From the Vault: The Invention of the Mirror, Part 2

Smoking pools of dark reflection. Propagator of uncanny doubles. Gateway to inverse kingdom. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture into the world of mirrors, discussing their predecessors, their invention and way humans relate to the world on the other side. (originally published 8/10/2021)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode.
This is part two of the series that we did
on the Mirror. This originally published August. We hope you enjoy.
I was guiding the tour that Sandra Bates, his brother,
was a part of when he got his look into

(00:27):
your precious Delver mirror, Spangler. He was perhaps sixteen, part
of a high school group. I was going through the
history of the glass and had just got to the
part you would appreciate, extolling the flawless craftsmanship, the perfection
of the glass itself, when the boy raised his hand, um,
but what about that black splotch in the upper left

(00:48):
hand corner that looks like a mistake. And one of
his friends asked him what he meant, so the Bates
boy started to tell him, then stopped. He looked at
the mirror very closely, pushing right up to the red
velvet guard rope around the case. Then he looked behind him,
as if what he had seen had been the reflection
of someone of someone in black standing at his shoulder.

(01:11):
It looked like a man, but I couldn't see the face.
It's gone now, And that was all. Welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,

(01:32):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our discussion of the mirror. In the
last episode, we talked about some of the science of optics,
about how mirrors work, why they work. We talked a
little bit about mirror psychology and some of the earliest
mirrors from the archaeological record, specifically obsidian mirrors found associated

(01:55):
with the ancient Proto city of Chattel Hoyak in southern Anatolia. Yeah,
and that that cold read that we opened the episode with.
That's an excerpt from Stephen King's Wonderful Haunted Mirror short
story The Reaper's Image, collected in ve short story compilation
Skeleton Crew. So I highly recommend anyone who hasn't read
that go read that story if you want a creepy

(02:16):
mirror story. For my money, just as creepy as anything
he ever wrote, you know, as creepy as the likes
of the Boogeyman or the Jaunt. You know. I was
saying in the last episode that I don't think it's
an accident that there are so many horror movie scenes
and ghost stories that involve a mirror. There there seems
something really special about mirrors that uh takes people's minds

(02:38):
to two supernatural and unsettling places more so than other
household objects. And I think it's pretty obvious why that
would be. That there appears to be something alive on
the other side of the mirror, and the mirror gives
you you know, it's not just that you see yourself
and you see something animate in it, but that you
can also see what's behind you. In a mirror, yeah,
you it allows you to seeings that you cannot directly see, uh.

(03:03):
And that's always been one of the attractive aspects of
mirrors in everything from I mean the very practical usage
of like we mentioned mirrors utilized by the roadside and
it turns and whatnot so you can see who's coming
or or even in in corridor, so you can see
who is around the corner. Uh. Two other things like
those those ridiculous sunglasses that have little mirrors in them

(03:24):
so you can see behind you. Oh. I got some
of those when I was a kid, and I thought
that was the coolest thing ever. Yeah, or driving a car,
just think about it, The very act of driving a
car were utilizing at least three different mirrors at all times.
It's I mean, it's just every day we take it
for granted, but it's, uh, it's kind of strange when
you think about it. Though. Of course, at least the

(03:45):
mirrors warned you that that reality and reflection do not
necessarily match up. Oh that's funny if like every mirror
came with a disclaimer the way the rear view mirrors
on a car do. Yeah, yeah, does not reflect reality.
But as a segue to one of the first things
we wanted to talk about today, it's worth noting that
prehistoric Anatolia is not the only place, uh, in the

(04:08):
ancient world where there was the use of obsidian mirrors.
That's right. Evidence of mirrors, and especially obsidian mirrors in
Mesoamerica date back at least as far as six b c. Uh.
There there might be some earlier dates, but I think
that was the earliest date. I was I was coming
across in my research, and so they were used by
the Maya, they were used by the Aztecs. And when

(04:29):
they were used by the Aztecs, particularly by Aztec priests,
they were used in various scrying rituals in the worship
of of the god that tezcot Li PoCA, whose name
actually means Lord of the smoking Mirror. Uh. So there
were black mirrors used by his priests. Uh. And he
has this just overall connection to dark volcanic obsidian. Yeah.

