Three Bodies in Texas

There’s an optical illusion that went viral a few years ago, an illustration from a nineteenth-century German humor magazine. From one angle, the drawing looks like a duck; from another, a bunny. Over the years, many have weighed in on how our interpretation of the bunny-
duck’s ambiguity has to do with how we perceive and interpret the world. One study, by neuroscientist Peter Brugger, suggested that people in Switzerland saw a bunny more often in the springtime than in the fall. The British psychologist Richard Wiseman has found that high levels of creativity track with an ability to toggle easily between seeing both animals. Ludwig Wittgenstein, before them both, discerned in the image a key to unravel the mystery of perception. Out of ambiguous raw matter a viewer suddenly perceives a duck, or a bunny. The moment of conversion and the resultant divergences fascinated Wittgenstein. What makes us perceive? What influences perception? How objective can any perception be? 

I think of that optical illusion when I think of the case of Pallavi Dhawan. Asked to interpret an ambiguous scene, police officers in Frisco, Texas, made a decision: Pallavi was guilty. She had killed her ten-year-old son, likely by drowning him in a tub, where his body lay to rot. They arrested her. What details they found supported their narrative, one that maintained a presumption of guilt. Of course, it’s possible they were able to see only one shape and couldn’t consider another.