Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.

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This book explores much deeper issues of psychology and even deeper neurology. Just when we thought we knew everything there is to know about our own bodies and their responses, we can have new and surprising experiences engendered by simple little tricks. This learned, encyclopedic, and well-referenced examination fully realizes the authors' aim of establishing these phenomena as a genre of folklore in its own right.

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Throughout the book, Barker and Rice make a compelling argument not only for the inclu-sion of folk illusions as its own genre, but also for interdisciplinary research to explore issues of perception and belief.