes that
related to Irish mythology, and as we were looking through
(01:10):
these various accounts of various heroes and monsters and tales
too often to ten and and so forth, I was
reminded again of a motif that I remember coming up briefly,
at least when we were looking at the hero cocolin,
and that is Irish heroes that are depicted as having
(01:35):
either multiple pupils or multiple irises within their eyes. That
is a strange detail, especially because I can picture multiple pupils,
I have a harder time picturing multiple irises. So, of course,
basic anatomical note, the pupil is the black dot in
the middle of your eye, and the iris is the
colored ring around that dot. So multiple pupils I'm seeing, Okay,
(01:59):
multiple thoughts, multiple irises. I don't know that that just
what Like, how would you tell where one iris began
or ended? Well, I guess you'd have to have like
multiple irises and pupils in that department. And as we'll
get into one of the things is that some of
these accounts will say pupils and other versions of that
same account will say irises. So you know, I'm not
(02:19):
I'm not sure exactly how uh you know, the term
maybe gets confused over time or it's lost in translation.
So but it kind of adds to the mystery of
of not being exactly sure what we're talking about here
when these details come up, Well, so how did these
details go? Like, what's an example? Okay, so um, taking
(02:40):
for example, Kucolin since we've we've discussed him before. The
Irish hero, a warrior hero, a demigod possessed by the
ability to enter the warp spasm during battle. Lots of
wonderful tales and about this character, and he's he's prominently
featured in the early Irish epic The Cattle Raid of
(03:02):
Coolie or the Tane as it goes sometimes called. But
one of the other interesting facts about this hero is
that he's sometimes described as having seven irises, as translated
from the epic by Joseph Dunns. I believe in nineteen
fourteen translation quote seven jewels of the eyes brilliance was
either of his keenly eyes, seven toes to either of
(03:24):
his two feet, seven fingers to either of his two hands,
with the clutch of hawk's claw, with the grip of
Hedgehog's talent in every separate one of them. I love
how that's all majestic and fierce until you get to
the hedgehog. I don't know. Hedgehog's talent sounds pretty intense
(03:44):
to me. Even if I can't quite picture what that
would be. Maybe I don't have enough experience with hedgehogs. Though.
I also this struck me because I love stories where
beings have a strange, recurring, specific number of body features.
It reminds me of visions in the Bible, like particularly
(04:04):
the visions of the Dragon and the beast in the
Book of Revelation. And if you're not familiar, the Book
of Revelation is the last book in the Christian New Testament.
It is mostly describing a vision that the author, someone
named John says was given to him by Christ. And
it's a book where the number seven has great significance.
It's used in a number of ways throughout the apocalypse.
(04:27):
There are messages sent to seven church congregations there and
then within the vision, seven seals are opened, seven trumpets
are sounded, and so forth. But there are also these
wondrous beings, both great and terrible, with seven of something.
So for example, in chapter twelve, verse three, it says,
and there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a
(04:48):
great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and
seven crowns upon his heads. And I always wondered if
that meant okay, so he's got seven heads and then
seven crowns on his heads. But does that mean seven
crowns per head or just one crown per head? I'm
not sure. One of the seven heads is wearing seven crowns,
staffing pop to each other. That heads a real dick.
(05:10):
They fight over the crowns. But then later also the
beast is said to have seven heads and ten horns
quote end upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his
heads the name of blasphemy. And so I like these
specific numbers. It's not just like, oh, this beast has
two heads. It's got seven heads. And of course, in
Jewish and Christian traditions, seven is a very significant number.
(05:34):
It's a holy number and one that most of the
time seems to be associated with wholeness or completion or fulfillment.
You know, God rested on the seventh day in the
creation story, after creating Earth in six days, rested on
the seventh, So it's sort of like the finishing of
a good and wholesome cycle of something. Though I guess
(05:55):
in this case it's interesting because this is a sort
of unholy seven. It's the opposite of God, and there
are other beings in Jewish literature described with various specific
numbers of features. For example, there is a vision described
in the Book of Isaiah where the prophet sees the
Lord sitting upon a throne and he's surrounded by angels
called seraphim, which literally means the burning ones. And the
(06:18):
Seraphim are said to each have six wings, and there's
a reason given for this. In the vision, the wings
are each doing something, so Isaiah says that with two
of the wings he covered his face, with two of
them he covered his feet, and with the other two
he did fly. Though I wonder if the number six
is also showing a different significance in that these beings
(06:39):
are sort of the second highest beings in the heavenly
hierarchy without being on the level of God himself. So
seven is holy perfection and fulfillment. Six is one level
under that. Oh wow. So first of all, I love
how this actually is finding way to tie back to
our recent episodes on the days of the week, you know,
the seven day week, and yeah, all these thing about
(07:00):
examples like this where we're dealing with you know, literary
motifs and symbolism and you know, mythic beings. But we
take these non biological numbers and though they sort of
bleed through their imagined bodies, and and we instantly enter
this zone of of of just of of fantasy and
(07:24):
in myth um. You know, it's the it's the sort
of thing that I think, you know, today we would
we would classify this sort of thing is like you know,
visionary art or you know, some sort of psychedelic notion um.
But but clearly we've you know, we've been dreaming up
these these things throughout human history. Well yeah, yeah, and
you're right to note that seven is not a very
(07:45):
biological number. Yeah, I mean, usually in animals with bilateral symmetry,
there tend to be even numbers of things. There are
some interesting exceptions, but that's that's most most often the case.
We'll get to one exception within the human body later
on that I like. But yeah, so so I don't
know exactly why you'd get these myths later on of
(08:06):
like say, yeah, a hero who's got seven irises in
his eye or seven pupils in his eye. But I
would be surprised if it isn't if it isn't part
of a tradition, if it is an all downstream from
this ancient line of thinking that says, hey, you know,
this monster doesn't just have two heads, it has seven heads.
And not only does it have seven heads, the fact
(08:26):
that it has seven heads means something. This is like
the ultimate bad monster because there's seven of it. Seven
is kind of like a siren. It means whenever there's
seven or of something, it's it's incredibly meaningful. It's intensely significant.
And with with Cocullen's eye, it's it's really hard for
me to picture it, Like I guess I'd end up
(08:47):
picturing like this just sort of ring of pupils, and
then yeah, when I try and picture seven irises in there,
it doesn't really come together for me. Here a couple
of other translations. M Thomas CANSELLA translation says seven hard
heroic jewels are set in the iris of Kucullan's eye
and then done also translating in another section of the work,
(09:09):
hero from a poem prophecy quote seven gems of champions,
brave deck the center of his orbs. Naked are the
spears he bears, and he hooks a red cloak round
And I've seen these, yeah, I've seen these described as
as pupils as irises, and there's a there's one version
that reads, quote, there were seven pupils in Kucullin's royal eye,
(09:30):
and two of these pupils were squinting. The pupils were squinting, Yes,
and yeah, this this is another area where I haven't
found I haven't found much to really, you know, break
down what this means, and that that just makes it
more enticing, Like what what to imagine looking into this
this hero's eyes and then like, first of all, they're
(09:52):
like seven pupils in there, and then and then to
make things even weirder, to make that moment even weirder,
two of them are squinting. A two of the pupils
are squinting. But pupil, I mean, so pupils do, of
course contract. We'll talk about that as we go on.
That's one of their main anatomical functions. But I don't
think that's usually what people mean with the words squinting.
With squinting, I think of squeezing of like the muscles
(10:14):
around the orbital you know, your face. Yeah, though, as
we'll discuss, pupils do weird things. So maybe by the
time we roll through some examples from the animal world,
we'll have a better idea of what this could conceivably
look like. But cal Colin is not the only character
in an Irish tradition who has mysterious eyes. There's also
(10:39):
a character by the name of fedem Or. I think
the modern version of this is Fidelma, and this is
a she's a member of the two authored don and
she's a prophet, a poet. She's mentioned in the Ulstra cycle,
and I've also read that she some critics and historians
think that she may be connected to later toys of
(11:00):
the Banshee, which, again, the Banshee, one of its whole
things is that it is it haunts a place, It
whales in anticipation of death, so it is it is,
in its own way, a profit, though a profit of
one particular thing. She appears in the Tane as well,
and she's described as having three irises in each eye,
(11:21):
triple irises. And this gets really interesting because she's described
at length, and I'm just going to read a part
of it, translated by Dunne quote weaving lace was she
and in her right hand was a bordering rod of
silvered bronze with its seven strips of red gold at
the sides, A mini spotted green mantle around her, A bulging,
(11:45):
strong headed pin of gold in the mantle over her bosom,
A hooded tunic with red interweaving about her. A ruddy,
fair faced countenance. She had, narrow below and broad above.
