by Dr. Patrick K. Turley Manhattan Beach, CA PCSO Bulletin Editor-in-Chief
This year marks the 36th anniversary of the movie Batman starring Michael Keaton. Not a comic book buff as a child, I was only vaguely familiar with the character, having never watched even a single episode of the television show that ran from 1966 to 1968 starring Adam West.
In 1989, I was teaching full time at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and would make the daily drive from my home in Manhattan Beach to the UCLA campus in Westwood. Exiting the 405 freeway onto Wilshire Blvd and passing the Veterans Administration cemetery, one of the first structures that would appear was the Westwood Medical Plaza. The 12-story building was one of the tallest on that side of the boulevard. The architect Paul Williams left the west side of the building windowless so that patients wouldn’t have to look out over the cemetery. Over the years, that side of the building became a huge billboard, usually displaying advertisements for the next blockbuster movie or television show. But this particular morning it was covered with a cartoon of a mouth in the early mixed dentition. What I saw were two upper central incisors with a large diastema and prominent interdental papilla and four lower incisors tipped distally because of the developing lower canines. All I saw were teeth! Those initial seconds were confounded by the fact that the ad said nothing about Batman, only the image and the caption underneath, which simply read “coming to theatres near you.”
I later rationalized that the reason I didn’t recognize this Batman image was because they had changed it from the one used in the comic books and later on in the television series. The image I saw was actually the 12th version since its inception in 1939. The familiar black-and-yellow version was used from 1966 to 2000 but got an update for the 1989 movie. Bob Ringwood, the costume designer of the Batman suit, redesigned it because he thought it should look more like a bat than an open mouth. Well, I still saw it as an open mouth. Why? What I saw was an optical illusion.
Optical illusions that display two different things depending on how you look at them are known as ambiguous images or reversible figures. The duck-rabbit was such an illusion and was first published in a German magazine in 1892, then used by Joseph Jastrow in 1899 in his research on perception. According to Albert Einstein, “the greatest illusion in this world is the illusion of separation.” You know those perceptual illusions where you think you see one thing, but if you look more closely you can see something else? In one moment, you perceive a goblet, and then in another you see two human profiles.
In the case of the goblet versus the facial profiles that Einstein referred to, when presented with a simple line drawing on a solid background, one is more apt to see the facial profiles than the goblet. Coloring the center area, even with black, draws the eyes to that area, so the goblet is seen before the profiles. When more details are added to the center of the drawing, all the attention is drawn to the center, and now only the goblet is seen. Similarly, the simple black-and-yellow Batman drawing leads one to see the bat image. But in contrast to the objective of the designer Bob Ringwood, who wanted the image to look more like a bat than an open mouth, jazzing up the image with gold and white sparkles attracted my eye to those areas, resulting in me seeing only the teeth.
An illusion is a distortion of perception. Your senses gather information and send it to your brain, which arranges, sorts, and organizes those data. The brain uses optical clues, past experiences, and learned assumptions to piece together images. The Airavatesvara Temple in India, believed to be constructed in the 12th century, is considered the world’s oldest optical illusion. A Hindu place of worship located in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, it is home to a 900-year-old carving of an elephant and bull that share a head but have separate bodies. Some think the animal you recognize first might tell you much about your personality: elephant or bull. If you first recognize an elephant, you are serene, logical, friendly, and highly intelligent. However, if you first notice the bull, you are steadfast, honest, and have a positive outlook. You are capable of holding your ground and not letting anyone take advantage of you. Could it also say something about one’s profession?
As orthodontists who devote their time to working with teeth and faces, it’s not surprising one would see the facial profiles before the vase or that I saw the mouth with teeth before I saw Batman. The fact that all I saw were teeth may not say much about my personality but definitely says a lot about my chosen specialty. I’m sure that most of us have experienced meeting someone new who, upon learning we’re an orthodontist, asks “are people’s teeth the first thing you notice when meeting someone for the first time?” Well, not necessarily, but in the case of Batman, they were the first thing I saw.