(04:54):
And so scrying is a practice that's found in cultures
and religions all throughout the world. The arc type example
you see is gazing into the crystal ball, right, Um,
But but scrying really refers to any form of divination, prophecy,
or revelation that involves gazing into some kind of medium,

(05:15):
often a reflective medium such as a mirror or a
crystal ball. Yeah. But I would say one of the
things about tes Catlet Polca is that, like he is
really the mirror deity par excellence because his name means
smoking mirror. Like, like, that's how closely connected he is
with this. Um. He's he's a fascinating character. I think

(05:35):
we've we've we've mentioned him a few different times on
the podcast. He's said to have lost his right foot
in a battle against an earth monster, and as such
he's often depicted with a prosthesis of gleaming obsidian that
may sometimes resemble a serpent. And I decided to go
a little deeper for this episode. So I was reading
about him in a book titled Tess Catl PoCA, Trickster

(05:57):
and Supreme Deity, edited by Aztec scholar Elizabeth Baquedano. And
in this book, in a chapter titled Enemy Brothers or
Divine Twins, author Gillium Oliver points out that test Catlet
PoCA was associated quote with untamed space and night, though
his name is composed of two cultural elements smoke, which
comes from the epitome of cultural creations fire and the mirror,

(06:21):
undoubtedly one of the manufactured objects whose creation is the
most exciting. And now this is in comparison to the
animal elements of his rival, quetzal Kotal, who we discussed
and at least I think we did a couple of
episodes on the on the plume de serpent. Did we not? Oh? Absolutely,
But I don't think I really understood this distinction before.

(06:42):
So one way of thinking about them is that Ketzel
Caudal embodies certain aspects of nature, whereas test Cat Polca
embodies something about technology or human artifice. Yeah, yeah, I
believe that's the That's the point here is that quetzal Kotal,
you know, has these natural animal elements that are his makeup,
whereas Testcatlipoca is essentially a lord of artifact and invention.

(07:05):
So yes, you know that smoke is part of fire,
and fire does not require humans. Obsidian um occurs on
its own, but of course both of these are brought
to new heights by by human invention, you know, the
polishing of the obsidian to make a mirror, the utilization
of of smoke and fire in in other human activities.

(07:26):
So you could you could look at him as a
god of technology. I know this is not intended by
the people who created these ancient artworks, but some depictions
of test Catlipoca do look like a robot. Yeah yeah, yeah,
sometimes that art does have that that kind of appearance
to it. Now, according to Michael E. Smith in Um
in that author's chapter in this book, uh the Archaeology

(07:48):
of Testcatlipoca, various items are associated with with the cult
of this deity. The most important are altars, ceramic flutes,
and of course obsidian mirrors, and the mirror is likely
the most important because on one hand, again it's part
of the god's name and identity. It's the substance of
his prosthesis, and numerous colt items and costume elements associated

(08:10):
with him were obsidian mirrors. Um Now. Mirrors were sometimes
associated with other Aztec gods, but apparently circular obsidian mirrors
were just central to the worship and identity of Testcatlet PoCA. Now.
One of the challenges to archaeological study of this mirrors, though,
is that, as as Smith points out, virtually none of
them were found under modern archaeological standards um and and

(08:35):
this becomes obvious when you consider dr ds as tech
obsidian mirror, which is often brought up as like the
most one of the most famous examples of this, which
has resided in England since at least the late sixteenth century,
and during this time it's traveled to other museums a bit,
and I think has come as far as the United
States on maybe two different occasions, but it's certainly never

(08:55):
returned to Mexico. So a lot of these mirrors have
been in circulation for a anisle and we're uncovered centuries ago.
Now are you aware of is anything actually known about
the exact provenance of of John D's mirror, like like
how by what route it came to him? Um? There
is I have looked at the scholarship on that before. Yeah.

(09:15):
So I guess a couple of things to keep in
mind about the mirrors. So, first of all, uh, the
are you also find rectangular obsidian mirrors in some collections
that are tied to um To Aztec traditions. But some
experts argue that these may not be pre Hispanic they
may be postconquest artifacts. Um. The mirrors that you see

(09:37):
in the various codices are are all circular, so that
seems to be a distinction some of the experts are making.
Now that the As for the magical speculum as it's
called of Dr d Um that does appear, I think
all the experts agree, like that isn't that isn't an
actual az Tech artifact. Um. I think the previous owner
prior to D is known. I can't remember how far back,

(10:00):
like the lineage of ownership is known. Um. But one
of the things about a lot of these obsidian artifacts
is you can you can trace them back to where
they came from. So so it's it's with a high
degree of certainty that this particular artifact is traced back
to Mexico. Is that tracing by geological means, Yes, Yes,
it's it's my understanding that you can geologically trace the