She had a blue gray laughing eye. Each eye had
three pupils. Dark and black were her eyebrows, The soft
(12:06):
black lashes threw a shadow to the middle of her cheeks.
Red and thin were her lips. Shiny and pearly were
her teeth. Thou wouldst believe they were showers of white
pearls that had rained into her head. And I have
to say, I love how I mean, it's all beautiful,
but the three pupils in the eye just gets like
(12:26):
this brief description. But then the author is like, and
let me tell you about her teeth, right, Yeah, I
had the same reaction. So then again, I'm thinking about
the historical setting from which this story would have emerged,
and maybe at that time seeing somebody with really clean
teeth was even more rare than a eye with three pupils.
A true true. So so okay, so we already have
(12:48):
a couple of examples here cocullen and we have we
also have a Feedom here, and Feedom is very much
just see her, and she has eyes of prophecy, So
it's easy to see where one interpretation here is that
her eyes are unnatural because she has unnatural vision she
can see into the future. Makes sense, right sure, But
(13:09):
as as several different commentators have pointed out, this is
what this is. Another level where it got even more
interesting is that commentators have pointed out that, um, these
are also signs of beauty. So think to this passage
I just read, so uh, you know, yes, again, she
is a seer, but she's described as as being as
(13:31):
not being beautiful but possessed with weird eyes. Her triple
pupils or iris eyes are listed as part of her
beauty though you know, undeniably this connects to her attributed
powers as well. Right, So it's listed along other along
other things like having long, lustrous eyelashes and pearly teeth,
(13:51):
things that in a lot of other literature would be
just clear markers that are supposed to mean beauty. And
here it's also like and three people by that is
one of those things, right, we all know that thing? Yeah, yeah,
And this is this is I think something that makes
it so fascinating to read as a modern reader of
the text, because obviously, if you had, you know, a
(14:12):
modern work of fiction that was referring to a character
like this, everything would go in reverse, right, you would
have all that you would say, Oh, she was beautiful,
and she looked totally human, a beautiful human, except woe,
those eyes three pupils in each one. It was a
bit weird. So one of the sources that I was
looking at about this is Jacqueline the Evil Eye in
(14:33):
early Irish literature in Law two thousand and three, published
in Celtica twenty four. It provides a lot of insight
into the literary motif of the eye in Irish literature.
So she brings up, first of all, a different creature
with a unique eye, and that is the one eyed
(14:54):
giant Insoul Cache or ing Soul the Terrible, who is
described as this great giant something of a pirate I
think with possible like English origins of the time, so
you know, into in this week get like the idea
that may if there is some sort of historical basis
for this figure, maybe he was just some sort of
a pirate rater from that region. But in the mythic
(15:15):
connotation he becomes this, this this great, big giant who
not only has just this single eye in his head,
he's not only a cyclops, but it is a solid
black eye. And that solid black eye has seven pupils
within it, though I've also read descriptions where he just
has three pupils. How would it have pupils if it's solid.
The pupil is the black part of the eye. So
(15:38):
that's thoroughly confusing. Yes, so he's known for the destruction
of Dadurga Hostel. There's a whole story about this. And
so the author here is discussing Ingsul's eye and she
connects it not only with Cocolin, but also with the
High King of Ireland, Cormac McCart who is also said
to have had seven pupils in each eye. So again
(16:01):
it's just driving home that this is a recurring motif.
It's not like a one time thing that you know,
it clearly meants something and was worth repeating in the Cannon.
But but she points out that you know, in the
cases of these two heroes quote this is explicitly qualified
as a sign of beauty. And furthermore, she says that
the squinting in Cucullin's pupils is also seen as a
(16:24):
doornament rather than disfigurement. And then she also comes back
to Fedelm, the female seer of the Tuatha, to Donna
and says quote, there is no explanation offered of this characteristic,
the triple I with Fedelm. It could be a sign
of beauty, and it could be a sign of her
supernatural sight. The latter is more probable because the characteristic
(16:47):
is separated from the description of her looks by the
mention of the weaver's beam. The weaver's beam has been
interpreted as a supernatural tool for prophecy. The triple pupils
could therefore very well be a symbol of her claer
of glance. And yeah, so I'm not if I'm not
mistaken here the weaver's beam, this is part of a loom.
And so we're getting into the idea they'd like here this,
(17:09):
this piece of technology also had mystical connotations for divination.
All right? What about ing Sol though, the giant or
pirate who has a single eye which is entirely black
and also has either three or seven pupils in it, well,
she's She says that, Okay, if we're going to look
at these other examples and try and figure out Engsol,
we'll say, first of all, he's definitely not beautiful. This
(17:31):
is not a sign of his beauty. He's a rough
and horrible monster, she knows. She points out some of
the terms that are used to describe him. But his
sight is described as being sharp, he can make out
every detail of the hostile at a glance, and Boor
says that he also might connect to the legendary evil
eye of Balor, the king of the Fomorians, whose great eye,
(17:54):
when opened and when his great brow could be raised
up in some accounts, two warriors have to stand on
either side of him, put a woman wooden beam beneath
his big, saggy brow, and lift the brow up so
that the evil eye can see out an unleash destruction
on the battlefield. It could be connected to that Ballor,
(18:14):
by the way, is eventually killed by his grandson Lug
of the Tuatha de Dun, and there are multiple versions
of the Balor myth as well. Sometimes his destructive eye
is described, you know, more or less like the single
single eye of a cyclops and other times it's depicted
as more of a third eye in the center of
the head alongside two ordinary eyes. So there's just a
(18:36):
taste of the triple or sevenfold eye in Irish mythology.
And again I've even having you know, research to the
bed and laid it out in the in the outline here,
it's still just overwhelmingly mysterious and on inspiring to me.
And we're going to come back to some other traditions,
(18:56):
some other ancient writings that refer to mysterious eyes of
this nature. But at this point we're gonna we're gonna
shift into the scientific world and hopefully this will be
a fun case where the science and the myth will
sort of play off each other and each one will
make the other more fabulous. All right, well, since we're
(19:21):
talking about eyes, I think we do need to do
a quick overview of eyeball anatomy. So picture an eyeball,
rob Are you doing it? Can you can see that
eyeball in your mind's eye burning like the eye of Sauron. Okay, well,
that actually connects to something because the eye of Sauron,
you picture that, that's not just floating out in space, right,
it's sitting in a tower, that's right, And so of
course our eyeballs need some some structural scaffolding as well.
(19:44):
So the eyeball of humans it's within a bony socket
called the orbit, and the outer layer of the eyeball
itself is a tough white tissue made of collagen that's
called the sclera. This is the white part of the
eye that you can see. And then the pupil, of course,
is the black dot in the middle of the eye.
Covering the pupil on the outside is a clear layer
(20:05):
of cells known as the cornea, which both protects the eye.
It protects the iris and the pupil, and it also
helps to focus incoming light into the pupil. Actually, there
are two parts of your eyes that do focusing of
light rays. The cornea does the majority of it. I
think it does about two thirds of the focusing, and
that's the first layer. And actually, if you've listened to
(20:26):
our episodes on tiers that we did I think a
couple of months ago, you know there's something even to
the outside of the cornea, which is that thin layer
of tier film that covers the eye. It's secreted by
the lachrymal glands actually has multiple parts. That the watery
part of the tier film is secreted by the lachrymal glands,
and then there's an oily part of the tier film
(20:46):
that comes from the base of the eyelids, now coming
to the pupil. While it's tempting to think of the
pupil as a thing, the interesting truth is that the
pupil is really an absence. The pupil is the whole
or the opening through which light passes. So light comes
through the cornea and then is directed through the pupil
(21:09):
and then is focused again a second time after the
cornea by a clear structure on the inside of the eye,
the inside of the pupil that's called the lens. And
then finally, after it is focused through the lens, the
light is reflected onto the layer of sensitive cells on
the back of the inside of the eye, known as
the retina, and then the sensing cells of the retina
(21:29):
transmit the information about the light via the optic nerve
all the way to the visual cortex in the back
of the brain, where the information is made sense of
in a way that we experience as sight. So I
think what we should say is that sight happens in
the brain, which is why there are so many things
that can that can affect what we see when we
look at the world. You know, it's not just like
a video camera feed. There's there's some post processing that
(21:53):
goes on that can be affected by all kinds of
things from uh, you know, from biases and little little
tricks of how the brain works, to drugs and so so.
