March 18, 2023 • 44 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 03/31/2022)
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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,
which means we're going on down into the old vault
to pull out a classic episode of the show for you.
This one is from last year. This one is from
March thirty first, twenty twenty two, and it is the
Three Pupil Die Part two. This is the follow up
(00:27):
to the episode that aired last Saturday about about strange
pupils and irises in myth, legend and reality. Welcome to
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
(00:48):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In our last episode,
we discussed a common but enthralling literary motif in Irish mythology,
the triple and the sevenfold eye, three or seven pupils,
three or seven irises found in the eyes of beautiful heroes,
divine seers, destructive monsters. We also discussed the structure and
(01:13):
functionality of the human eye and the rare instances in
which we actually see double pupils in human eyes. In
this episode, we're going to explore more curious eyes from
the natural world, as well as more accounts of marvelous
eyes from ancient history and literature. But first a pop
culture update. At the end of last episode we were talking,
(01:35):
I spoke briefly about some double eyes that I remembered
from some movies, album covers, etc. Well, our good producer
Seth provided us with two additional examples of double eyes
and popular culture that we didn't think of last time.
Number one, the double irises and pupils of Aminet in
twenty seventeens. The Mummy. This is the Tom Cruise Mummy film.
(01:58):
Oh boy, did not see it, but I think this
is like the the titular Mummy, or at least one
of them. I think she is the Mummy in this film.
I'm okay, I haven't seen this one, not even on
an airplane, but I'm not opposed to it. I mean,
I've seen a lot of crummy mummy movies over the years,
and usually there's something interesting in them. Yeah, at least
sometimes you get an Arnold Foslou or something. Yeah. And
(02:22):
then the second example Seth brings up is the album
cover to Bubba by Haitian Canadian musician k Trenada featuring
the artist with otherworldly blue eyes that have double pupils,
double irises. I listened to a track from this album
while we were working on notes. It was good. I
haven't had a chance yet, but I do love the
album cover. It's pretty great now. One of the sources
(02:45):
that we mentioned in the last episode was the Evil
Eye in early Irish literature and law. This was published
in Celtica twenty four back in two thousand and three,
and this was by Jacqueline Borsch and the author of
Fergus Kelly is also cited on this paper because there's
like a part one in a part two, but I
(03:06):
believe we're we dealt with material from part one. Celtica,
the journal this is in is a scholarly journal for
Celtic studies out of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
So most of this deals of course with Irish law,
Irish traditions, Irish mythology, and despite the popularity of this
(03:26):
motif of the multiple pupils, multiple irises within the Irish tradition,
we also encounter discussions of this sort of thing in
other traditions as well, and shares a few of these
The first one comes to us from A Plenty of
The Elder and the Natural History. Plenty discusses individuals in
(03:46):
Africa said to possess quote, the power of fascination with
the eyes and can even kill those on whom they
fix their gaze for any length of time, more especially
if their look denotes anger. Now that's you're pretty basic
evil eye scenario right there. You encounter variations of this
throughout the world, based on the fact that, yes, you
(04:09):
can shoot somebody a really terrible look and you can
almost feel it. Of course, going back into the ancient world,
the belief was often that it was more than you know,
giving somebody the stink eye produced more than just a
bad feeling, that it could literally curse them or cause
them magical harm. Yes. But the neat thing here where
it ties into what we're talking about in these episodes
(04:31):
is Plenty goes on to connect this to multiple pupils quote.
A still more remarkable circumstance is the fact that these
persons have two pupils in each eye. Apollo Nides says
that there are certain females of this description in Scythia
who are known as the Bitha and Philarchus states that
(04:52):
a tribe of the theebe in Pontus, and many other
persons as well, have a double pupil in one eye
and in the other the figure of a horse. Double
pupil in one eye, the other the figure of a horse. Now,
with passages of this kind, we're often faced with the
question is this based on some distorted or exaggerated retelling
(05:13):
of something that somebody actually saw, or is it just
pure creative imagination or you know, tall tales, And it's
always interesting to wonder about the former, But ancient accounts
like Plenties are clearly full of the ladder, especially when
telling stories about peoples who live in far away parts
of the globe. You know, this section that we're quoting
(05:34):
from plenty is from I can't remember what it's called.
There's like one of his books is all about the
nations of the world, and it's just all these weird
stories of like here's a people who live somewhere far away,
and here's this strange thing they do or something that
they wear that would be fascinating to my readers. Like
there's one part where he talks about a tribe of
people somewhere who do not have heads and instead have
(05:57):
eyes in their breasts. So it need not be the
case that Plenty is necessarily here repeating a misunderstood or
exaggerated story about somebody who actually had something like polychoria
or some other unusual condition of the pupils. But of
course it is always possible. Yeah, it does make you wonder,
you know, to what extent would there be, like, you know,
(06:19):
some account of an individual with this rare condition, some
memory of this rare condition, and then it gets folded
into some of these traditions and beliefs at one point
or another in their long lives. Yes, though of course
it could again just be something somebody made up, like
the people who don't have heads and have eyes in
their breasts, right right, Like, we can dream up individuals
(06:41):
with like four arms, and it's pretty interesting and we
can draw all sorts of meaning from that, but it
doesn't mean that people with four arms ever actually existed,
you know, that there's any actual biological basis on which
that was based. Though. I do think it's really interesting
that he doesn't just say, Okay, they've got two pupils
in each eye, but that they've got two pupils in
(07:01):
one eye and in the other eye a horse. Yeah,
And like the first place my mind went was, Okay,
is it actually shaped like a horse a distortion that
is roughly horse shaped? Or is it? Does it mean
that this is like some sort of telephone game, you know,
translation game version of a horizontal pupil like one finds
in the eyeble horse. That's interesting, and that'll tie into
(07:23):
a scientific paper we're going to talk about in a bit.
I found an editor's footnote in the Bostock translation of Plenty,
which notes, quote, some of the commentators have supposed that
Plenty or Phi larcis from whom he borrows, because remember,
this isn't an original observation of Plenties, He's like copying
this from some other writing of this person named phi Larcus,
(07:44):
but Philarcus from whom he borrows. Whether they were misled
by the ambiguity of the Greek term eCos, which signifies
either a horse or a tremulous motion of the eye.
But even admitting this to be the case, the wonder
is scarcely diminished, for we have the double pupil in
(08:05):
one eye, while this supposed tremulous motion is confined to
the other. So so if Fostuck is correct there, it's
that this word had had a double meaning, and one
of them was like a you know, a quivering of
the eye. I guess I would assume that's like when
somebody's eye is twitching. But yeah, you wonder, well, why
why is it just that the other eye is twitching
when when the first eye has two pupils in it,
(08:27):
that's also strange, maybe not as strange as a horse.
I was. I was looking for answers on this as well,
and I ran across a nineteen eighteen paper titled of
the Papula duplex and Other Tokens of an Evil Eye
in the Light of Ophthalmology by Walton Brooks McDaniel, And
(08:47):
according to Brooks, here one doctor Kirby Flower Smith, a
professor of Latin and at John Hopkins University, who had
I looked VI had died in nineteen eighteen, interpreted the
Plenty passage as having some sort of connection to the
idea that the affliction of the eye was caused by
quote a horse shaped demon, horsehead masked demon. Yeah. McDaniel
(09:10):
also begins to discuss the the idea that if you know,
if you look into another eye, you know certainly with
the right lighting and so forth, you look into another
person's eye, you can see your own reflection. And so
McDaniel mentions that in some traditions that individual you see
in the eye is interpreted, you know, not as yourself,
(09:31):
but as the signifier of the soul, and that there
are even some traditions where if the individual looks in
some way inverted, that is because of witchcraft. And in
this this this is one of those weird situations where
then McDaniel mentioned something else that leads me back to
a source that I'm very familiar with, and yet I
(09:52):
totally blinked on this particular detail, or or maybe I'd
never read this one particular tale, but he ends up
referring back to Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by
Poosh song Ling. That's a show, favorite, folks. Should we
do we have a Strange Sales from a Chinese studio? Buzzer?
I doubt we do, but at any rate, it's it's
(10:12):
it's a book that I really enjoy. This is a
Ching Dynasty collection of stories that Pous song Ling collected
and retells, and you know there's a lot that's that's
lost in translation. Out of Mandarin. But but there's still
remarkable fun, sometimes funny, and sometimes it's just very strange. Uh.
Sometimes it's it's you know, it's all about what they
(10:34):
would have meant to the people who read them. But
they're a lot of fun. There's a Penguin edition of
it translation that I've I read again and again over
the years, and yet I completely blanked on this one story.
