August 29, 2024: One by One, Hurrah, Hurrah -
My friends took me to the Museum of Illusions, in Seattle, and it was both cool and slightly sickening. The (well-curated) illusions start off with textbook classics, like: Oh Look, These Two Lines Are the Same Length, Amazing! They move on to mirror stuff and color stuff, and then they start to spin, and it gets more intense. By the time we left, we were a bit weak in the knees and the lobby floor, which had been stable when we arrived, was rolling, gently. So I woke up at 2 am thinking, “For a grandly-named Museum of Illusions, those were just OPTICAL illusions, or Optical that set off Vestibular. Are there illusions for the other senses? Are there taste, touch, smell, sound illusions? Or are those called hallucinations?” And I noodled on that thought for a while, because why sleep when you can ponder in the dark? And then I moved to: Are there illusions that aren’t sensory at all? I vote Yes, as exemplified by the common illusion “Other people have it together.” ...