Sight happens in the brain, but of course light has
to go through all these stages within the eye before
it is turned into the experience of vision in the
visual cortex. You know. I just think you were talking
(22:15):
about how about the pupil being an absence and not
a thing, and I was thinking about, you know, various
there's of course the Chinese story of the magic paint brush,
and I think there are different variations on this, but
there's one in which the paint brush, whatever you paint
with it comes to life, but only after you have
added the eye or I think perhaps the you know,
(22:37):
adding the pupil slash iris of the eye, because depending
on the detail of your illustration, like the pupil in
the eye are just going to be one, right, Like
if you're painting an eye. Drawing an eye, you create
the white and then you put that black dot in
the middle to complete it, and it kind of brings
life to something. But on the other hand, I think
(22:58):
to the world of miniature paint and off there. If
anyone's never seen this, you should look it up because
it can be hilarious. When people are just figuring out
what they're doing with miniatures, they'll often want to complete
like this small you know, we're talking like a small scale, uh,
you know, soldier or something, and they'll want to put
(23:20):
eyes on it, so they'll create the white dots and
then they'll go to throw those little black dots in
there as well, often with just hilarious results. You'll end
up with just the completely ridiculous googly eyes that that are,
you know, look too big for the head and one
eyes put looking off in one direction and the other
in another direction. But we have that compulsion way like
(23:41):
we it's not real until I add, you know, the
pupil iris. We can't just have white there, we can't
just have dark there. We have to have both. Well, yeah,
I think there is actually a strong biological reason why
why having both is very important to us. You know,
we've looked at research before on how humans are very
sensitive to noticing gaze direction in other humans, to monitoring
(24:05):
the movement of other people's eyes to understand where they're looking.
That is very socially relevant information and we keep close
tabs on it even when you don't notice you're doing it. Yeah.
So if you're just see a representation of a human
and they like don't have pupils in their eyes, this
is very disturbing because it's like, well, I can't tell
where they're looking and that you know that that doesn't
(24:27):
feel good at all. And this is probably why you
know it's it's very popular in films and TV shows.
If you need a character to have a very very
other worldly air to them, just simply give them completely
black eyes or completely wide eyes, and you know they'll
have this angelic or demonic a hair about them. Oh yeah, absolutely.
The one thing I do want to come back to
(24:47):
when I said that the pupils are an absence and
I said not a thing. I mean, of course, it
depends on what you mean by thing, but I mean,
you know, they are the pinhole in a pinhole camera
without the whole the pinhole camera doesn't work. They're very important,
you've got to have them, but what they are is
an opening. Yeah, here's another weird thing. You ever think
about the fact that your eye has muscles. I don't know. Yah,
(25:10):
maybe this is one that everybody else is just fully
metabolized and it is sitting with them just fine. But
thinking about my eye muscles makes me a little woozy.
But obviously it's true. I mean, in fact, your eye
has multiple levels of muscles. And here's we're going to
come back to creatures with seven of something. So arranged
around the back of each of your eyes, on the
(25:30):
attached to the sclera, there are seven muscles, the extraocular muscles,
and these are muscles that move the eyeballs into some
degree the eyelids as well, certainly the superior eyelids. So
when you look up down side to side, up at
an angle, when you're trying to remember something, you're flexing
these muscles. Do you think Colin had seven of these?
(25:52):
Or did he have forty nine muscles on his eyeballs? Wait?
Did he have different eyes or I know, I mean
I think he only had two eyeballs. He just said
seven irises or eyeles. So these are apportioned according to eyeballs.
Not took pupils and irises. Didn't know how deep into
his anatomy the numerology went. But to get even weirder,
(26:14):
there are also muscles within the eye. There are muscles
in your eyes responsible for changing the diameter of the
pupil of that opening. So remember the pupil is basically
a hole in the function of the pupil is to
allow light to pass through the lens and onto the retina,
and the eye has to adjust the size of the
hole to help control light exposure and to focus the image.
(26:37):
A very easy example to see for yourself. Everybody probably
did this in elementary school at some point, but if
you never did, check it out sometime. Watch your pupils
in a mirror. When you're turning the lights in the
room on and off. Your pupil will dilate in a
dark room to allow more light in to become more
sensitive to less data, and when the light comes on,
(26:58):
the pupil will contract to allow less light in. Now
I was reading about what function the pupil serves because
I think the expansion and contraction of the pupil is
not only for controlling for the amount of light in
the environment. And I think it also helps control focus
of the image that you're trying to turn your gaze onto.
(27:18):
So I was reading about this in a paper by
Sebastian Methote called Pupilometry, Psychology, Physiology and Function in the
Journal of Cognition twenty eighteen, and Methote writes, quote, although
people responses likely serve many functions, not all of which
are fully understood, one important function is to optimize vision,
either for acuity small pupils see sharper and depth of
(27:42):
field small pupils see sharply at a wider range of distances,
or for sensitivity, large pupils are better able to detect
faint stimuli. And then finally says that that is, pupils
change their size to optimize vision for a particular situation.
And probably all of these are familiar to people who
have ever had to work the aperture of a film camera,
(28:06):
because you manipulate the aperture not just to respond to
different light conditions and to avoid overexposing or under exposing,
but you also do it in order to control things
like depth of field, like do you want you know
things that are both close and far away in sharp
focus are only what's up close in focus and so forth.
But to come back to those muscles within the eye,
(28:26):
what causes the expansion or contraction of the pupil is
actually the set of muscles within the iris. This is
what your iris is for. And so here's a wonderful
anatomy fact that everyone should know. When you hear a
good love song or a poem about eye color. You know,
my love, how I long to gaze into your big
(28:47):
brown eyes. The singer is technically longing to gaze into
two sphincters. What certainly makes you rethink Van Morrison's Brown
Eyed Girl? That right, Yes, speaking of which Irish singer,
why not why brown eyes instead of triple or seven
pupiled eyes? Missed opportunity? Brown Eyed Girl is a song
(29:09):
all about the appreciation of beautiful glassy sphincters glinting in
the sun. Okay, So the iris is composed of two
types of muscle. You've got the dilator muscles, and these
are long muscle fibers, you know, relatively long within the
eye at least that cause the pupil to expand when
they contract. So you can kind of think of muscles
(29:29):
like pulling and opening wider by by pulling at its edges.
And then the second type within the iris is the
sphincter muscle. This is a ring of muscle tissue around
the inner edge of the iris that shrinks the pupil
when it contracts. And so the term sphincter is of
course most famous for referring to the muscle that controls
the anus, but it actually just means any ring of
(29:52):
muscle that works to open and close a tube in
an animal body. So you actually have multiple sphincters throughout
your body, not just the anus, not just in the
anus and the irises, but also internally controlling the openings
of the stomach. By the way, we do have at
least a couple of episodes about the evolution of the
anus that we did a few years back, So if
(30:14):
anyone is interested in more information on that, then I
send you to the vault to seek those episodes out.
Oh yeah, I recall that being great fun, But but
I wanted to say, believe it or not, this tidbit
about sphincters is the sphincters of the eyes is not
just an amusing digression. This will actually play into what
I'm about to talk about, which is an extremely rare
(30:36):
medical condition in which human beings do sometimes have multiple
pupils in the same eye. And this is a condition
known as polychoria. So it's very very rare, but multiple
pupils per eye does exist in the real world, and
so as a source on this, I was looking at
a book called The Handbook of Pediatric neuro Optimology published
(30:59):
by Springer in two thousand and six by Kenneth W. Wright,
Peter H. Spiegel, and Lisa S. Thompson. According to the
authors here, there are actually two different conditions known as polychoria,
though both are referring to conditions where there is more
than one opening in the iris. They say these additional
openings tend to be due to what they call local
(31:20):
hypoplasia of the iris stroma and the pigment epithelium. So
these are the layers of tissue within the iris. The
iris stroma is the bigger middle layer and the pigment
epithelium is a layer that is what gives eyes their color,
the pigment on the back of the irises and so
(31:40):
hypoplasia within those tissues would mean a lack of cells
or an incomplete formation of the cells within those tissues. Now,
regarding the two varieties of this condition, there is true polychoria,
in which there is more than one pupil and they
each have their own iris sphincter muscle the ability to contract.