It's called Talking Pupils. I think maybe the reason that
I haven't read this one recently is sometimes i'll read
these to my son and I'll sort of glance at them,
(10:57):
and if it looks like there's something that might be
scandalous in it, or you know, a little dirty, then
I'll skip over the tale. There aren't many, but occasionally
there's one like that. So anyway, this story Talking Pupils
concerns the tale of one Feng Dong quote, a gentleman
of considerable accomplishments while at the same time having a
reputation as an unprincipled libertine. Oh yeah, so clearly that's
(11:19):
why I might have skipped over this in recent years. Anyway,
So Fang was this is how the story goes. Fang
is strolling the countryside and he happens on a fine
carriage on the road. One of the female attendants to
the carriage is quite fetching, so he moves in for
a closer look. But as he does so, he's able
to peek between the curtains of the carriage itself and
he sees a beautiful young woman within, and he's captivated.
(11:43):
The female attendant is having none of this, though, and
she verbally shames him, you know, calls him a you know,
a weirdo and a snooper. And not only does she
verbally shame him, she reaches down grabs him dust out
of the road and throws it in Fang's face. Oh,
dirty fighter. Yeah, but you know, he had it coming.
He was up to no good and he gets punished
(12:05):
for it. So he's he's initially he's trying to get
the dust out of his eyes. The carriage carries on.
When he is able to see again, you know, struggling,
the carriage is completely done. It's you know, it's vanished
around the bend or whatever. So he has heads on home,
but his eyes continue to bother him, so he seeks
some help. A friend looks into his eyes, and this
(12:26):
friend says, yeah, there's a visible film over each of
your eyeballs, and meanwhile, tears won't stop flowing. In time,
the film thickens and a spiral what is described as
a spiral shaped protuberance begins growing from his right eye,
resisting all manner of treatment. Eventually he's completely blind, and
(12:47):
you know he's he's distraught over this. But he hears
about a Buddhist sutra known as the Sutra of Light,
and it's said to be able to heal eye ailments
or ailments of this sort. So he gets a side
friend to read it to him, and he learns it
by heart, and he recites it over and over again,
and after a while it gives him solace. You know,
(13:08):
he feels a little better. His side is not back.
But then one day he begins to hear voices, two voices,
one from each of his eyeballs. Oh, I love this.
The eyeballs are talking, both of them. Well, as it
turns out, not the eyeballs but things within the eyeballs.
There's one voice within each eyeball, and they start talking
to each other, and they're talking about how dark it
(13:29):
is in their homes and how they'd really like to
just get outside and go for a stroll. And then
so pusong Ling says quote, then he felt a slight
irritation in both nostrils, as if two little creatures were
wriggling down his nose. After a while, he felt the
creatures return and make their way back up his nostrils
and into the eye sockets. Again, this is anatomically correct because,
(13:51):
as we know, the tear ducks that drain tears away
from the eyes drain into the nasal cavity, which is
why your nose when you cry. Oh very good. So
what does Feing do at this point, Well, he gets
his wife to take him to the old garden, and
he has her observe him in the garden to see
if anything like this happens again. Maybe the garden will
(14:13):
coax whatever it is out of his eyeballs. And this
is what happens. Quote. It was not long before she
saw two little mannekins, neither of them any larger than
a bean, emerged from his nose and fly buzzing out
of the door. They were soon well out of sight,
but we're back again in next to no time, flying
together up onto his face and in at his nostrils.
(14:35):
Like a pair of homing bees or ants. So is
he getting relief when they fly away? I don't think so. No. Oh,
it's just it happens, and he doesn't know what this
is about, so it keeps happening. It happens again each
day for three days, and finally one of the voices
complains that the tunnel that they're using to get out
(14:55):
of the eyeball is a bit round about and there's
got to be a better way. It's time that they
make some sort of proper doorway. So I'm going to
read the rest of this year that it really gets
to the juicy part. I'm just I'm filled with dread.
It's not a good idea when the tenants in your
eyeballs decided to start renovating on their own. Yeah, so
(15:17):
that is how it goes. The wall on my side
is very thick, replied the right eye. It won't be easy.
I'll try to make an opening on my side, said
the left eye. Then we can share my door. Presently,
Fang thought he felt a scratching and a splitting in
his left eye socket, and an instant later he could
see he could see everything around him with absolute clarity.
(15:38):
Beside himself with a delight. He promptly informed his wife,
who inspected his eyes afresh and found that in the
left eye a minute aperture had appeared in the film,
a hole no larger than a cracked peppercorn, through which
gleamed the black globe of a pupil. By the next morning,
the film in the left eye had disappeared altogether. But
(15:59):
the strangest thing of all was that, on careful inspection,
there were now two pupils visible in that eye, and
the right eye was still obscured by its spiral shaped growth. Apparently,
both of the two eye mannequins his talking pupils had
now taken up residence in the left eye. So although
Fang was still blind in one eye, he could see
(16:19):
better with his one good eye than he had ever
done with two. From that day fourth, he was a
great deal more circumspect in his behavior and acquired unimpeccable
reputation in the district. Okay, so no more creeping on
ladies and carriages. Right, he learned his lesson, He was
punished for his creepy behavior, and now he's back and
(16:40):
ready to be a good citizen with one eye that
can see better than two, right, because two pupils. Now
that this again is from the Penguin Classics edition. It's
a John Minford translation, and this was super interesting as well.
Minford shares this in the notes pupils. The traditional Chinese
expression for pupil, tong wren, means literally man in the
(17:02):
pupil from the reflection of oneself that one sees in
the eye of another. Wow. Yeah, that was that was
really that. I was really impressed by that. And I
was talking to my wife about it because I was
looking around a little bit after this and I saw
an article about photography and about being able to zoom
in on the eye of an individual in a modern
photograph and see the reflection potentially of the photographer and
(17:27):
oh yeah, because of the high resolution, I guess, yeah, yeah.
And I was asking my wife about this, and she
pointed out that one thing that photographers can do is
you can pull up, say a headshot that another photographer
is done. You can zoom in on the eye and
you can see what their lighting setup is. So I
was impressed by that as well. Oh, I'm impressed. That's
(17:49):
a real James Bond level trick. I do not know
what to make of the spiral growth though I looked
around briefly on that and I was not able to
find any answers that seemed fencing. I have no expertise
on spiral growths from eyes. All right, I want to
(18:11):
go back to Borsch for just a minute here, because
she has a couple of other examples that she brings up.
One apparently tolomeos Chinos. This would have been a figure
from the late first early second century. CE once described
a beautiful woman as being quote with a double pupil. Okay,
(18:31):
And in the last episode we talked about some legends
in which a character with multiple pupils this was assumed
to be a marker of beauty. Right, So this is
interesting because it seems to suggest that this is not
just isolated within Irish literary traditions, that perhaps somewhere else
in the world there was this idea that double pupil
(18:51):
equals beauty. And I mean, who am I to say
it's not beautiful? You know, it's not like you look
at images of actual double pupil situations and you're not
hortified by them or anything, no more so than if
you look at a super close up of any human
Eyeball also mentions that ovid portrays a woman with double
pupils having the evil eye at one point, so tying
(19:15):
back into the evil eye tradition. But anyway, Bors concludes
quote to conclude this section, Both angry eyes and eyes
with multiple pupils have been connected with the concept of
the evil eye, there is no strict identity between the phenomena.
Multiple pupils can also be a sign of beauty, sharp sight,
and clairvoyance. Okay, so we're not really converging on a
(19:36):
unity of theme here. If you're in an Irish legend
or myth and you have a character with multiple pupils
in one eye, it seems they could either be somebody
who has a lot of insight, somebody who can see
very far away, somebody who can see the future, somebody
who is beautiful, or somebody who is monstrous or can
do curses. And there is this idea too that it's
(19:59):
it's part of like the supernatural body, that when you
have some sort of a demigod figure, it's the human body.
It's almost like it mutates with the divinity within it
like the human The normal human body cannot contain this
level of power and therefore, extra things are going to happen,
you know, extra pupils, extra fingers, that sort of thing.
(20:21):
And this ties directly into another example I found, and
this one comes from Chinese traditions as well. This is
from the nineteen sixty seven book Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy,
Variations on a Theme by Hungarian born French senologist Eten
Balahs working with working from another source as well, Essay
(20:45):
on the Extinction of the Soul by Faun Shin, a
Chinese philosopher and writer who lived four fifty through five
fifteen CE. The subject here, as far as eyes are concerned,
is one of the legendary sage rulers of antiquity in China.
This would concern a time during the third millennium BC.
(21:06):
And so the structure of this paper seems to concern
like questions and answers. And so first we have this question.