(10:23):
obsidian to it to at least a certain degree. Now,
one of the things that Smith points out about the
magical speculum of dr D which is where it's worth
looking up a picture of this. I think I've described
it before on the show. If you didn't know what
you're looking at, you might think it was a component
for like an ikea coffee table. It's not. It's not
something that instantly looks ancient. It's um. It's it's very

(10:45):
plain and um and functional in many respects. It is
a circular mirror with kind of a notch at the top,
with a hole in it. And apparently Smith points out
that the whole at the top of that artifact is
likely there so it could be worn as an ammu
let across the chest, which is something that we see
in the codiceas. So, there seemed to have largely been

(11:06):
two standardized types or sizes of these mirrors, there was
one size that was intended to adorn a sculpture, and
then others like this, like the one that came into
Dr De's possession, that was worn as an ornament by priests.
But it's also possible that size norms changed over time.
Now Nicholas J. Saunders and Elizabeth Bacuadano right quote these

(11:28):
reflective devices were powerfully ambiguous, not least because they shone
with a quote unquote dark light. They partook of what
has been called a pen Amerindian quote aesthetic of brilliance,
which accorded sacredness and power to a multimediasemblage of shiny objects.
The material metaphors of access to and control of the

(11:50):
glowing spirit realm from wind, status and political power flowed.
And they also write that quote a presence of absence
to finds the ambivalent nature of test catolet PoCA, the
supreme deity of the late post classic Aztec pantheon, in
the dark ephemeral reflection of his obsidian mirror, in the

(12:11):
transient sound of his ceramic flower pipes, lies the sensuous
nature of a god who mediates materiality and invisibility with
omniscience and omnipresence. So a couple of years ago I
actually was lucky enough to see uh John D's mirror, uh,
the Aztec of Citian mirror from his collection in the

(12:32):
British Museum. It's on display there among the collection of
Dr D's treasures, and I recall, yeah, looking into it,
you can get a rather unsettling feeling where you you
could imagine how a person could could feel the power
from the other realm flowing out from this, this sort
of conduit or gateway. Yeah. Yeah, this mirror is I

(12:52):
think I've mentioned before. I may have seen it when
I visited the British Museum, but I did not know
about its existence, so I have no specific memory of
of seeing it. And again, if you don't know what
you're looking for, or you're happy to sort of breathe
past it, you might not pay that much attention to it.
But yeah, it's it's part of the British Museum collection. Again,
has traveled a little bit, but but not I don't

(13:12):
think extensively. Uh So if you visit the British Museum today,
there's a good chance you'll be able to find it.
They also have it on their website. Now I want
to mention one more thing from that book. Um, there's
a chapter in there by Susan mill Breath titled the
Maya Lord of the Smoking Mirror. And this, this dude
paper deals primarily with cal Will, the Maya form of
this same deity, but in it the author writes that

(13:36):
the mirrors were indeed used in acts of divination. Priests
and magicians would use the mirrors to gaze into the future.
Quote his obsidian mirror appears in an Aztec account describing
a mirror or test cattle that showed the quote stars
and fire drill a constellation even though it was daytime,
and then revealed an omen forecasting the Spanish invasion. And

(14:00):
so they point out that that the mirrors ruling divination
may be linked with astrology, because test catlet Polca had
numerous astronomical avatars. So it's interesting we see this idea
of of reflections in the mirror. It's you know, it's
it's clearly associated with reflections of us, but also reflections
of of the cosmos. I think that's that's fascinating. And
then you get into the idea of the darkness of obsidy,

(14:22):
and I guess being like the darkness betwixt the stars.
Oh yeah, thank thank, thank Now, as we talked about
in the last episode, there were also obsidian mirrors on
the other side of the Atlantic. In the ancient world.
The earliest mirror artifacts known of are probably these obsidian

(14:44):
discs from prehistoric Anatolia. But I was wondering, okay, where
did mirror technology go after that? So I was turning
back to a sort of catalog of of different early
mirror finds that are listed in a paper by J. M.
Enoch in the Journal of Optometry and Vision Science in
two thousand six called History of Mirrors dating back eight

(15:05):
thousand years and Enoch notes a few types of artifacts
from ancient Egypt that have been interpreted as possible mirrors,
but but are not quite certain. For example, the English
egyptologist Flinders Petrie suggested that stone palettes in pre dynastic
Egypt could have been turned into mirrors by wedding them.
So you might have an artifact that just looks like