(32:02):
Then there is false polychoria or pseudo polychoria, in which
there are multiple openings in the iris, but only one
has the sphincter muscle. So the sphincter muscle is what
makes the difference. The having the sphincters around your extra
pupils is what makes it true polychoria. Both conditions are rare,
but true polychoria is much more rare. They write that
(32:24):
in almost all clinical situations the correct diagnosis is pseudo polychoria.
And given how rare polychoria is, there doesn't seem to
be a ton of accessible medical literature on it. Most
of what I did find was pretty old. I found
one report from recent years, and this was an article
published in Jamma Optimology from twenty twenty by Antoine Safie
(32:49):
and Shallenburg and Aki Kawasaki called Polychoria in a Young Girl.
This was a case report of a nine year old
girl in good health who was in for a regular
checkup with her doctor when the doctor noticed that she
had two pupils in her left eye, one regular sized
pupil in the middle and then another much smaller hole
(33:09):
in the iris just the side of the primary rob
I've attached a picture for you to look at here.
But this case was one of the extremely rare documented
cases of true polychoria because both pupils in the same
eye would contract simultaneously when exposed to light, meaning they
both had functional sphincter muscles surrounding them. And one of
(33:33):
the proposed causes of true polychoria is what the authors
call quote a sneering or pinching off from the margin
of another pupil, and that would seem to make sense
of why there would be sphincter muscles surrounding it. So
if you picture the pupil surrounded by this ring of
sphincter muscle, and then you picture part of that pupil
(33:55):
by just some kind of quirk of how the cells
are growing, part of the pupil pinched off and separated
from the other one, like the iris cells around it
kind of just come together and grow together and pinch
off part of it that would still it would still
be surrounded by those sphincter muscle cells. By the way,
and a lot of times we'll say, definitely, go do
(34:15):
an image search so you can see what we're talking
about here. I have to advise if you're doing a
search for polychoria, you will invariably turn up some actual images,
but also a lot of doctored images and like clickbait
images that don't represent anything that's actually happening in the
real biological world. If you definitely want to see a
(34:38):
real photo, you can look up the article I just
mentioned again that was in jam Optomology called polychoria in
a young Girl. It just as close ups of the
pupils and you can see them right there. Yeah, these
images are quite impressive. Though of course, I have to
say that anytime you have a close up image of
the inner workings of an eyeball, you're getting into weird
territory because it quickly becomes this strange a in the world. Now,
(35:07):
you might be tempted to wonder, WHOA if somebody has
two pupils in the same eye, how does that affect vision?
Like do they see two images out of that eye
or something? And the answer to that is no, because
what's what's creating the what's sending the light data back
to your visual cortex is the retina. So what tends
(35:29):
to result from polychoria is usually just some impairment of
vision in that eye. But it doesn't tend to, at
least as far as I've read, create any extravagant unusual effects.
More likely, if it has effects on vision, it's probably
just some reduction in the function of the eye or
impairment of vision. I mean, you kind of come back
(35:50):
to the same place where we've we've been here before,
where you you talk about site and it's something that
we know most of us take for granted. But then
when you start thinking about what's act really happening, you
know that you have these not one, but two different
eyeballs functioning, and uh and then this data is then um,
you know, reassembled and created into this stitched together into
(36:11):
this this simulated model of the world inside our heads.
It's it's pretty crazy. Well yeah, and especially because as
we said earlier, you know, vision happens in the brain.
It just makes use of data gathered with the eyes.
So the brain can actually do a lot of compensating,
adapting and adjusting based on what's going on in the
first part of the process. Right. It also reminds me
(36:33):
of talking to David Eagleman. You know, one of the
things he points out is that we're basically mister potato
heads and the more sensory tools that you plug into
the brain, like, it's just going to be integrated into
the model. So you know, it's like one eyeball, two eyeballs, Um,
if you if you were to add additional eyeballs or
additional things, that's that that fed in additional data like
(36:57):
that would be consolidated into the Yeah, he's pretty from
what I understand, he's pretty bullish on plasticity, right, And
I guess there are differences of opinion among experts on this,
like how adaptable is the adult brain, how many types
of new sensory information could a brain make use of?
But yeah, I think he's more on the end of
like we would be shocked how much the brain can
(37:20):
adapt to, right. Yeah, But then again, just coming back
to the idea that, yeah, your vision is not the
thing your eye does. Your vision is the thing your
brain does using the eyes. Right. All Right, So we're
gonna be back in the next episode. We're gonna have
more ancient ideas about multi lobed eyes. We're gonna have
We're gonna have some more science at this time from
(37:42):
the animal world and some of the strange pupils going
on out there. I did want to mention, though, briefly,
that yeah, you do have some some pretty neat pop
culture examples of multi pupil, multi irist eyes. I was
trying to think of think of them. I feel like
the ones that came to mind or are all kind
of loosely connected to each other, or they all feel
(38:04):
like they're very much within the same sort of genre
of sort of weird horror themed visionary art. I was like, Rob,
is it going to be Tool? Yeah, well it has
to be Tool, right, So like and because I guess
these were probably my first exposures to this kind of
of imagery, even though again it's it's you know, it's
clearly been around with us for a very long time.
(38:25):
But there's the Adam Jones of Tool. His art for
the The ep Opiate features something like, you know, eyes
with multiple pupils and or eyes undergoing mitosis or their
figure eight pupils. It's you know, hard to figure out
exactly what's happening in a stationary image. There's also the
(38:47):
cam de Leon album art Ocular Orifice for Tools nineteen
ninety six album Onema featuring an eye with two or
more irises and pupils, and that's one that I believe
is animated as well. So its this you get this
idea of the eye turning. Was that an album that
had some release where you'd like turn it in the
light and it would move? Yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah,
(39:08):
some of the images could be placed so that they're
they're looking out the front of the CD case and
it creates this this this movement. The real masters of
the physical release, the horror movie you talked about with
the VHS box with the light up eyes. Yeah, yeah,
they were very very much and that I mean they're
still putting out albums with that kind of gimmick rick,
which which I love. Um. Now, a film that comes
(39:31):
to mind, there's John Carpenter's in the Mouth of Madness,
which I know you you saw in the last few years. Anyway,
there's a scene in which a deranged killer, uh like
you know, crashes through the the storefront, this cafe front
with an axe and then you get a close up
of his eyes, and he seems to have they're either
like conjoined irises, or perhaps irises that are undergoing mitosis
(39:54):
that are coming together or splitting apart, or something is
going on there, and it's like a super creepy moment.
And then he starts talking about Sutter kane Um and
then of cour course, you know that's a film that's
often talked about in terms of the Lovecrafty and influences.
There's a great madness line at the end of HP
Lovecraft's story The Haunter of the Dark that reads, I
(40:16):
see it coming here, hell Win, Titan blur, black wings,
Yog so thought save me. The three lobed burning eye.
I mean, frankly, after all this talk of seven lobed
burning eyes, I feel like that's right. The same is
not that impressive. I can easily imagine the three lobe
burning eye, seven lobed. Yeah, that's too mad to even
right about. Yog Sotho arrives on Earth after millions of
(40:39):
years is like I have come to conquer runs into
ku Collin. Collin's like, I have so many more irises
than you, And that's right, Yeah, I have a Kukolin.
Could could totally whip yog sotho, no no, no question
about it. All right, Well, we're gonna go and close
it out there, but we will be back Thursday. There'll
be more I related to Wonder, more related science, so
(41:01):
tune in. In the meantime. We'd love to hear from everyone, though,
if you have thoughts about this episode, if you have
thoughts about Irish mythology, other tales that involve multiple pupils
or multiple irises in the same eye. Like I said,
we're going to mention some in the next episode, but
it's very likely. I mean it's it's I'm definitely missing something.
(41:22):
There's some sort of detail from some other folklore, mythology,
or certainly pop culture, and we would love to hear
about any of those examples. So write in and let
us know. Those episodes. Of course, core episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesday we do a short form artifact or monster fact.
On Monday we do listener Mail, and on Friday we
(41:42):
do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most serious matters and just discuss a strange film. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at tact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(42:11):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening
to your favorite shows.