The body of the sage is similar to the body
of ordinary men. Yet there is a difference by which
the sage is distinguished from ordinary men. From this, it
can be inferred that body and soul are different. Answer
not at all. Pure gold glitters and unwashed gold does
(21:30):
not pure gold. That glitters surely cannot be made of
the same unglittering material as that of unwashed gold. How
much less, then, can the soul of a sage be
lodged in a vessel such as the ordinary man. Nor
would it be possible for the soul of an ordinary
man to dwell in the body of a sage. Therefore,
(21:50):
fengg Sum is depicted as having eyebrows of eight colors,
and zong Huo's eyes with double pupils, signon as having
the face of a dragon, and tie how the mouth
of a horse, all of which are outward bodily signs
of their exceptional nature. All the seven openings were found
(22:11):
in the heart of pie Con. The gall bladder of
poe U was as big as a fist, which shows
that their inner organs were unusual. Thus we know that
certain parts of the bodies of sages are quite out
of the ordinary, and that sages are not only superior
to ordinary human beings, but also surpass all other creatures
(22:32):
in bodily form. That's just science. I love this passage
so much. I mean, I love that it's basically an
autopsy of supernatural sages, of determining how they're they're but
like you can imagine this scene in a movie. Oh yeah,
this is beautiful, the gall bladder as big as a fist,
showing that the inner organs are unusual. This is great,
(22:54):
and you know, and this is this is not a
totally unique view of the body of the holy person
or the saint. I mean, you know, there are tons
of traditions all around the world, including like the idea
that certain types of saints or holy people, because of
their spiritual nature, their bodies would be found to be say, incorruptible,
like they don't rot the way most spoties do. Yeah. So,
(23:18):
but Balais adds some notes on this and points out
that the legends about the eyebrows of eight colors and
the eyes with double pupils He's come from Mahan times
and are contained in a number of different works. So
yet another example of of of exceptional eyes in the
bodies of exceptional you know, heroic mythic individuals. Now, in
(23:40):
the last episode, we talked a bit about human eye
anatomy and some medical literature on polychoria, or the condition
of having multiple pupils within the same eye. But I
thought in this episode it would be a good idea
to turn to pupils of the animal kingdom more broadly,
because there's a lot we can learn about the function
of pupils by looking at the pupils of non human animals.
(24:03):
That's right. I mean, just consider the vast diversity we
have in the animal world, and I mean even just
dealing with the vertebrate world, it's pretty remarkable, not even
getting into compound eyes of flies and so forth. But
consider humans. We have round pupils. House cats have vertical slits,
Tigers have round pupils, Goats and horses horizontal. Dolphins have crescents,
(24:28):
cuttlefish have w shaped pupils, some frogs have heart shaped pupils,
and geckos have these sort of what looked like pinholes
arranged in a vertical line. I always love a good
crocodile pupil. Oh, yes, tend to be rather vertical. Yeah,
it's and it's also it's a window into the crocodile soul.
But seeing all this different diversity does raise some questions
(24:52):
because you think, okay, well, you know, the bodies of
animals are shaped by their environment. You know, that's what
evolution does. It tends to give you the equipment that
best helps you do whatever you need to do within
your ecological niche. So why do different animals have different pupils?
How to differently shaped or sized pupils help an animal
(25:13):
adapt to how it's supposed to survive in the world. Yeah.
According to Martin Banks, the vision scientist at the University
of California that cited in a twenty fifteen NPR story,
eye shapes of the animal world hint at differences in
our lifestyles. Land animals of sufficient height tend to have
round pupils. Thus you have big cats that have round pupils.
(25:35):
Meanwhile your small house cat cat has vertical pupils. Verticals
are more the domain, it seems, of smaller ambush predators,
giving them an excellent ability at judging distances, of which,
of course, is going to be super important when you're
pouncing out of the shadows and trying to capture like
a small rodent or your owner's foot. Horizontal pupils, on
(25:58):
the other hand, are widely under stood as a means
of keeping a wider swath of the surroundings in sight
while you're grazing, and an expanded field of view. So
you can think of this as the panoramic potential prey
view of the world, right, So I was actually looking
into this. The paper that Banks is connected with is
one that was published in twenty fifteen in Science Advances,
(26:21):
and it's by Martin Banks, William Sprague, urg And Schmall,
Jared Parnell, and Gordon Love and it's called why do
animal eyes have pupils of different shapes? And what you
say is correct. They looked into this question and they found, yeah,
there are some very strong correlations between how an animal
survives and what shape its pupils are, at least among
(26:44):
land vertebrates. And so you tend to have, like you're saying,
horizontal pupils if you are a herbivore, whereas ambush predators
predators that sit around and wait for their prey, they
tend to have vertical slits, especially if they're active of
it in both daytime and nighttime. And meanwhile, active predators,
(27:05):
predators that hunt and chase down their prey instead of
sitting and waiting, they are more likely to have round
or circular pupils. And this is not a coincidence. The
author has found some pretty good reasons why the pupils
would be allotted in these ways. So first of all,
you would have to wonder how does it work this
(27:25):
lay way, Like why would vertical pupils be useful if
you are an ambush predator, especially as you were saying,
an ambush predator of low height, because height matters. So
if you're an active predator chasing down prey, you likely
have round pupils, or if you're an ambush predator that
is taller, you probably have round pupils vertical slits of
(27:48):
what you're really likely to see if you're a sit
and wait, jump out predator and you're close to the ground.
So I want to read a section from this paper,
and there's a couple bits of terminology. To understand the
quote I'm about to read, it'll use the term stereopsis.
Stereopsis is depth perception that is created by comparing the
difference between what is seen by two different eyes focusing
(28:11):
on the same image. So we use stereopsis to judge
depth when we look at an image by the brain says, okay,
we've got two different data points of the eyes, and
it compares them together and gives you this three D
image with depth. But then the other term is defocus blur,
This refers to the blurriness and objects that are either
(28:31):
close or farther away, closer or farther away than you're focusing.
So the authors of this paper right quote, vertically elongated
pupils create astigmatic depth of field, such that images of
vertical contours nearer or farther than the distance to which
the eyes focused are sharp, whereas images of horizontal contours
(28:52):
at different distances are blurred. This is advantageous for ambush
predators to use stereopsis to estimate distance says of vertical contours,
and defocus blur to estimate distances of horizontal contours. So
rob if you'll scroll down a bit in the notes here,
I attached a picture that they put in the paper
to simulate what it looks like to a creature that's
(29:15):
gazing out at the world with vertical slit pupils, and
it's a very interesting So they've got a picture with
a toy bird sitting on the ground, presumably a foot
or two ahead of where the camera is positioned, and
then there's some objects in the foreground in in the background,
and what you'll notice about this picture is that the
(29:36):
bird is very much in tight focus, but then for
objects around it there is there is an uneven amount
of blurriness in the vertical and horizontal directions. So like
there's a plant stalk that's poking right up in the
foreground and its shape is fairly in focus when you're
looking at it height wise, you know, like the stalk
(29:57):
is sort of sort of blurry but sort of in focus.
But things in the horizontal direction, like the top of
the pot that the plant is sitting in, are very blurry.
And apparently it allows these animals to use both the stereopsis,
the comparing the two different eyes if the animal has
two front facing eyes, and the way that images are
(30:20):
blurred when they're at different levels of distance from the
object in focus to judge depth very well. So you
can really nail that bird when you jump. So sorry
if that was a little complicated, but it took me
while to understand. I was trying to figure out, like
why the vertical slits actually help with the hunting. But yeah,
I think it makes sense if you especially if you
(30:41):
look up the picture, you can say like, oh, okay,
this is yeah, this is for an animal that is
precisely trying to target a jump at something. Yeah, and
you've got one shot pulling it off. But there was
another thing noted in this pain that I thought was
really interesting, and this was actually just in the introduction,
(31:03):
but it was about advantages of slit shaped pupils over
round ones in general. So we were just talking about
vertical pupils for a load of the ground ambush predators.
But slit pupils in general can be advantageous because they
allow for much greater changes in the area of the
pupil and thus greater variation in the light conditions they
(31:25):
can adapt to. So you've got a human pupil. To
constrict a round human pupil like ours, you need that
ring shaped sphincter muscle that we talked about at length
in the last episode. But to close a slit pupil,
it uses two muscles that close the sides of the
slit together. And as a result of these morphological differences,
(31:47):
there is a different amount that you can increase or
decrease the area of the pupil and the amount of
light that it can pull in. So, to read from
the paper quote, the vertical at pupils of the domestic
cat and gecko undergo area changes of one hundred and
thirty five and three hundredfold, respectively, whereas human circular pupil
(32:10):
changes by about fifteenfold. Yeah, species that are active in
night and day need to dilate sufficiently under dim conditions
while constricting enough to prevent dazzle in daylight. So a
slit pupil provides the required dynamic range. So this is
why a slit pupil is good. It's great for high
(32:31):
dynamic range for an eye that works great in both
bright daylight and in pitch dark. And you know, I
can't help but think with smaller predators as well. I mean,
these are generally going to be creatures that are not
only predator but prey as well. So it's not like
they can just hold up, you know, all day. I mean,
they may try to hold up all day, but they
(32:51):
might need to play the survival game during daylight as well,
assuming they're not actively hunting during the day as well
of course, right right, So, yes, a slit pupil is
great for being highly adaptable to whatever the light situation is,
But the directional orientation of the slit depends more on
your ecological niche like you were talking about earlier. So again, yeah,
(33:12):
the grazing herbivores, like horses, they will have horizontal slits
to help them keep a panoramic view of the environment
and watch for movement or predators approaching. But another interesting
finding of the authors here, these pupil orientations for herbivores
only work if the animal keeps the pupil parallel to
the horizon, and grazing herbivores actually spend much of their
(33:35):
time with their heads bent down to the ground eating grass.
