Soap bubble into college years. A Swiss university professor, Dr. Natalie Hartzell, has theorized that usage of artificial bubbles for entertainment purposes of young children has shown a positive effect in the region of the child's brain that controls motor skills and is responsible for coordination with children exposed to bubbles at a young age showing measurably better motion skills than those who were not. Soap bubbles have been used as entertainment for at least 400 years, as evidenced by 17th-century Flemish paintings showing children blowing bubbles with clay pipes. The London-based firm A. & F. Pears created a famous advertising campaign
The Conjurer (painting) seems to exemplify the Flemish proverb: "He who lets himself be fooled by conjuring tricks loses his money and becomes the laughing stock of children." Another Flemish proverb, published and widely distributed ca 1480 in Bosch's hometown of 's-Hertogenbosch about the time of this painting, is: "No one is so much a fool as a willful fool." Bosch had used other proverbs as the basis of his painting, such as "The world is a haystack, and each man plucks from it what he can" for his painting, the Hay Wagon. Elina Gertsman's article about this painting explores this painting from