Hey you, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday,
the day of each week that we venture down into
the vault and retrieve an older episode of the show
for you. This one originally published on March twenty ninth,
twenty twenty two, and it's part one of our series
called The Three Pupiled Eye. Yeah. I remember this one
being quite a lot of fun, and I think we
(00:28):
discussed this idea as it pops up in a various
cultures and traditions and sources. But I think we do
get a little bit into some Irish legend so it's
a good topic to revisit as we launch ourselves towards
Saint Patty's Day. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
(00:48):
a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And you know, we recently did a couple episodes that
related to Irish mythology, and as we were looking through
(01:10):
these various accounts of various heroes and monsters and tales
too often to ten and and so forth, I was
reminded again of a motif that I remember coming up briefly,
at least when we were looking at the hero cocolin,
and that is Irish heroes that are depicted as having
(01:35):
either multiple pupils or multiple irises within their eyes. That
is a strange detail, especially because I can picture multiple pupils,
I have a harder time picturing multiple irises. So, of course,
basic anatomical note, the pupil is the black dot in
the middle of your eye, and the iris is the
colored ring around that dot. So multiple pupils I'm seeing, Okay,
(01:59):
multiple thoughts, multiple irises. I don't know that that just
what Like, how would you tell where one iris began
or ended? Well, I guess you'd have to have like
multiple irises and pupils in that department. And as we'll
get into one of the things is that some of
these accounts will say pupils and other versions of that
same account will say irises. So you know, I'm not
(02:19):
I'm not sure exactly how uh you know, the term
maybe gets confused over time or it's lost in translation.
So but it kind of adds to the mystery of
of not being exactly sure what we're talking about here
when these details come up, Well, so how did these
details go? Like, what's an example? Okay, so um, taking
(02:40):
for example, Kucolin since we've we've discussed him before. The
Irish hero, a warrior hero, a demigod possessed by the
ability to enter the warp spasm during battle. Lots of
wonderful tales and about this character, and he's he's prominently
featured in the early Irish epic The Cattle Raid of
(03:02):
Coolie or the Tane as it goes sometimes called. But
one of the other interesting facts about this hero is
that he's sometimes described as having seven irises, as translated
from the epic by Joseph Dunns. I believe in nineteen
fourteen translation quote seven jewels of the eyes brilliance was
either of his keenly eyes, seven toes to either of
(03:24):
his two feet, seven fingers to either of his two hands,
with the clutch of hawk's claw, with the grip of
Hedgehog's talent in every separate one of them. I love
how that's all majestic and fierce until you get to
the hedgehog. I don't know. Hedgehog's talent sounds pretty intense
(03:44):
to me. Even if I can't quite picture what that
would be. Maybe I don't have enough experience with hedgehogs. Though.
I also this struck me because I love stories where
beings have a strange, recurring, specific number of body features.
It reminds me of visions in the Bible, like particularly
(04:04):
the visions of the Dragon and the beast in the
Book of Revelation. And if you're not familiar, the Book
of Revelation is the last book in the Christian New Testament.
It is mostly describing a vision that the author, someone
named John says was given to him by Christ. And
it's a book where the number seven has great significance.
It's used in a number of ways throughout the apocalypse.
(04:27):
There are messages sent to seven church congregations there and
then within the vision, seven seals are opened, seven trumpets
are sounded, and so forth. But there are also these
wondrous beings, both great and terrible, with seven of something.
So for example, in chapter twelve, verse three, it says,
and there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a
(04:48):
great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and
seven crowns upon his heads. And I always wondered if
that meant okay, so he's got seven heads and then
seven crowns on his heads. But does that mean seven
crowns per head or just one crown per head? I'm
not sure. One of the seven heads is wearing seven crowns,
staffing pop to each other. That heads a real dick.
(05:10):
They fight over the crowns. But then later also the
beast is said to have seven heads and ten horns
quote end upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his
heads the name of blasphemy. And so I like these
specific numbers. It's not just like, oh, this beast has
two heads. It's got seven heads. And of course, in
Jewish and Christian traditions, seven is a very significant number.
(05:34):
It's a holy number and one that most of the
time seems to be associated with wholeness or completion or fulfillment.
You know, God rested on the seventh day in the
creation story, after creating Earth in six days, rested on
the seventh, So it's sort of like the finishing of
a good and wholesome cycle of something. Though I guess
(05:55):
in this case it's interesting because this is a sort
of unholy seven. It's the opposite of God, and there
are other beings in Jewish literature described with various specific
numbers of features. For example, there is a vision described
in the Book of Isaiah where the prophet sees the
Lord sitting upon a throne and he's surrounded by angels
called seraphim, which literally means the burning ones. And the
(06:18):
Seraphim are said to each have six wings, and there's
a reason given for this. In the vision, the wings
are each doing something, so Isaiah says that with two
of the wings he covered his face, with two of
them he covered his feet, and with the other two
he did fly. Though I wonder if the number six
is also showing a different significance in that these beings
(06:39):
are sort of the second highest beings in the heavenly
hierarchy without being on the level of God himself. So
seven is holy perfection and fulfillment. Six is one level
under that. Oh wow. So first of all, I love
how this actually is finding way to tie back to
our recent episodes on the days of the week, you know,
the seven day week, and yeah, all these thing about
(07:00):
examples like this where we're dealing with you know, literary
motifs and symbolism and you know, mythic beings. But we
take these non biological numbers and though they sort of
bleed through their imagined bodies, and and we instantly enter
this zone of of of just of of fantasy and
(07:24):
in myth um. You know, it's the it's the sort
of thing that I think, you know, today we would
we would classify this sort of thing is like you know,
visionary art or you know, some sort of psychedelic notion um.
But but clearly we've you know, we've been dreaming up
these these things throughout human history. Well yeah, yeah, and
you're right to note that seven is not a very
(07:45):
biological number. Yeah, I mean, usually in animals with bilateral symmetry,
there tend to be even numbers of things. There are
some interesting exceptions, but that's that's most most often the case.
We'll get to one exception within the human body later
on that I like. But yeah, so so I don't
know exactly why you'd get these myths later on of
(08:06):
like say, yeah, a hero who's got seven irises in
his eye or seven pupils in his eye. But I
would be surprised if it isn't if it isn't part
of a tradition, if it is an all downstream from
this ancient line of thinking that says, hey, you know,
this monster doesn't just have two heads, it has seven heads.
And not only does it have seven heads, the fact
(08:26):
that it has seven heads means something. This is like
the ultimate bad monster because there's seven of it. Seven
is kind of like a siren. It means whenever there's
seven or of something, it's it's incredibly meaningful. It's intensely significant.
And with with Cocullen's eye, it's it's really hard for
me to picture it, Like I guess I'd end up
(08:47):
picturing like this just sort of ring of pupils, and
then yeah, when I try and picture seven irises in there,
it doesn't really come together for me. Here a couple
of other translations. M Thomas CANSELLA translation says seven hard
heroic jewels are set in the iris of Kucullan's eye
and then done also translating in another section of the work,
(09:09):
hero from a poem prophecy quote seven gems of champions,
brave deck the center of his orbs. Naked are the
spears he bears, and he hooks a red cloak round
And I've seen these, yeah, I've seen these described as
as pupils as irises, and there's a there's one version
that reads, quote, there were seven pupils in Kucullin's royal eye,
(09:30):
and two of these pupils were squinting. The pupils were squinting, Yes,
and yeah, this this is another area where I haven't
found I haven't found much to really, you know, break
down what this means, and that that just makes it
more enticing, Like what what to imagine looking into this
this hero's eyes and then like, first of all, they're
(09:52):
like seven pupils in there, and then and then to
make things even weirder, to make that moment even weirder,
two of them are squinting. A two of the pupils
are squinting. But pupil, I mean, so pupils do, of
course contract. We'll talk about that as we go on.
That's one of their main anatomical functions. But I don't
think that's usually what people mean with the words squinting.
With squinting, I think of squeezing of like the muscles
(10:14):
around the orbital you know, your face. Yeah, though, as
we'll discuss, pupils do weird things. So maybe by the
time we roll through some examples from the animal world,
we'll have a better idea of what this could conceivably
look like. But cal Colin is not the only character
in an Irish tradition who has mysterious eyes. There's also
(10:39):
a character by the name of fedem Or. I think
the modern version of this is Fidelma, and this is
a she's a member of the two authored don and
she's a prophet, a poet. She's mentioned in the Ulstra cycle,
and I've also read that she some critics and historians
think that she may be connected to later toys of
(11:00):
the Banshee, which, again, the Banshee, one of its whole
things is that it is it haunts a place, It
whales in anticipation of death, so it is it is,
in its own way, a profit, though a profit of
one particular thing. She appears in the Tane as well,
and she's described as having three irises in each eye,
(11:21):
triple irises. And this gets really interesting because she's described
at length, and I'm just going to read a part
of it, translated by Dunne quote weaving lace was she
and in her right hand was a bordering rod of
silvered bronze with its seven strips of red gold at
the sides, A mini spotted green mantle around her, A bulging,
(11:45):
strong headed pin of gold in the mantle over her bosom,
A hooded tunic with red interweaving about her. A ruddy,
fair faced countenance. She had, narrow below and broad above.