So what gives there? Well, the researchers looked into this
and they found that, in fact, when horses bind down
to graze, they rotate their eyes within the sockets to
keep the pupils parallel to the horizon. And Martin Banks
(33:56):
in that NPR article he gives a quote pointing out
that this is weird because the eyes have to rotate
in opposite directions, you know, think about the eyes on
opposite side. So yeah, and apparently they couldn't find any
references to anybody ever writing about this before, which is
funny given how much time people spend around horses. But yeah,
so that's what horses do when they've been down to
the grass. Their eyes swivel in the sockets to maintain
(34:20):
the pupil slit as parallel to the horizon. Wow, this
is another one of the I don't know, we've we've
talked about this before, and you know, imagining alien life
forms and so forth, but also getting into just ideas
of consciousness, like how much of our our understanding of
ourselves in the world seems to come down to how
we view the world and how we focus attention um
(34:43):
and yet to try and put yourself in the mindset
of a mind that is that perceives the world in
this manner that you know, that that has eyes that
are always focused on the horizon in order to get
this panoramic view of all the potential threats that could
be interfered with they're feeding one lass. Funny note that
was in that NPR coverage of this paper was about
(35:05):
depictions of dinosaurs in Jurassic World and other movies. So
you know, you've got this some kind of giga predator dinosaur.
It's just like the ultimate what do they call it
in Jurassic World. It was like the Killer Rex or
so this is the this is the Hannibal electro one, Yeah,
Kilamus maximus, yeah, something like that. Yeah. Well, they talk
(35:26):
about the temptation to depict predators like this with vertical
slits for eyes, because I think we correctly detect that
as a predatory trait. You look at a crocodile's eyes,
it's got these creepy vertical slits, and that makes sense
because a crocodile is an ambush predator that operates low
to the ground. But they say, actually this, you know,
(35:46):
the Kilamus maximus dinosaur is an active predator and it's
very tall, so it would probably have round pupils like ours.
And the funny thing is, you can't even use the
frog excuse, like oftentimes that is used to excuse sort
of stuck in the mud depictions of dinosaurs in the
Durassic Park Traffic Jurassic World movies. They'll say, well, you
(36:08):
have to remember they also used frog DNA, So the
fact that they don't have feathers that has to do
with the frog DNA. But it was the frog DNA,
then perhaps they would all have heart shaped pupils depending
on the type of frogs that were used. Right, Yeah,
And that brings us back to the next thing, which is,
so we were talking about the orientations of slit shaped
pupils versus round pupils in terrestrial vertebrates. But when you
(36:30):
start looking at the eyes there are the pupils of
animals that live in the water. You starts even weirder
shapes in dolphins and cuttlefish and all kinds of things
have these strangely shaped pupils. Yeah. The cuttlefish pupil especially
is very fascinating to look at. Definitely look up a
picture of it if you're not picturing it right now.
(36:51):
It looks like this WAVYW. It looks kind of like,
you know, the face on the Pringles can. Is that
mister Pringles, Doctor Pringles, I can't remember, doctor Pringles. Man,
which is that Governor Pringles? Governor Pringles, yes, Senator Pringles, Yes,
we have Walter K. Pringles. He has a mustache and
(37:13):
um under under certain light conditions, the cuttlefish eye looks
like that mustache in my opinion. But the interesting thing
is that, yes it has the cuttlefish ye has this
signature W shape in bright light, but it's actually circular
in low light. According to the W shaped pupil in
cuttlefish by a math ger at All, published in Vision
(37:35):
Research in twenty thirteen. The two main theories um were
that the shape is either for camouflage, so it's just
it has a weird pupil because it's doing all sorts
of strange things with its chromatic force to you know,
to change its its appearance and therefore it has you know,
strange things going on as high as well, or that
(37:56):
it has to do with distance calculations. It's coming down
to some of the same factors that we just discussed
in terms of vertical and horizontal pupils. But in this case,
the researchers proposed that the w shaped pupil might aid
in balancing out the vertically uneven light field of its
natural habitat m Okay, So here's a quote from from
(38:19):
that paper. Quote. While an animal's retina can deal with
a wide range of light intensities in one scene, reducing
this range would limit the need for rapid local adaptation
during vertical gaze shifts. Since cuttlefish do not have an
instant three sixty field of view, they must rely on
(38:40):
gaze shifts to provide them with the complete view of
the surrounding world. Okay, so they have to move their
eyes to look around them, right, and you know, in
this we have to think about light in the aquatic world,
you know, where you know, the ever present darkness of
the depths and then the periodic light field a realm
(39:01):
of the upper depth. And if you're something like cuttlefish,
you're having to navigate both. And it kind of comes
down to some of the ideas we're discussing with with
with load of the ground predators. You know, you have
to sort of be adaptable to both realms, but in
this case you need to be able to to simultaneously
deal with the light in the darkness. By the way,
(39:25):
coming out of the water for a second, the gecko
pupil I was reading about essentially as a vertical pupil
aiding in a nocturnal ambush predator's lifestyle. But it does
look really cool and they are apparently really incredible hunting
eyes according to some of the articles that I looked at.
But then, oh, another aquatic eye of note is the
dolphin pupil, and it's it's interesting that while it resembles
(39:50):
a horseshoe or crescent, when it's fully dilated, it constricts
down to two tiny openings that are sometimes referred to
as a double bowl. Pupil um, and this apparently comes
down to the fact that the eye the pupil shape
who with dolphins has to do with dolphins or noted
for having exceptional vision both in and out of the water.
(40:11):
They know, they're they're they're they're able to to position
their bodies so that they're gazing out of the water,
and they have great vision in that circumstance as well.
But I included a photograph here for you, Joe, and
I encourage listeners to look this up as well. Um.
The first picture shows the horseshoe pupil, and then the
second picture shows the double pupil when everything's fully constricted. Yeah,
(40:33):
it does look amazing though, if you do look up
scientific diagrams of the eye. I think what these are
explaining that's normally happening is like that the the sort
of horseshoe or or U shaped pupil when it constricts,
what it actually constricts down to is something that looks
kind of like two earbuds connected by a wire, and
(40:54):
the wire is just very narrow. Yes. Yes, now some
of you might be wondering, Okay, you're talking about mythic
figures with strange eyes, and now we've we've talked about
a number of different real life organisms that have some
sort of interesting eyes going on. Is it possible that
that that the myth makers and the storytellers of old
(41:15):
were inspired by eyes they saw in nature. And I
didn't really find anybody talking about this, I mean outside
of Yes, if you're watching some sort of modern show
and reptile people show up and they have vertical slits
and their eyeballs, yes, obviously somebody decided let's give them
reptile eyes. Um. Though again, if they're reptile people, I mean,
(41:35):
if they're like, I don't know, five six feet tall
or something, they should probably have round eyes. What if
they crawl around on their bellies all the time that's
how they hunt. Oh oh, okay, then yeah, vertical slits,
go for it. But I was thinking, Okay, the cuttlefish
has this amazing looking eye. Any possibility there, well, I mean,
(41:55):
the common or European cuttlefish can be found in Irish waters,
and cuttlefish shells or cuttlefish bones were used as ornaments
by the Celts, according to DJ Conway in the book
Celtic Magic Ireland. However, it's famously light on reptile species,
So I don't think geckos would have had an impact
on any literary motifs. And and ultimately, I don't think
(42:17):
anybody was pulling up any cuttlefish and checking out their
their eyeballs either or you know, I've I found nothing
to suggest that, but my mind went there, so I
thought i'd mentioned it to everybody. You know, I think
this show is a safe place to admit research dead ends.
Sometimes we just got to do that. Yeah, unless there's
a paper out there I'm missing, And if so, as always,
if there's something we've missed, right in and let us know,
(42:40):
we would love to be corrected. Well, should we tighten
the sphincter, constrict the pupil on this one, that's right, book,
what's what we should do. We should limit the light
coming in at this point. But we'd love to hear
from everyone out there. If there are particular mythic figures,
literary figures, pop culture examples of of multi pupil, multi irist,
(43:02):
multi lobed eyes, right in and let us know about them,
Send some pictures if they exist. We would love to
hear from you. Likewise, if there are other you know,
we really only spend a little bit of time here
with the animal world. There's so many fascinating animal eyes
out there, so if there are examples that you're particularly
fond of right in, let us know. And then, of
(43:23):
course there are other areas of this that we've just
touched on in these two episodes that we could easily
come back and discuss more about, like oh, the evil
Eye as we were discussing like that could be its
own deep dive on the show, no doubt, all right.
In the meantime, if you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, it publishes
every Tuesday and Thursday, core episodes. In the Stuff to
(43:45):
Blow Your Mind podcast feed, we have listener mail episodes
on Monday, short form Artifact or Monster Fact episodes on Wednesday,
and on Friday we do Weird House Cinema. That's our
time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk
about a strange motion picture. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
(44:06):
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 contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
(44:27):
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're 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,
which means we're going on down into the old vault
to pull out a classic episode of the show for you.
