Member-only story
Disruptions of Roundness
Humans demonstrate an inherent appreciation for the disruption of simple round objects in words, idioms, stories, games, sports, art, symbols, mythology and sex. Other animals appear to have similar feelings.
“But the peach rushed on across the countryside — on and on and on, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Cowsheds, stables, pigsties, barns, bungalows, hayricks, anything that got in its way went toppling over like a nine-pin…. These cliffs are the most famous in the whole of England, and they are hundreds of feet high. Below them, the sea is deep and cold and hungry…. and when it reached the edge of the cliff it seemed to leap up into the sky and hang there suspended for a few seconds, still turning over and over in the air… Then it began to fall… Down… Down… Down… Down… Down… SMACK! It hit the water with a colossal splash and sank like a stone.”
— Ronald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (2007)
A general bias in sensory systems and brains appears to be responsible for a roundness disruption effect in phenomena under aesthetic selection throughout the animal world. Humans are universally preoccupied with the disruption of spheres, circles, points and other roundness including that of the body. When objects of such perceptually simple configurations present themselves to us we are very tempted to make them wet, fly, roll, bounce, wiggle, shake, break, crack, expand, pulsate, pop, explode, multiply, slam together or undergo some other type of disruptive transformation, purely for aesthetic satisfaction. It’s not coincidental that other animals including dogs, cats, tigers, birds, penguins, bears, elephants, otters, dung beetles, primates, chimps, monkeys, mice, rats and dolphins have an interest in playing with balls and disrupting various round objects like we do ourselves. Even though they’re not normally available in nature, and we shouldn’t have any particular interest in them, we construct perfectly round objects for the purpose of sending them through cycles of up and downwardness, out and inwardness, motion and stillness and order and chaos. Ball games have been played by humans since at least 3,000 years ago (Wertmann et al. 2020):
“Ball games are the…