She had a blue gray laughing eye. Each eye had
three pupils. Dark and black were her eyebrows, The soft
(12:06):
black lashes threw a shadow to the middle of her cheeks.
Red and thin were her lips. Shiny and pearly were
her teeth. Thou wouldst believe they were showers of white
pearls that had rained into her head. And I have
to say, I love how I mean, it's all beautiful,
but the three pupils in the eye just gets like
(12:26):
this brief description. But then the author is like, and
let me tell you about her teeth, right, Yeah, I
had the same reaction. So then again, I'm thinking about
the historical setting from which this story would have emerged,
and maybe at that time seeing somebody with really clean
teeth was even more rare than a eye with three pupils.
A true true. So so okay, so we already have
(12:48):
a couple of examples here cocullen and we have we
also have a Feedom here, and Feedom is very much
just see her, and she has eyes of prophecy, So
it's easy to see where one interpretation here is that
her eyes are unnatural because she has unnatural vision she
can see into the future. Makes sense, right sure, But
(13:09):
as as several different commentators have pointed out, this is
what this is. Another level where it got even more
interesting is that commentators have pointed out that, um, these
are also signs of beauty. So think to this passage
I just read, so uh, you know, yes, again, she
is a seer, but she's described as as being as
(13:31):
not being beautiful but possessed with weird eyes. Her triple
pupils or iris eyes are listed as part of her
beauty though you know, undeniably this connects to her attributed
powers as well. Right, So it's listed along other along
other things like having long, lustrous eyelashes and pearly teeth,
(13:51):
things that in a lot of other literature would be
just clear markers that are supposed to mean beauty. And
here it's also like and three people by that is
one of those things, right, we all know that thing? Yeah, yeah,
And this is this is I think something that makes
it so fascinating to read as a modern reader of
the text, because obviously, if you had, you know, a
(14:12):
modern work of fiction that was referring to a character
like this, everything would go in reverse, right, you would
have all that you would say, Oh, she was beautiful,
and she looked totally human, a beautiful human, except woe,
those eyes three pupils in each one. It was a
bit weird. So one of the sources that I was
looking at about this is Jacqueline the Evil Eye in
(14:33):
early Irish literature in Law two thousand and three, published
in Celtica twenty four. It provides a lot of insight
into the literary motif of the eye in Irish literature.
So she brings up, first of all, a different creature
with a unique eye, and that is the one eyed
(14:54):
giant Insoul Cache or ing Soul the Terrible, who is
described as this great giant something of a pirate I
think with possible like English origins of the time, so
you know, into in this week get like the idea
that may if there is some sort of historical basis
for this figure, maybe he was just some sort of
a pirate rater from that region. But in the mythic
(15:15):
connotation he becomes this, this this great, big giant who
not only has just this single eye in his head,
he's not only a cyclops, but it is a solid
black eye. And that solid black eye has seven pupils
within it, though I've also read descriptions where he just
has three pupils. How would it have pupils if it's solid.
The pupil is the black part of the eye. So
(15:38):
that's thoroughly confusing. Yes, so he's known for the destruction
of Dadurga Hostel. There's a whole story about this. And
so the author here is discussing Ingsul's eye and she
connects it not only with Cocolin, but also with the
High King of Ireland, Cormac McCart who is also said
to have had seven pupils in each eye. So again
(16:01):
it's just driving home that this is a recurring motif.
It's not like a one time thing that you know,
it clearly meants something and was worth repeating in the Cannon.
But but she points out that you know, in the
cases of these two heroes quote this is explicitly qualified
as a sign of beauty. And furthermore, she says that
the squinting in Cucullin's pupils is also seen as a
(16:24):
doornament rather than disfigurement. And then she also comes back
to Fedelm, the female seer of the Tuatha, to Donna
and says quote, there is no explanation offered of this characteristic,
the triple I with Fedelm. It could be a sign
of beauty, and it could be a sign of her
supernatural sight. The latter is more probable because the characteristic
(16:47):
is separated from the description of her looks by the
mention of the weaver's beam. The weaver's beam has been
interpreted as a supernatural tool for prophecy. The triple pupils
could therefore very well be a symbol of her claer
of glance. And yeah, so I'm not if I'm not
mistaken here the weaver's beam, this is part of a loom.
And so we're getting into the idea they'd like here this,
(17:09):
this piece of technology also had mystical connotations for divination.
All right? What about ing Sol though, the giant or
pirate who has a single eye which is entirely black
and also has either three or seven pupils in it, well,
she's She says that, Okay, if we're going to look
at these other examples and try and figure out Engsol,
we'll say, first of all, he's definitely not beautiful. This
(17:31):
is not a sign of his beauty. He's a rough
and horrible monster, she knows. She points out some of
the terms that are used to describe him. But his
sight is described as being sharp, he can make out
every detail of the hostile at a glance, and Boor
says that he also might connect to the legendary evil
eye of Balor, the king of the Fomorians, whose great eye,
(17:54):
when opened and when his great brow could be raised
up in some accounts, two warriors have to stand on
either side of him, put a woman wooden beam beneath
his big, saggy brow, and lift the brow up so
that the evil eye can see out an unleash destruction
on the battlefield. It could be connected to that Ballor,
(18:14):
by the way, is eventually killed by his grandson Lug
of the Tuatha de Dun, and there are multiple versions
of the Balor myth as well. Sometimes his destructive eye
is described, you know, more or less like the single
single eye of a cyclops and other times it's depicted
as more of a third eye in the center of
the head alongside two ordinary eyes. So there's just a
(18:36):
taste of the triple or sevenfold eye in Irish mythology.
And again I've even having you know, research to the
bed and laid it out in the in the outline here,
it's still just overwhelmingly mysterious and on inspiring to me.
And we're going to come back to some other traditions,
(18:56):
some other ancient writings that refer to mysterious eyes of
this nature. But at this point we're gonna we're gonna
shift into the scientific world and hopefully this will be
a fun case where the science and the myth will
sort of play off each other and each one will
make the other more fabulous. All right, well, since we're
(19:21):
talking about eyes, I think we do need to do
a quick overview of eyeball anatomy. So picture an eyeball,
rob Are you doing it? Can you can see that
eyeball in your mind's eye burning like the eye of Sauron. Okay, well,
that actually connects to something because the eye of Sauron,
you picture that, that's not just floating out in space, right,
it's sitting in a tower, that's right, And so of
course our eyeballs need some some structural scaffolding as well.
(19:44):
So the eyeball of humans it's within a bony socket
called the orbit, and the outer layer of the eyeball
itself is a tough white tissue made of collagen that's
called the sclera. This is the white part of the
eye that you can see. And then the pupil, of course,
is the black dot in the middle of the eye.
Covering the pupil on the outside is a clear layer
(20:05):
of cells known as the cornea, which both protects the eye.
It protects the iris and the pupil, and it also
helps to focus incoming light into the pupil. Actually, there
are two parts of your eyes that do focusing of
light rays. The cornea does the majority of it. I
think it does about two thirds of the focusing, and
that's the first layer. And actually, if you've listened to
(20:26):
our episodes on tiers that we did I think a
couple of months ago, you know there's something even to
the outside of the cornea, which is that thin layer
of tier film that covers the eye. It's secreted by
the lachrymal glands actually has multiple parts. That the watery
part of the tier film is secreted by the lachrymal glands,
and then there's an oily part of the tier film
(20:46):
that comes from the base of the eyelids, now coming
to the pupil. While it's tempting to think of the
pupil as a thing, the interesting truth is that the
pupil is really an absence. The pupil is the whole
or the opening through which light passes. So light comes
through the cornea and then is directed through the pupil
(21:09):
and then is focused again a second time after the
cornea by a clear structure on the inside of the eye,
the inside of the pupil that's called the lens. And
then finally, after it is focused through the lens, the
light is reflected onto the layer of sensitive cells on
the back of the inside of the eye, known as
the retina, and then the sensing cells of the retina
(21:29):
transmit the information about the light via the optic nerve
all the way to the visual cortex in the back
of the brain, where the information is made sense of
in a way that we experience as sight. So I
think what we should say is that sight happens in
the brain, which is why there are so many things
that can that can affect what we see when we
look at the world. You know, it's not just like
a video camera feed. There's there's some post processing that
(21:53):
goes on that can be affected by all kinds of
things from uh, you know, from biases and little little
tricks of how the brain works, to drugs and so so.