This one is from last year. This one is from
March thirty first, twenty twenty two, and it is the
Three Pupil Die Part two. This is the follow up
(00:27):
to the episode that aired last Saturday about about strange
pupils and irises in myth, legend and reality. Welcome to
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
(00:48):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In our last episode,
we discussed a common but enthralling literary motif in Irish mythology,
the triple and the sevenfold eye, three or seven pupils,
three or seven irises found in the eyes of beautiful heroes,
divine seers, destructive monsters. We also discussed the structure and
(01:13):
functionality of the human eye and the rare instances in
which we actually see double pupils in human eyes. In
this episode, we're going to explore more curious eyes from
the natural world, as well as more accounts of marvelous
eyes from ancient history and literature. But first a pop
culture update. At the end of last episode we were talking,
(01:35):
I spoke briefly about some double eyes that I remembered
from some movies, album covers, etc. Well, our good producer
Seth provided us with two additional examples of double eyes
and popular culture that we didn't think of last time.
Number one, the double irises and pupils of Aminet in
twenty seventeens. The Mummy. This is the Tom Cruise Mummy film.
(01:58):
Oh boy, did not see it, but I think this
is like the the titular Mummy, or at least one
of them. I think she is the Mummy in this film.
I'm okay, I haven't seen this one, not even on
an airplane, but I'm not opposed to it. I mean,
I've seen a lot of crummy mummy movies over the years,
and usually there's something interesting in them. Yeah, at least
sometimes you get an Arnold Foslou or something. Yeah. And
(02:22):
then the second example Seth brings up is the album
cover to Bubba by Haitian Canadian musician k Trenada featuring
the artist with otherworldly blue eyes that have double pupils,
double irises. I listened to a track from this album
while we were working on notes. It was good. I
haven't had a chance yet, but I do love the
album cover. It's pretty great now. One of the sources
(02:45):
that we mentioned in the last episode was the Evil
Eye in early Irish literature and law. This was published
in Celtica twenty four back in two thousand and three,
and this was by Jacqueline Borsch and the author of
Fergus Kelly is also cited on this paper because there's
like a part one in a part two, but I
(03:06):
believe we're we dealt with material from part one. Celtica,
the journal this is in is a scholarly journal for
Celtic studies out of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
So most of this deals of course with Irish law,
Irish traditions, Irish mythology, and despite the popularity of this
(03:26):
motif of the multiple pupils, multiple irises within the Irish tradition,
we also encounter discussions of this sort of thing in
other traditions as well, and shares a few of these
The first one comes to us from A Plenty of
The Elder and the Natural History. Plenty discusses individuals in
(03:46):
Africa said to possess quote, the power of fascination with
the eyes and can even kill those on whom they
fix their gaze for any length of time, more especially
if their look denotes anger. Now that's you're pretty basic
evil eye scenario right there. You encounter variations of this
throughout the world, based on the fact that, yes, you
(04:09):
can shoot somebody a really terrible look and you can
almost feel it. Of course, going back into the ancient world,
the belief was often that it was more than you know,
giving somebody the stink eye produced more than just a
bad feeling, that it could literally curse them or cause
them magical harm. Yes. But the neat thing here where
it ties into what we're talking about in these episodes
(04:31):
is Plenty goes on to connect this to multiple pupils quote.
A still more remarkable circumstance is the fact that these
persons have two pupils in each eye. Apollo Nides says
that there are certain females of this description in Scythia
who are known as the Bitha and Philarchus states that
(04:52):
a tribe of the theebe in Pontus, and many other
persons as well, have a double pupil in one eye
and in the other the figure of a horse. Double
pupil in one eye, the other the figure of a horse. Now,
with passages of this kind, we're often faced with the
question is this based on some distorted or exaggerated retelling
(05:13):
of something that somebody actually saw, or is it just
pure creative imagination or you know, tall tales, And it's
always interesting to wonder about the former, But ancient accounts
like Plenties are clearly full of the ladder, especially when
telling stories about peoples who live in far away parts
of the globe. You know, this section that we're quoting
(05:34):
from plenty is from I can't remember what it's called.
There's like one of his books is all about the
nations of the world, and it's just all these weird
stories of like here's a people who live somewhere far away,
and here's this strange thing they do or something that
they wear that would be fascinating to my readers. Like
there's one part where he talks about a tribe of
people somewhere who do not have heads and instead have
(05:57):
eyes in their breasts. So it need not be the
case that Plenty is necessarily here repeating a misunderstood or
exaggerated story about somebody who actually had something like polychoria
or some other unusual condition of the pupils. But of
course it is always possible. Yeah, it does make you wonder,
you know, to what extent would there be, like, you know,
(06:19):
some account of an individual with this rare condition, some
memory of this rare condition, and then it gets folded
into some of these traditions and beliefs at one point
or another in their long lives. Yes, though of course
it could again just be something somebody made up, like
the people who don't have heads and have eyes in
their breasts, right right, Like, we can dream up individuals
(06:41):
with like four arms, and it's pretty interesting and we
can draw all sorts of meaning from that, but it
doesn't mean that people with four arms ever actually existed,
you know, that there's any actual biological basis on which
that was based. Though. I do think it's really interesting
that he doesn't just say, Okay, they've got two pupils
in each eye, but that they've got two pupils in
(07:01):
one eye and in the other eye a horse. Yeah,
And like the first place my mind went was, Okay,
is it actually shaped like a horse a distortion that
is roughly horse shaped? Or is it? Does it mean
that this is like some sort of telephone game, you know,
translation game version of a horizontal pupil like one finds
in the eyeble horse. That's interesting, and that'll tie into
(07:23):
a scientific paper we're going to talk about in a bit.
I found an editor's footnote in the Bostock translation of Plenty,
which notes, quote, some of the commentators have supposed that
Plenty or Phi larcis from whom he borrows, because remember,
this isn't an original observation of Plenties, He's like copying
this from some other writing of this person named phi Larcus,
(07:44):
but Philarcus from whom he borrows. Whether they were misled
by the ambiguity of the Greek term eCos, which signifies
either a horse or a tremulous motion of the eye.
But even admitting this to be the case, the wonder
is scarcely diminished, for we have the double pupil in
(08:05):
one eye, while this supposed tremulous motion is confined to
the other. So so if Fostuck is correct there, it's
that this word had had a double meaning, and one
of them was like a you know, a quivering of
the eye. I guess I would assume that's like when
somebody's eye is twitching. But yeah, you wonder, well, why
why is it just that the other eye is twitching
when when the first eye has two pupils in it,
(08:27):
that's also strange, maybe not as strange as a horse.
I was. I was looking for answers on this as well,
and I ran across a nineteen eighteen paper titled of
the Papula duplex and Other Tokens of an Evil Eye
in the Light of Ophthalmology by Walton Brooks McDaniel, And
(08:47):
according to Brooks, here one doctor Kirby Flower Smith, a
professor of Latin and at John Hopkins University, who had
I looked VI had died in nineteen eighteen, interpreted the
Plenty passage as having some sort of connection to the
idea that the affliction of the eye was caused by
quote a horse shaped demon, horsehead masked demon. Yeah. McDaniel
(09:10):
also begins to discuss the the idea that if you know,
if you look into another eye, you know certainly with
the right lighting and so forth, you look into another
person's eye, you can see your own reflection. And so
McDaniel mentions that in some traditions that individual you see
in the eye is interpreted, you know, not as yourself,
(09:31):
but as the signifier of the soul, and that there
are even some traditions where if the individual looks in
some way inverted, that is because of witchcraft. And in
this this this is one of those weird situations where
then McDaniel mentioned something else that leads me back to
a source that I'm very familiar with, and yet I
(09:52):
totally blinked on this particular detail, or or maybe I'd
never read this one particular tale, but he ends up
referring back to Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by
Poosh song Ling. That's a show, favorite, folks. Should we
do we have a Strange Sales from a Chinese studio? Buzzer?
I doubt we do, but at any rate, it's it's
(10:12):
it's a book that I really enjoy. This is a
Ching Dynasty collection of stories that Pous song Ling collected
and retells, and you know there's a lot that's that's
lost in translation. Out of Mandarin. But but there's still
remarkable fun, sometimes funny, and sometimes it's just very strange. Uh.
Sometimes it's it's you know, it's all about what they
(10:34):
would have meant to the people who read them. But
they're a lot of fun. There's a Penguin edition of
it translation that I've I read again and again over
the years, and yet I completely blanked on this one story.
