Your Brain Can’t Handle the Moon
What is this new theory?” the long-retired New York University cognitive psychologist, Lloyd Kaufman, asked me. We were sitting behind the wooden desk of his cozy home office. He had a stack of all his papers on the moon illusion, freshly printed, waiting for me on the adjacent futon. But I couldn’t think of a better way to start our discussion than to have him respond to the latest thesis claiming to explain what has gone, for thousands of years, unexplained: Why does the moon look bigger when it’s near the horizon?
He scooted closer to his iMac, tilted his head and began to read the MIT Technology Review article I had pulled up.1 I thought I’d have a few moments to appreciate, as he read, the view of New York City outside the 28th floor window of his Floral Park apartment, but within a half-minute he told me, “Well, it’s clearly wrong.”
It wasn’t even my theory, yet I felt, as it were, in front of the sky, occluding it. Since our depth perception also places the moon farther away from us than the horizon, we are faced with a perceptual dilemma. The scientists reasoned that the horizon moon’s enlargement is a product of the brain trying to solve this dilemma.