Sight happens in the brain, but of course light has
to go through all these stages within the eye before
it is turned into the experience of vision in the
visual cortex. You know. I just think you were talking
(22:15):
about how about the pupil being an absence and not
a thing, and I was thinking about, you know, various
there's of course the Chinese story of the magic paint brush,
and I think there are different variations on this, but
there's one in which the paint brush, whatever you paint
with it comes to life, but only after you have
added the eye or I think perhaps the you know,
(22:37):
adding the pupil slash iris of the eye, because depending
on the detail of your illustration, like the pupil in
the eye are just going to be one, right, Like
if you're painting an eye. Drawing an eye, you create
the white and then you put that black dot in
the middle to complete it, and it kind of brings
life to something. But on the other hand, I think
(22:58):
to the world of miniature paint and off there. If
anyone's never seen this, you should look it up because
it can be hilarious. When people are just figuring out
what they're doing with miniatures, they'll often want to complete
like this small you know, we're talking like a small scale, uh,
you know, soldier or something, and they'll want to put
(23:20):
eyes on it, so they'll create the white dots and
then they'll go to throw those little black dots in
there as well, often with just hilarious results. You'll end
up with just the completely ridiculous googly eyes that that are,
you know, look too big for the head and one
eyes put looking off in one direction and the other
in another direction. But we have that compulsion way like
(23:41):
we it's not real until I add, you know, the
pupil iris. We can't just have white there, we can't
just have dark there. We have to have both. Well, yeah,
I think there is actually a strong biological reason why
why having both is very important to us. You know,
we've looked at research before on how humans are very
sensitive to noticing gaze direction in other humans, to monitoring
(24:05):
the movement of other people's eyes to understand where they're looking.
That is very socially relevant information and we keep close
tabs on it even when you don't notice you're doing it. Yeah.
So if you're just see a representation of a human
and they like don't have pupils in their eyes, this
is very disturbing because it's like, well, I can't tell
where they're looking and that you know that that doesn't
(24:27):
feel good at all. And this is probably why you
know it's it's very popular in films and TV shows.
If you need a character to have a very very
other worldly air to them, just simply give them completely
black eyes or completely wide eyes, and you know they'll
have this angelic or demonic a hair about them. Oh yeah, absolutely.
The one thing I do want to come back to
(24:47):
when I said that the pupils are an absence and
I said not a thing. I mean, of course, it
depends on what you mean by thing, but I mean,
you know, they are the pinhole in a pinhole camera
without the whole the pinhole camera doesn't work. They're very important,
you've got to have them, but what they are is
an opening. Yeah, here's another weird thing. You ever think
about the fact that your eye has muscles. I don't know. Yah,
(25:10):
maybe this is one that everybody else is just fully
metabolized and it is sitting with them just fine. But
thinking about my eye muscles makes me a little woozy.
But obviously it's true. I mean, in fact, your eye
has multiple levels of muscles. And here's we're going to
come back to creatures with seven of something. So arranged
around the back of each of your eyes, on the
(25:30):
attached to the sclera, there are seven muscles, the extraocular muscles,
and these are muscles that move the eyeballs into some
degree the eyelids as well, certainly the superior eyelids. So
when you look up down side to side, up at
an angle, when you're trying to remember something, you're flexing
these muscles. Do you think Colin had seven of these?
(25:52):
Or did he have forty nine muscles on his eyeballs? Wait?
Did he have different eyes or I know, I mean
I think he only had two eyeballs. He just said
seven irises or eyeles. So these are apportioned according to eyeballs.
Not took pupils and irises. Didn't know how deep into
his anatomy the numerology went. But to get even weirder,
(26:14):
there are also muscles within the eye. There are muscles
in your eyes responsible for changing the diameter of the
pupil of that opening. So remember the pupil is basically
a hole in the function of the pupil is to
allow light to pass through the lens and onto the retina,
and the eye has to adjust the size of the
hole to help control light exposure and to focus the image.
(26:37):
A very easy example to see for yourself. Everybody probably
did this in elementary school at some point, but if
you never did, check it out sometime. Watch your pupils
in a mirror. When you're turning the lights in the
room on and off. Your pupil will dilate in a
dark room to allow more light in to become more
sensitive to less data, and when the light comes on,
(26:58):
the pupil will contract to allow less light in. Now
I was reading about what function the pupil serves because
I think the expansion and contraction of the pupil is
not only for controlling for the amount of light in
the environment. And I think it also helps control focus
of the image that you're trying to turn your gaze onto.
(27:18):
So I was reading about this in a paper by
Sebastian Methote called Pupilometry, Psychology, Physiology and Function in the
Journal of Cognition twenty eighteen, and Methote writes, quote, although
people responses likely serve many functions, not all of which
are fully understood, one important function is to optimize vision,
either for acuity small pupils see sharper and depth of
(27:42):
field small pupils see sharply at a wider range of distances,
or for sensitivity, large pupils are better able to detect
faint stimuli. And then finally says that that is, pupils
change their size to optimize vision for a particular situation.
And probably all of these are familiar to people who
have ever had to work the aperture of a film camera,
(28:06):
because you manipulate the aperture not just to respond to
different light conditions and to avoid overexposing or under exposing,
but you also do it in order to control things
like depth of field, like do you want you know
things that are both close and far away in sharp
focus are only what's up close in focus and so forth.
But to come back to those muscles within the eye,
(28:26):
what causes the expansion or contraction of the pupil is
actually the set of muscles within the iris. This is
what your iris is for. And so here's a wonderful
anatomy fact that everyone should know. When you hear a
good love song or a poem about eye color. You know,
my love, how I long to gaze into your big
(28:47):
brown eyes. The singer is technically longing to gaze into
two sphincters. What certainly makes you rethink Van Morrison's Brown
Eyed Girl? That right, Yes, speaking of which Irish singer,
why not why brown eyes instead of triple or seven
pupiled eyes? Missed opportunity? Brown Eyed Girl is a song
(29:09):
all about the appreciation of beautiful glassy sphincters glinting in
the sun. Okay, So the iris is composed of two
types of muscle. You've got the dilator muscles, and these
are long muscle fibers, you know, relatively long within the
eye at least that cause the pupil to expand when
they contract. So you can kind of think of muscles
(29:29):
like pulling and opening wider by by pulling at its edges.
And then the second type within the iris is the
sphincter muscle. This is a ring of muscle tissue around
the inner edge of the iris that shrinks the pupil
when it contracts. And so the term sphincter is of
course most famous for referring to the muscle that controls
the anus, but it actually just means any ring of
(29:52):
muscle that works to open and close a tube in
an animal body. So you actually have multiple sphincters throughout
your body, not just the anus, not just in the
anus and the irises, but also internally controlling the openings
of the stomach. By the way, we do have at
least a couple of episodes about the evolution of the
anus that we did a few years back, So if
(30:14):
anyone is interested in more information on that, then I
send you to the vault to seek those episodes out.
Oh yeah, I recall that being great fun, But but
I wanted to say, believe it or not, this tidbit
about sphincters is the sphincters of the eyes is not
just an amusing digression. This will actually play into what
I'm about to talk about, which is an extremely rare
(30:36):
medical condition in which human beings do sometimes have multiple
pupils in the same eye. And this is a condition
known as polychoria. So it's very very rare, but multiple
pupils per eye does exist in the real world, and
so as a source on this, I was looking at
a book called The Handbook of Pediatric neuro Optimology published
(30:59):
by Springer in two thousand and six by Kenneth W. Wright,
Peter H. Spiegel, and Lisa S. Thompson. According to the
authors here, there are actually two different conditions known as polychoria,
though both are referring to conditions where there is more
than one opening in the iris. They say these additional
openings tend to be due to what they call local
(31:20):
hypoplasia of the iris stroma and the pigment epithelium. So
these are the layers of tissue within the iris. The
iris stroma is the bigger middle layer and the pigment
epithelium is a layer that is what gives eyes their color,
the pigment on the back of the irises and so
(31:40):
hypoplasia within those tissues would mean a lack of cells
or an incomplete formation of the cells within those tissues. Now,
regarding the two varieties of this condition, there is true polychoria,
in which there is more than one pupil and they
each have their own iris sphincter muscle the ability to contract.
