Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: How Eyes In a Painting Follow You

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Ever noticed how eyes in a painting sometimes follow you around the room? It’s weird! But it’s also fully explainable and Josh and Chuck do just that here. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, hi there, ho there, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck and Jerry's here, which took up an extra couple seconds mentioning Jerry.

So let's get to it because we just wasted some time. Yeah, so if you remember about a year ago, dear listener, we did a podcast a little shorty on the Mona Lisa. And we talked kind of briefly about the fact that Mona Lisa's eyes will follow you if you move about the room, like a horror movie painting. And that's the thing. And we said, I think Josh even said,

hey, you know, I want to do a show on that, like a regular shorty on that. That was a great Josh impression. You went, hello love, let's do one on that. Jiminy Crickets. So we did, this is what we're doing right now, Chuck. That's right, the reason why, which will come later in the podcast, but the phenomenon

of that we've all seen on Scooby-Doo and in horror movies of moving around a room and the appearance that the eyeballs of a painting are following you. Right, so there's actual, like this is actually a thing as anybody who's ever seen it in real life knows. But you may not have ever understood why. And it turns out that it's one of the easiest things in the world to understand, one of the hardest things

in the world to explain for some reason. I had a hard time too. It makes no sense whatsoever, because once you understand it, you're like, okay. Yeah, of course that makes total sense. But like I even had to go back and add some to this article that wrote, this is a Josh Clark jam from the How Stuff Works staff writer days.

Very How Stuff Works-y too. And I had to go back and add something from like, I think some art site and another site about, there was like a forum among painters. There's this one painter's post saying like, I can't make the eyes look at the viewer help me. And there, you know, some people kind of swooped in and explained to this one painter how to do it.

But it's actually very, very hard. But the whole thing is based on perspective. And you would not have been able to make a painting with eyes staring at the viewer before the 14th century, I believe. And thanks to an Italian architect named Philippe, I'm sorry, Chuck, you want to take this one? That's about to say.

I mean, I know I'm not sitting in the room with you, but. Filippo Brunellesco. Very nice. And he was an architect in Italy, like I said, and he was in charge of the Baptistery, sorry, Chuck. Baptistery in San Gellini. Very nice. So he basically accidentally figured out perspective,

linear perspective in particular, which is in a painting where if you're looking at, say like a painting of railroad tracks, they vanish in the distance. But if you'll notice, they come together. The reason that they seem very far off and that the tracks wider apart are closer to you and the tracks closer together are further from you

is because it's using linear perspective, which is just all lines in a painting can trace their origin back to a common single point. That's the source of the linear perspective. Yeah, and it's one of the coolest things in art, the notion that you can draw something on a flat canvas and just have those points kind of come closer to each other at the top

and it gives the impression of distance. It's really, really cool. It is very cool. So that's one thing that, it's like you said, it gives the impression of distance and before linear perspective came along, artists had height and width and the only way to make something seem further away

is to draw it smaller than the other thing you want to seem closer together and the whole jam just seemed very flat. Like if you think of hieroglyphics, Egyptian paintings on walls of tombs, that's a good example of pre-perspective art. Right. Very flat and two-dimensional.

Yeah, you can also do some other things to create the illusion of depth. Obviously light and shadow. If you use light, it will demonstrate something, a surface is closeness to the light source and it's going to protrude out and then reflect more light. You're going to use that shadow in the darker areas

to denote something that's more closed off maybe, something further away. You combine those two things and you're going to have another illusion, that illusion of depth, basically sort of like a third dimension that's really not there. Exactly, but for all intents and purposes,

you have just figured out how to add that third dimension. And it's like you just said, it's really important. It's not actually there. Using linear perspective, using the interplay of light and shadows to suggest depth, it's not there. Height and width, they're actually there.

Those two dimensions are actually present in the painting. But that third dimension of depth, also known as length, that is nothing but an optical illusion. But that optical illusion gives rise to another optical illusion, the eyes in a painting following you around the room. That's right.

We're going to take a break and talk how that actually works right after this. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so before we get to how that actually works, we should point out that what you mentioned earlier

from that painter's blog or thread or whatever, it is a tough thing to do as an artist to paint eyes on a human being that look like they're looking at the person looking at the painting. It's a hard thing to do. Yeah. Like you are basically a master of painting if you can do it without really having to think about it.