It's called Talking Pupils. I think maybe the reason that
I haven't read this one recently is sometimes i'll read
these to my son and I'll sort of glance at them,
(10:57):
and if it looks like there's something that might be
scandalous in it, or you know, a little dirty, then
I'll skip over the tale. There aren't many, but occasionally
there's one like that. So anyway, this story Talking Pupils
concerns the tale of one Feng Dong quote, a gentleman
of considerable accomplishments while at the same time having a
reputation as an unprincipled libertine. Oh yeah, so clearly that's
(11:19):
why I might have skipped over this in recent years. Anyway,
So Fang was this is how the story goes. Fang
is strolling the countryside and he happens on a fine
carriage on the road. One of the female attendants to
the carriage is quite fetching, so he moves in for
a closer look. But as he does so, he's able
to peek between the curtains of the carriage itself and
he sees a beautiful young woman within, and he's captivated.
(11:43):
The female attendant is having none of this, though, and
she verbally shames him, you know, calls him a you know,
a weirdo and a snooper. And not only does she
verbally shame him, she reaches down grabs him dust out
of the road and throws it in Fang's face. Oh,
dirty fighter. Yeah, but you know, he had it coming.
He was up to no good and he gets punished
(12:05):
for it. So he's he's initially he's trying to get
the dust out of his eyes. The carriage carries on.
When he is able to see again, you know, struggling,
the carriage is completely done. It's you know, it's vanished
around the bend or whatever. So he has heads on home,
but his eyes continue to bother him, so he seeks
some help. A friend looks into his eyes, and this
(12:26):
friend says, yeah, there's a visible film over each of
your eyeballs, and meanwhile, tears won't stop flowing. In time,
the film thickens and a spiral what is described as
a spiral shaped protuberance begins growing from his right eye,
resisting all manner of treatment. Eventually he's completely blind, and
(12:47):
you know he's he's distraught over this. But he hears
about a Buddhist sutra known as the Sutra of Light,
and it's said to be able to heal eye ailments
or ailments of this sort. So he gets a side
friend to read it to him, and he learns it
by heart, and he recites it over and over again,
and after a while it gives him solace. You know,
(13:08):
he feels a little better. His side is not back.
But then one day he begins to hear voices, two voices,
one from each of his eyeballs. Oh, I love this.
The eyeballs are talking, both of them. Well, as it
turns out, not the eyeballs but things within the eyeballs.
There's one voice within each eyeball, and they start talking
to each other, and they're talking about how dark it
(13:29):
is in their homes and how they'd really like to
just get outside and go for a stroll. And then
so pusong Ling says quote, then he felt a slight
irritation in both nostrils, as if two little creatures were
wriggling down his nose. After a while, he felt the
creatures return and make their way back up his nostrils
and into the eye sockets. Again, this is anatomically correct because,
(13:51):
as we know, the tear ducks that drain tears away
from the eyes drain into the nasal cavity, which is
why your nose when you cry. Oh very good. So
what does Feing do at this point, Well, he gets
his wife to take him to the old garden, and
he has her observe him in the garden to see
if anything like this happens again. Maybe the garden will
(14:13):
coax whatever it is out of his eyeballs. And this
is what happens. Quote. It was not long before she
saw two little mannekins, neither of them any larger than
a bean, emerged from his nose and fly buzzing out
of the door. They were soon well out of sight,
but we're back again in next to no time, flying
together up onto his face and in at his nostrils.
(14:35):
Like a pair of homing bees or ants. So is
he getting relief when they fly away? I don't think so. No. Oh,
it's just it happens, and he doesn't know what this
is about, so it keeps happening. It happens again each
day for three days, and finally one of the voices
complains that the tunnel that they're using to get out
(14:55):
of the eyeball is a bit round about and there's
got to be a better way. It's time that they
make some sort of proper doorway. So I'm going to
read the rest of this year that it really gets
to the juicy part. I'm just I'm filled with dread.
It's not a good idea when the tenants in your
eyeballs decided to start renovating on their own. Yeah, so
(15:17):
that is how it goes. The wall on my side
is very thick, replied the right eye. It won't be easy.
I'll try to make an opening on my side, said
the left eye. Then we can share my door. Presently,
Fang thought he felt a scratching and a splitting in
his left eye socket, and an instant later he could
see he could see everything around him with absolute clarity.
(15:38):
Beside himself with a delight. He promptly informed his wife,
who inspected his eyes afresh and found that in the
left eye a minute aperture had appeared in the film,
a hole no larger than a cracked peppercorn, through which
gleamed the black globe of a pupil. By the next morning,
the film in the left eye had disappeared altogether. But
(15:59):
the strangest thing of all was that, on careful inspection,
there were now two pupils visible in that eye, and
the right eye was still obscured by its spiral shaped growth. Apparently,
both of the two eye mannequins his talking pupils had
now taken up residence in the left eye. So although
Fang was still blind in one eye, he could see
(16:19):
better with his one good eye than he had ever
done with two. From that day fourth, he was a
great deal more circumspect in his behavior and acquired unimpeccable
reputation in the district. Okay, so no more creeping on
ladies and carriages. Right, he learned his lesson, He was
punished for his creepy behavior, and now he's back and
(16:40):
ready to be a good citizen with one eye that
can see better than two, right, because two pupils. Now
that this again is from the Penguin Classics edition. It's
a John Minford translation, and this was super interesting as well.
Minford shares this in the notes pupils. The traditional Chinese
expression for pupil, tong wren, means literally man in the
(17:02):
pupil from the reflection of oneself that one sees in
the eye of another. Wow. Yeah, that was that was
really that. I was really impressed by that. And I
was talking to my wife about it because I was
looking around a little bit after this and I saw
an article about photography and about being able to zoom
in on the eye of an individual in a modern
photograph and see the reflection potentially of the photographer and
(17:27):
oh yeah, because of the high resolution, I guess, yeah, yeah.
And I was asking my wife about this, and she
pointed out that one thing that photographers can do is
you can pull up, say a headshot that another photographer
is done. You can zoom in on the eye and
you can see what their lighting setup is. So I
was impressed by that as well. Oh, I'm impressed. That's
(17:49):
a real James Bond level trick. I do not know
what to make of the spiral growth though I looked
around briefly on that and I was not able to
find any answers that seemed fencing. I have no expertise
on spiral growths from eyes. All right, I want to
(18:11):
go back to Borsch for just a minute here, because
she has a couple of other examples that she brings up.
One apparently tolomeos Chinos. This would have been a figure
from the late first early second century. CE once described
a beautiful woman as being quote with a double pupil. Okay,
(18:31):
And in the last episode we talked about some legends
in which a character with multiple pupils this was assumed
to be a marker of beauty. Right, So this is
interesting because it seems to suggest that this is not
just isolated within Irish literary traditions, that perhaps somewhere else
in the world there was this idea that double pupil
(18:51):
equals beauty. And I mean, who am I to say
it's not beautiful? You know, it's not like you look
at images of actual double pupil situations and you're not
hortified by them or anything, no more so than if
you look at a super close up of any human
Eyeball also mentions that ovid portrays a woman with double
pupils having the evil eye at one point, so tying
(19:15):
back into the evil eye tradition. But anyway, Bors concludes
quote to conclude this section, Both angry eyes and eyes
with multiple pupils have been connected with the concept of
the evil eye, there is no strict identity between the phenomena.
Multiple pupils can also be a sign of beauty, sharp sight,
and clairvoyance. Okay, so we're not really converging on a
(19:36):
unity of theme here. If you're in an Irish legend
or myth and you have a character with multiple pupils
in one eye, it seems they could either be somebody
who has a lot of insight, somebody who can see
very far away, somebody who can see the future, somebody
who is beautiful, or somebody who is monstrous or can
do curses. And there is this idea too that it's
(19:59):
it's part of like the supernatural body, that when you
have some sort of a demigod figure, it's the human body.
It's almost like it mutates with the divinity within it
like the human The normal human body cannot contain this
level of power and therefore, extra things are going to happen,
you know, extra pupils, extra fingers, that sort of thing.
(20:21):
And this ties directly into another example I found, and
this one comes from Chinese traditions as well. This is
from the nineteen sixty seven book Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy,
Variations on a Theme by Hungarian born French senologist Eten
Balahs working with working from another source as well, Essay
(20:45):
on the Extinction of the Soul by Faun Shin, a
Chinese philosopher and writer who lived four fifty through five
fifteen CE. The subject here, as far as eyes are concerned,
is one of the legendary sage rulers of antiquity in China.
This would concern a time during the third millennium BC.
(21:06):
And so the structure of this paper seems to concern
like questions and answers. And so first we have this question.