(32:02):
Then there is false polychoria or pseudo polychoria, in which
there are multiple openings in the iris, but only one
has the sphincter muscle. So the sphincter muscle is what
makes the difference. The having the sphincters around your extra
pupils is what makes it true polychoria. Both conditions are rare,
but true polychoria is much more rare. They write that
(32:24):
in almost all clinical situations the correct diagnosis is pseudo polychoria.
And given how rare polychoria is, there doesn't seem to
be a ton of accessible medical literature on it. Most
of what I did find was pretty old. I found
one report from recent years, and this was an article
published in Jamma Optimology from twenty twenty by Antoine Safie
(32:49):
and Shallenburg and Aki Kawasaki called Polychoria in a Young Girl.
This was a case report of a nine year old
girl in good health who was in for a regular
checkup with her doctor when the doctor noticed that she
had two pupils in her left eye, one regular sized
pupil in the middle and then another much smaller hole
(33:09):
in the iris just the side of the primary rob
I've attached a picture for you to look at here.
But this case was one of the extremely rare documented
cases of true polychoria because both pupils in the same
eye would contract simultaneously when exposed to light, meaning they
both had functional sphincter muscles surrounding them. And one of
(33:33):
the proposed causes of true polychoria is what the authors
call quote a sneering or pinching off from the margin
of another pupil, and that would seem to make sense
of why there would be sphincter muscles surrounding it. So
if you picture the pupil surrounded by this ring of
sphincter muscle, and then you picture part of that pupil
(33:55):
by just some kind of quirk of how the cells
are growing, part of the pupil pinched off and separated
from the other one, like the iris cells around it
kind of just come together and grow together and pinch
off part of it that would still it would still
be surrounded by those sphincter muscle cells. By the way,
and a lot of times we'll say, definitely, go do
(34:15):
an image search so you can see what we're talking
about here. I have to advise if you're doing a
search for polychoria, you will invariably turn up some actual images,
but also a lot of doctored images and like clickbait
images that don't represent anything that's actually happening in the
real biological world. If you definitely want to see a
(34:38):
real photo, you can look up the article I just
mentioned again that was in jam Optomology called polychoria in
a young Girl. It just as close ups of the
pupils and you can see them right there. Yeah, these
images are quite impressive. Though of course, I have to
say that anytime you have a close up image of
the inner workings of an eyeball, you're getting into weird
territory because it quickly becomes this strange a in the world. Now,
(35:07):
you might be tempted to wonder, WHOA if somebody has
two pupils in the same eye, how does that affect vision?
Like do they see two images out of that eye
or something? And the answer to that is no, because
what's what's creating the what's sending the light data back
to your visual cortex is the retina. So what tends
(35:29):
to result from polychoria is usually just some impairment of
vision in that eye. But it doesn't tend to, at
least as far as I've read, create any extravagant unusual effects.
More likely, if it has effects on vision, it's probably
just some reduction in the function of the eye or
impairment of vision. I mean, you kind of come back
(35:50):
to the same place where we've we've been here before,
where you you talk about site and it's something that
we know most of us take for granted. But then
when you start thinking about what's act really happening, you
know that you have these not one, but two different
eyeballs functioning, and uh and then this data is then um,
you know, reassembled and created into this stitched together into
(36:11):
this this simulated model of the world inside our heads.
It's it's pretty crazy. Well yeah, and especially because as
we said earlier, you know, vision happens in the brain.
It just makes use of data gathered with the eyes.
So the brain can actually do a lot of compensating,
adapting and adjusting based on what's going on in the
first part of the process. Right. It also reminds me
(36:33):
of talking to David Eagleman. You know, one of the
things he points out is that we're basically mister potato
heads and the more sensory tools that you plug into
the brain, like, it's just going to be integrated into
the model. So you know, it's like one eyeball, two eyeballs, Um,
if you if you were to add additional eyeballs or
additional things, that's that that fed in additional data like
(36:57):
that would be consolidated into the Yeah, he's pretty from
what I understand, he's pretty bullish on plasticity, right, And
I guess there are differences of opinion among experts on this,
like how adaptable is the adult brain, how many types
of new sensory information could a brain make use of?
But yeah, I think he's more on the end of
like we would be shocked how much the brain can
(37:20):
adapt to, right. Yeah, But then again, just coming back
to the idea that, yeah, your vision is not the
thing your eye does. Your vision is the thing your
brain does using the eyes. Right. All Right, So we're
gonna be back in the next episode. We're gonna have
more ancient ideas about multi lobed eyes. We're gonna have
We're gonna have some more science at this time from
(37:42):
the animal world and some of the strange pupils going
on out there. I did want to mention, though, briefly,
that yeah, you do have some some pretty neat pop
culture examples of multi pupil, multi irist eyes. I was
trying to think of think of them. I feel like
the ones that came to mind or are all kind
of loosely connected to each other, or they all feel
(38:04):
like they're very much within the same sort of genre
of sort of weird horror themed visionary art. I was like, Rob,
is it going to be Tool? Yeah, well it has
to be Tool, right, So like and because I guess
these were probably my first exposures to this kind of
of imagery, even though again it's it's you know, it's
clearly been around with us for a very long time.
(38:25):
But there's the Adam Jones of Tool. His art for
the The ep Opiate features something like, you know, eyes
with multiple pupils and or eyes undergoing mitosis or their
figure eight pupils. It's you know, hard to figure out
exactly what's happening in a stationary image. There's also the
(38:47):
cam de Leon album art Ocular Orifice for Tools nineteen
ninety six album Onema featuring an eye with two or
more irises and pupils, and that's one that I believe
is animated as well. So its this you get this
idea of the eye turning. Was that an album that
had some release where you'd like turn it in the
light and it would move? Yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah,
(39:08):
some of the images could be placed so that they're
they're looking out the front of the CD case and
it creates this this this movement. The real masters of
the physical release, the horror movie you talked about with
the VHS box with the light up eyes. Yeah, yeah,
they were very very much and that I mean they're
still putting out albums with that kind of gimmick rick,
which which I love. Um. Now, a film that comes
(39:31):
to mind, there's John Carpenter's in the Mouth of Madness,
which I know you you saw in the last few years. Anyway,
there's a scene in which a deranged killer, uh like
you know, crashes through the the storefront, this cafe front
with an axe and then you get a close up
of his eyes, and he seems to have they're either
like conjoined irises, or perhaps irises that are undergoing mitosis
(39:54):
that are coming together or splitting apart, or something is
going on there, and it's like a super creepy moment.
And then he starts talking about Sutter kane Um and
then of cour course, you know that's a film that's
often talked about in terms of the Lovecrafty and influences.
There's a great madness line at the end of HP
Lovecraft's story The Haunter of the Dark that reads, I
(40:16):
see it coming here, hell Win, Titan blur, black wings,
Yog so thought save me. The three lobed burning eye.
I mean, frankly, after all this talk of seven lobed
burning eyes, I feel like that's right. The same is
not that impressive. I can easily imagine the three lobe
burning eye, seven lobed. Yeah, that's too mad to even
right about. Yog Sotho arrives on Earth after millions of
(40:39):
years is like I have come to conquer runs into
ku Collin. Collin's like, I have so many more irises
than you, And that's right, Yeah, I have a Kukolin.
Could could totally whip yog sotho, no no, no question
about it. All right, Well, we're gonna go and close
it out there, but we will be back Thursday. There'll
be more I related to Wonder, more related science, so
(41:01):
tune in. In the meantime. We'd love to hear from everyone, though,
if you have thoughts about this episode, if you have
thoughts about Irish mythology, other tales that involve multiple pupils
or multiple irises in the same eye. Like I said,
we're going to mention some in the next episode, but
it's very likely. I mean it's it's I'm definitely missing something.
(41:22):
There's some sort of detail from some other folklore, mythology,
or certainly pop culture, and we would love to hear
about any of those examples. So write in and let
us know. Those episodes. Of course, core episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesday we do a short form artifact or monster fact.
On Monday we do listener Mail, and on Friday we
(41:42):
do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside
most serious matters and just discuss a strange film. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at tact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(42:11):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
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