But it has everything to do. I've been trying for years. Are you, do you paint? No. No, OK. I'm terrible. I can see that being like just something I didn't know that you just kind of did on the side.

No, no, no. I wish. So if you ever want to try, apparently, Chuck, from what I could tell from this painter forum, we'll call it Paint Chan, if you have the face looking dead on, like 90 degrees from the canvas, it's much easier to paint the eyes looking out that way. It gets really hard when the head is tilted or, yeah, tilted

in one way or another away from that 90 degree axis. That's when it gets hard. Now, it has everything to do with how much of the white is shown, how much of the iris is shown, where it sits in the eye, that it's really tough to capture unless the painting is looking, or the subject is looking straight out of the painting. Yeah, so another thing we should understand

before we move on to how this little trick works with the eyes following you is if you move yourself around a statue, a sculpture, or if you move yourself around a live human being, and just tell them to keep their eyes fixed forward, and you move around them, and you keep your eyeballs on theirs, that trick is not going to work. Their eyeballs are not going to be following you around the room, nor would it appear so from a sculpture,

because you are changing your perspective. Their perspective is saying the same, and when you round the corner, you go from seeing iris to the whites of someone's eyes, and then the back of their head, and then eventually back around again. And not only that, you're seeing more iris or less iris or more white, and this is giving your brain

visual cues about this third dimension. But also, the interplay of light and shadow on their face, on their eyes wherever, are also giving your brain cues too, and it's changing. So you're doing all this. Yes, the statue, your friend who's staring straight forward, going like, why am I doing this again?

Those things exist in the actual three dimensions. The painting itself, again, that third dimension is nothing but tricks of technique. They don't actually exist in the three dimensions. So when you paint eyes looking a certain way, they're going to look that certain way, no matter what. They're fixed. They're set.

Your brain's not going to get any more information moving around the room. It's not going to see more white or less white of the eyes. The irises aren't going to change position. They are fixed no matter where you stand in relation to that painting, and as a result, that's why the eyes follow you around, because if they're painted gazing out of the painting to begin with,

they're going to seem that way no matter where you stand. The eyes will follow you around the room from the painting. That's right. If a person on a painting is painted to where they're not looking at you, they're looking away from you, it's not going to allow that illusion to take place. And to cap it off, it's even hard to have that person meet

your gaze. Let's say someone's painted, and they're looking off to the side. You can't just walk off to the side to where they seem to be looking and lock eyes with them. There is just this weird illusion of this forever into the distance gaze that happens. Yeah, which really, re-researching this,

and I think admittedly fully understanding it for the first time, has really given me a lot of more respect for the craft of painting portraits than I have before. Yeah, I've never been into portraiture that much, so for me too. Yeah, I like a good Rembrandt. So but I mean, the idea that it's really hard to paint the eyes

a certain way, and then the fact that when you are painting eyes one way or the other, you're locking them in through tricks of perspective using shadow and light and all that. And that's off to all of you painters out there. Yeah, one thing I truly did not understand was this experiment in 2004 from a group of researchers to try and prove this using a mannequin and math.

I read this 10 times, and I have no idea what they mean. So they didn't use an actual mannequin. They used an image of a mannequin. So it's in two dimensions. That probably helps. But they used perspective to make it seem like a three-dimensional mannequin's torso. Oh, OK, well, that makes more sense.

But then they plotted out the different dots. So the dots that should seem further away, because the mannequin itself, that part of the mannequin was further away, seemed further away no matter where you stood when you were viewing this image of the mannequin. And they managed to basically capture this digitally to prove once and for all.

This isn't the eyes following you in a painting aren't a trick. Like it actually is the way that you're perceiving it. They do seem to be following you around the room. It's not like you're going nuts. Amazing. Really cool. It really is. So now everybody knows the eyes in a painting

follow you around, because if they're painted looking that way, you're not going to get any other visual cues suggesting that they're looking any other direction than that way. I think we've explained it, Chuck. I think so. And since Chuck breathlessly said, I think so, that means short stuff is out. The stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's

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