The body of the sage is similar to the body
of ordinary men. Yet there is a difference by which
the sage is distinguished from ordinary men. From this, it
can be inferred that body and soul are different. Answer
not at all. Pure gold glitters and unwashed gold does
(21:30):
not pure gold. That glitters surely cannot be made of
the same unglittering material as that of unwashed gold. How
much less, then, can the soul of a sage be
lodged in a vessel such as the ordinary man. Nor
would it be possible for the soul of an ordinary
man to dwell in the body of a sage. Therefore,
(21:50):
fengg Sum is depicted as having eyebrows of eight colors,
and zong Huo's eyes with double pupils, signon as having
the face of a dragon, and tie how the mouth
of a horse, all of which are outward bodily signs
of their exceptional nature. All the seven openings were found
(22:11):
in the heart of pie Con. The gall bladder of
poe U was as big as a fist, which shows
that their inner organs were unusual. Thus we know that
certain parts of the bodies of sages are quite out
of the ordinary, and that sages are not only superior
to ordinary human beings, but also surpass all other creatures
(22:32):
in bodily form. That's just science. I love this passage
so much. I mean, I love that it's basically an
autopsy of supernatural sages, of determining how they're they're but
like you can imagine this scene in a movie. Oh yeah,
this is beautiful, the gall bladder as big as a fist,
showing that the inner organs are unusual. This is great,
(22:54):
and you know, and this is this is not a
totally unique view of the body of the holy person
or the saint. I mean, you know, there are tons
of traditions all around the world, including like the idea
that certain types of saints or holy people, because of
their spiritual nature, their bodies would be found to be say, incorruptible,
like they don't rot the way most spoties do. Yeah. So,
(23:18):
but Balais adds some notes on this and points out
that the legends about the eyebrows of eight colors and
the eyes with double pupils He's come from Mahan times
and are contained in a number of different works. So
yet another example of of of exceptional eyes in the
bodies of exceptional you know, heroic mythic individuals. Now, in
(23:40):
the last episode, we talked a bit about human eye
anatomy and some medical literature on polychoria, or the condition
of having multiple pupils within the same eye. But I
thought in this episode it would be a good idea
to turn to pupils of the animal kingdom more broadly,
because there's a lot we can learn about the function
of pupils by looking at the pupils of non human animals.
(24:03):
That's right. I mean, just consider the vast diversity we
have in the animal world, and I mean even just
dealing with the vertebrate world, it's pretty remarkable, not even
getting into compound eyes of flies and so forth. But
consider humans. We have round pupils. House cats have vertical slits,
Tigers have round pupils, Goats and horses horizontal. Dolphins have crescents,
(24:28):
cuttlefish have w shaped pupils, some frogs have heart shaped pupils,
and geckos have these sort of what looked like pinholes
arranged in a vertical line. I always love a good
crocodile pupil. Oh, yes, tend to be rather vertical. Yeah,
it's and it's also it's a window into the crocodile soul.
But seeing all this different diversity does raise some questions
(24:52):
because you think, okay, well, you know, the bodies of
animals are shaped by their environment. You know, that's what
evolution does. It tends to give you the equipment that
best helps you do whatever you need to do within
your ecological niche. So why do different animals have different pupils?
How to differently shaped or sized pupils help an animal
(25:13):
adapt to how it's supposed to survive in the world. Yeah.
According to Martin Banks, the vision scientist at the University
of California that cited in a twenty fifteen NPR story,
eye shapes of the animal world hint at differences in
our lifestyles. Land animals of sufficient height tend to have
round pupils. Thus you have big cats that have round pupils.
(25:35):
Meanwhile your small house cat cat has vertical pupils. Verticals
are more the domain, it seems, of smaller ambush predators,
giving them an excellent ability at judging distances, of which,
of course, is going to be super important when you're
pouncing out of the shadows and trying to capture like
a small rodent or your owner's foot. Horizontal pupils, on
(25:58):
the other hand, are widely under stood as a means
of keeping a wider swath of the surroundings in sight
while you're grazing, and an expanded field of view. So
you can think of this as the panoramic potential prey
view of the world, right, So I was actually looking
into this. The paper that Banks is connected with is
one that was published in twenty fifteen in Science Advances,
(26:21):
and it's by Martin Banks, William Sprague, urg And Schmall,
Jared Parnell, and Gordon Love and it's called why do
animal eyes have pupils of different shapes? And what you
say is correct. They looked into this question and they found, yeah,
there are some very strong correlations between how an animal
survives and what shape its pupils are, at least among
(26:44):
land vertebrates. And so you tend to have, like you're saying,
horizontal pupils if you are a herbivore, whereas ambush predators
predators that sit around and wait for their prey, they
tend to have vertical slits, especially if they're active of
it in both daytime and nighttime. And meanwhile, active predators,
(27:05):
predators that hunt and chase down their prey instead of
sitting and waiting, they are more likely to have round
or circular pupils. And this is not a coincidence. The
author has found some pretty good reasons why the pupils
would be allotted in these ways. So first of all,
you would have to wonder how does it work this
(27:25):
lay way, Like why would vertical pupils be useful if
you are an ambush predator, especially as you were saying,
an ambush predator of low height, because height matters. So
if you're an active predator chasing down prey, you likely
have round pupils, or if you're an ambush predator that
is taller, you probably have round pupils vertical slits of
(27:48):
what you're really likely to see if you're a sit
and wait, jump out predator and you're close to the ground.
So I want to read a section from this paper,
and there's a couple bits of terminology. To understand the
quote I'm about to read, it'll use the term stereopsis.
Stereopsis is depth perception that is created by comparing the
difference between what is seen by two different eyes focusing
(28:11):
on the same image. So we use stereopsis to judge
depth when we look at an image by the brain says, okay,
we've got two different data points of the eyes, and
it compares them together and gives you this three D
image with depth. But then the other term is defocus blur,
This refers to the blurriness and objects that are either
(28:31):
close or farther away, closer or farther away than you're focusing.
So the authors of this paper right quote, vertically elongated
pupils create astigmatic depth of field, such that images of
vertical contours nearer or farther than the distance to which
the eyes focused are sharp, whereas images of horizontal contours
(28:52):
at different distances are blurred. This is advantageous for ambush
predators to use stereopsis to estimate distance says of vertical contours,
and defocus blur to estimate distances of horizontal contours. So
rob if you'll scroll down a bit in the notes here,
I attached a picture that they put in the paper
to simulate what it looks like to a creature that's
(29:15):
gazing out at the world with vertical slit pupils, and
it's a very interesting So they've got a picture with
a toy bird sitting on the ground, presumably a foot
or two ahead of where the camera is positioned, and
then there's some objects in the foreground in in the background,
and what you'll notice about this picture is that the
(29:36):
bird is very much in tight focus, but then for
objects around it there is there is an uneven amount
of blurriness in the vertical and horizontal directions. So like
there's a plant stalk that's poking right up in the
foreground and its shape is fairly in focus when you're
looking at it height wise, you know, like the stalk
(29:57):
is sort of sort of blurry but sort of in focus.
But things in the horizontal direction, like the top of
the pot that the plant is sitting in, are very blurry.
And apparently it allows these animals to use both the stereopsis,
the comparing the two different eyes if the animal has
two front facing eyes, and the way that images are
(30:20):
blurred when they're at different levels of distance from the
object in focus to judge depth very well. So you
can really nail that bird when you jump. So sorry
if that was a little complicated, but it took me
while to understand. I was trying to figure out, like
why the vertical slits actually help with the hunting. But yeah,
I think it makes sense if you especially if you
(30:41):
look up the picture, you can say like, oh, okay,
this is yeah, this is for an animal that is
precisely trying to target a jump at something. Yeah, and
you've got one shot pulling it off. But there was
another thing noted in this pain that I thought was
really interesting, and this was actually just in the introduction,
(31:03):
but it was about advantages of slit shaped pupils over
round ones in general. So we were just talking about
vertical pupils for a load of the ground ambush predators.
But slit pupils in general can be advantageous because they
allow for much greater changes in the area of the
pupil and thus greater variation in the light conditions they
(31:25):
can adapt to. So you've got a human pupil. To
constrict a round human pupil like ours, you need that
ring shaped sphincter muscle that we talked about at length
in the last episode. But to close a slit pupil,
it uses two muscles that close the sides of the
slit together. And as a result of these morphological differences,
(31:47):
there is a different amount that you can increase or
decrease the area of the pupil and the amount of
light that it can pull in. So, to read from
the paper quote, the vertical at pupils of the domestic
cat and gecko undergo area changes of one hundred and
thirty five and three hundredfold, respectively, whereas human circular pupil
(32:10):
changes by about fifteenfold. Yeah, species that are active in
night and day need to dilate sufficiently under dim conditions
while constricting enough to prevent dazzle in daylight. So a
slit pupil provides the required dynamic range. So this is
why a slit pupil is good. It's great for high
(32:31):
dynamic range for an eye that works great in both
bright daylight and in pitch dark. And you know, I
can't help but think with smaller predators as well. I mean,
these are generally going to be creatures that are not
only predator but prey as well. So it's not like
they can just hold up, you know, all day. I mean,
they may try to hold up all day, but they
(32:51):
might need to play the survival game during daylight as well,
assuming they're not actively hunting during the day as well
of course, right right, So, yes, a slit pupil is
great for being highly adaptable to whatever the light situation is,
But the directional orientation of the slit depends more on
your ecological niche like you were talking about earlier. So again, yeah,
(33:12):
the grazing herbivores, like horses, they will have horizontal slits
to help them keep a panoramic view of the environment
and watch for movement or predators approaching. But another interesting
finding of the authors here, these pupil orientations for herbivores
only work if the animal keeps the pupil parallel to
the horizon, and grazing herbivores actually spend much of their
(33:35):
time with their heads bent down to the ground eating grass.
