The Ig Nobel Prizes are often treated as a joke, but their recipients are often working on surprisingly illuminating scientific fields. Japanese researcher Higashiyama Atsuki, who won his Ig Nobel in 2016 for his work on the effect of viewing objects between one’s own legs, continues to explore areas that clarify the connections between the body and the brain.
The “Between-Legs Effect” Wins Ig Nobel Prize
In 2016 Higashiyama Atsuki received an English-language letter in the mail informing him that his study on the effect of viewing things upside down between one’s legs (the so-called “between-legs effect”), which had originally been published 10 years earlier, had been selected as a candidate for the Ig Nobel Prize.
He ignored it, thinking it must have been a prank of some kind. Then he received another letter, this time in Japanese. The contents of the letter asked him to indicate if he would accept the prize if it were awarded to him. “Imagine that,” he remembers thinking. “It was true!”
The Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony was held in the Sanders Theatre at Harvard University between acts of an opera. The prize he was awarded was a large clock that was equipped with a hand that indicated the sixty-first second — the “leap second”—and minute and hour hands that puzzlingly indicated seconds. The prize money was $10 trillion, although the unit of currency was not US dollars but rather Zimbabwe dollars, which had been discontinued at the time he received the prize. In fact, the prize money was worth about ¥170.
“It was an extremely humorous awards ceremony,” remarks Higashiyama, “which was fitting to the occasion.”
The Ig Nobel Prize clock with a leap-second hand. (© Power News)
The 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollar note that Higashiyama received as prize money. (© Power News)
Higashiyama began his “between-legs effect” research in 1996. Since he was younger he sensed that there were numerous constraints in the world of psychological research in Japan, and as a result he intentionally submitted his work to English-language publications to increase his chances of publication. “Although my work was quite dull,” he comments, “if I published it in English there were people who would read it. This more than anything else made me happy.”
What exactly was this research that he modestly describes as “dull”?
Optical Illusion Disappears When Positioned Sideways
“Viewing things between one’s legs,” Higashiyama explains, “entails bending at the waist and looking at one’s surroundings upside down from between the legs. When one does this, distances and colors appear differently.”
At Higashiyama’s urging, I bend forward and take a look at a forest through my legs. Viewed in this way, the entire scene seems farther away, the trunks, branches, and leaves of the trees seem to be smaller, and the distances between all the various objects in sight seem to shrink in size as well. It also seems that the shapes and colors are clearer than when viewed in the normal way.
When I express surprise at the wonders of the human sense of sight, Higashiyama counters: “It isn’t sight per se, but rather the influence of the body.”
“In our research,” he continues, “we refer to things we can see as ‘visual information,’ while we refer to phenomena that occur as a result of changing the position of the body as ‘physical information.’ The ‘between-legs effect’ is strongly affected by this physical information. This is what I have found through a process of collecting data and repeated experimentation.”
Higashiyama demonstrating between-the-legs viewing. (© Power News)
While still in his early thirties, Higashiyama began studying the “horizontal-vertical illusion” in an attempt to identify the relationship between physical and visual information. The horizontal-vertical illusion is a phenomenon in which the vertical l