So what gives there? Well, the researchers looked into this
and they found that, in fact, when horses bind down
to graze, they rotate their eyes within the sockets to
keep the pupils parallel to the horizon. And Martin Banks
(33:56):
in that NPR article he gives a quote pointing out
that this is weird because the eyes have to rotate
in opposite directions, you know, think about the eyes on
opposite side. So yeah, and apparently they couldn't find any
references to anybody ever writing about this before, which is
funny given how much time people spend around horses. But yeah,
so that's what horses do when they've been down to
the grass. Their eyes swivel in the sockets to maintain
(34:20):
the pupil slit as parallel to the horizon. Wow, this
is another one of the I don't know, we've we've
talked about this before, and you know, imagining alien life
forms and so forth, but also getting into just ideas
of consciousness, like how much of our our understanding of
ourselves in the world seems to come down to how
we view the world and how we focus attention um
(34:43):
and yet to try and put yourself in the mindset
of a mind that is that perceives the world in
this manner that you know, that that has eyes that
are always focused on the horizon in order to get
this panoramic view of all the potential threats that could
be interfered with they're feeding one lass. Funny note that
was in that NPR coverage of this paper was about
(35:05):
depictions of dinosaurs in Jurassic World and other movies. So
you know, you've got this some kind of giga predator dinosaur.
It's just like the ultimate what do they call it
in Jurassic World. It was like the Killer Rex or
so this is the this is the Hannibal electro one, Yeah,
Kilamus maximus, yeah, something like that. Yeah. Well, they talk
(35:26):
about the temptation to depict predators like this with vertical
slits for eyes, because I think we correctly detect that
as a predatory trait. You look at a crocodile's eyes,
it's got these creepy vertical slits, and that makes sense
because a crocodile is an ambush predator that operates low
to the ground. But they say, actually this, you know,
(35:46):
the Kilamus maximus dinosaur is an active predator and it's
very tall, so it would probably have round pupils like ours.
And the funny thing is, you can't even use the
frog excuse, like oftentimes that is used to excuse sort
of stuck in the mud depictions of dinosaurs in the
Durassic Park Traffic Jurassic World movies. They'll say, well, you
(36:08):
have to remember they also used frog DNA, So the
fact that they don't have feathers that has to do
with the frog DNA. But it was the frog DNA,
then perhaps they would all have heart shaped pupils depending
on the type of frogs that were used. Right, Yeah,
And that brings us back to the next thing, which is,
so we were talking about the orientations of slit shaped
pupils versus round pupils in terrestrial vertebrates. But when you
(36:30):
start looking at the eyes there are the pupils of
animals that live in the water. You starts even weirder
shapes in dolphins and cuttlefish and all kinds of things
have these strangely shaped pupils. Yeah. The cuttlefish pupil especially
is very fascinating to look at. Definitely look up a
picture of it if you're not picturing it right now.
(36:51):
It looks like this WAVYW. It looks kind of like,
you know, the face on the Pringles can. Is that
mister Pringles, Doctor Pringles, I can't remember, doctor Pringles. Man,
which is that Governor Pringles? Governor Pringles, yes, Senator Pringles, Yes,
we have Walter K. Pringles. He has a mustache and
(37:13):
um under under certain light conditions, the cuttlefish eye looks
like that mustache in my opinion. But the interesting thing
is that, yes it has the cuttlefish ye has this
signature W shape in bright light, but it's actually circular
in low light. According to the W shaped pupil in
cuttlefish by a math ger at All, published in Vision
(37:35):
Research in twenty thirteen. The two main theories um were
that the shape is either for camouflage, so it's just
it has a weird pupil because it's doing all sorts
of strange things with its chromatic force to you know,
to change its its appearance and therefore it has you know,
strange things going on as high as well, or that
(37:56):
it has to do with distance calculations. It's coming down
to some of the same factors that we just discussed
in terms of vertical and horizontal pupils. But in this case,
the researchers proposed that the w shaped pupil might aid
in balancing out the vertically uneven light field of its
natural habitat m Okay, So here's a quote from from
(38:19):
that paper. Quote. While an animal's retina can deal with
a wide range of light intensities in one scene, reducing
this range would limit the need for rapid local adaptation
during vertical gaze shifts. Since cuttlefish do not have an
instant three sixty field of view, they must rely on
(38:40):
gaze shifts to provide them with the complete view of
the surrounding world. Okay, so they have to move their
eyes to look around them, right, and you know, in
this we have to think about light in the aquatic world,
you know, where you know, the ever present darkness of
the depths and then the periodic light field a realm
(39:01):
of the upper depth. And if you're something like cuttlefish,
you're having to navigate both. And it kind of comes
down to some of the ideas we're discussing with with
with load of the ground predators. You know, you have
to sort of be adaptable to both realms, but in
this case you need to be able to to simultaneously
deal with the light in the darkness. By the way,
(39:25):
coming out of the water for a second, the gecko
pupil I was reading about essentially as a vertical pupil
aiding in a nocturnal ambush predator's lifestyle. But it does
look really cool and they are apparently really incredible hunting
eyes according to some of the articles that I looked at.
But then, oh, another aquatic eye of note is the
dolphin pupil, and it's it's interesting that while it resembles
(39:50):
a horseshoe or crescent, when it's fully dilated, it constricts
down to two tiny openings that are sometimes referred to
as a double bowl. Pupil um, and this apparently comes
down to the fact that the eye the pupil shape
who with dolphins has to do with dolphins or noted
for having exceptional vision both in and out of the water.
(40:11):
They know, they're they're they're they're able to to position
their bodies so that they're gazing out of the water,
and they have great vision in that circumstance as well.
But I included a photograph here for you, Joe, and
I encourage listeners to look this up as well. Um.
The first picture shows the horseshoe pupil, and then the
second picture shows the double pupil when everything's fully constricted. Yeah,
(40:33):
it does look amazing though, if you do look up
scientific diagrams of the eye. I think what these are
explaining that's normally happening is like that the the sort
of horseshoe or or U shaped pupil when it constricts,
what it actually constricts down to is something that looks
kind of like two earbuds connected by a wire, and
(40:54):
the wire is just very narrow. Yes. Yes, now some
of you might be wondering, Okay, you're talking about mythic
figures with strange eyes, and now we've we've talked about
a number of different real life organisms that have some
sort of interesting eyes going on. Is it possible that
that that the myth makers and the storytellers of old
(41:15):
were inspired by eyes they saw in nature. And I
didn't really find anybody talking about this, I mean outside
of Yes, if you're watching some sort of modern show
and reptile people show up and they have vertical slits
and their eyeballs, yes, obviously somebody decided let's give them
reptile eyes. Um. Though again, if they're reptile people, I mean,
(41:35):
if they're like, I don't know, five six feet tall
or something, they should probably have round eyes. What if
they crawl around on their bellies all the time that's
how they hunt. Oh oh, okay, then yeah, vertical slits,
go for it. But I was thinking, Okay, the cuttlefish
has this amazing looking eye. Any possibility there, well, I mean,
(41:55):
the common or European cuttlefish can be found in Irish waters,
and cuttlefish shells or cuttlefish bones were used as ornaments
by the Celts, according to DJ Conway in the book
Celtic Magic Ireland. However, it's famously light on reptile species,
So I don't think geckos would have had an impact
on any literary motifs. And and ultimately, I don't think
(42:17):
anybody was pulling up any cuttlefish and checking out their
their eyeballs either or you know, I've I found nothing
to suggest that, but my mind went there, so I
thought i'd mentioned it to everybody. You know, I think
this show is a safe place to admit research dead ends.
Sometimes we just got to do that. Yeah, unless there's
a paper out there I'm missing, And if so, as always,
if there's something we've missed, right in and let us know,
(42:40):
we would love to be corrected. Well, should we tighten
the sphincter, constrict the pupil on this one, that's right, book,
what's what we should do. We should limit the light
coming in at this point. But we'd love to hear
from everyone out there. If there are particular mythic figures,
literary figures, pop culture examples of of multi pupil, multi irist,
(43:02):
multi lobed eyes, right in and let us know about them,
Send some pictures if they exist. We would love to
hear from you. Likewise, if there are other you know,
we really only spend a little bit of time here
with the animal world. There's so many fascinating animal eyes
out there, so if there are examples that you're particularly
fond of right in, let us know. And then, of
(43:23):
course there are other areas of this that we've just
touched on in these two episodes that we could easily
come back and discuss more about, like oh, the evil
Eye as we were discussing like that could be its
own deep dive on the show, no doubt, all right.
In the meantime, if you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, it publishes
every Tuesday and Thursday, core episodes. In the Stuff to
(43:45):
Blow Your Mind podcast feed, we have listener mail episodes
on Monday, short form Artifact or Monster Fact episodes on Wednesday,
and on Friday we do Weird House Cinema. That's our
time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk
about a strange motion picture. Huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
(44:06):
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 contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
(44:27):
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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