(15:27):
kind of a flat stone disc, and that by wedding
this disc you could turn it into a rough mirror. Also,
egyptologist Christine lily Quist argued that ancient Egyptians may have
used ceramic bowls that could be filled with water to
function as mirrors inside the home and lily Quist sites
findings at Elbadari, which is a site along the Nile

(15:49):
and Upper Egypt with a number of artifacts from pre
dynastic times. I think this is one of the earliest
sites that shows evidence of agriculture in in predynastic egypt Um.
But that around Elbadari there is possible evidence of early mirrors,
including quote a slab of selenite with traces of wood

(16:10):
as a possible frame um and a slate disc also
a piece of reflective mica pierced with the whole a
possible wall attachment. But moving on from here you start
to get signs of metal mirrors, which are obviously you
can just imagine, are going to have a very different
quality than say a wet stone would. So by the

(16:32):
time period of roughly the fourth millennium BC, so four
thousand to three thousand b C, there is some evidence
of metal mirrors in the ancient Near East, and this
includes small copper discs possibly used as mirrors that are
found in southern Mesopotamia in what is today Iraq, for example,
around the ancient city state of Or. And when I

(16:52):
was looking around at these examples, it seems perhaps most
or maybe even all of the mirrors recovered from around
three thousand BC e in Mesopotamia were copper mirrors. But
by the third millennium BC, in moving forward, there are
a number of examples of metal mirrors found in Egypt,
usually copper early on, and then as as the years

(17:12):
go on, there are more copper alloys, and these would
fall into the classification of bronze mirrors. But also by
the third millennium BC, there are not only these scant artifacts,
but actually records of mirrors. So this means mirrors evoked
as a concept in texts and in artistic imagery. So

(17:32):
Enoch includes some examples of ancient Egyptian artwork from tombs
that appears to show mirrors. Uh. For example, Rob, I've
got one you can look at here. This is figure
three in front of you, but I'll try to describe
it is detail from the tomb of mirror Ruca at Sakara.
And so this would have been the sixth dynasty of

(17:53):
Egypt roughly b C. And what you see is sort
of a line of figures depicted in that profile style. Um,
and they're they're doing they're they're holding up objects at
each other. And I think this may be showing a
sequence of the same figures interacting across time. But one
of the objects they're holding up it looks like, well,

(18:14):
what is that? Is that a ping pong paddle? No,
it's probably a mirror. Yeah, yeah, I can definitely see it.
I mean they're they're holding it up to their faces
as if looking at their own reflection. And way way
back into history. Uh, it's clear that mirrors contain not
just their practical functions they're used in cosmetics and stuff,
but also their religious significance. Uh. Enoch notes that is

(18:35):
extremely common across all of these cultures for mirrors to
be associated with some kind of supernatural power, to be
associated with the gods, or to have some kind of
use in divination or or association with the soul. He writes, quote,
they served as symbols of the sun or moon, and
may have been carried on tops of standards, a one sided,

(18:56):
flattened disc symbolized as setting or rising on. Mirrors were
sometimes used to symbolize the inner self. They also provided
a way to look back. Yeah, this is all especially
interesting considering the ancient Egyptians, who of course were very
solar oriented culture. Uh So anything that reflects sunlight is

(19:18):
going to potentially have some real value. Uh. And I
think we've discussed in the show before about the you know,
the idea that the the Great Pyramids were once um
uh covered in a more reflective surface, so that they
would have they would have you know, wouldn't have been
like a mirror, but they would have definitely reflected the
brilliance of the sun during the day. Yeah. It would
have been amazing to be alive at a time when

(19:39):
you could have seen that. Yeah. Um. But hey, so
there's another thing I came across while while reading up
for this episode that I really wanted to do a
digression on that has less to do with the technology
of a mirror, but I think actually does tie into
maybe a lot of these, uh these religious uses of
mirrors that we see throughout the ages. And this is

(20:00):
an effective mirrors that has come to be known as
the strange face in the mirror effect. Yeah, and this
is this is great because it's it's one that we
can certainly take all of this and apply it to
the mirrors that surround us today. But then if we're
talking about these various older variations of the mirror that
are maybe smoky or darker um, smaller um, it allows

(20:23):
even more room for ambiguity. Yeah. So a while back,
I did an episode of the artifact that I called
the Psychedelic Blindfold. I don't know if you ever got
a chance to listen to this one, Rob, but it
was one that I've been thinking about a lot ever since.
And in fact, though it's called the psychedelic blindfold, there's
actually nothing special about the blindfold that was used in

(20:44):
the study except that it basically blocks out all light.
What was really special about this research was the amount
of time that the blindfold was worn. The basic finding
in this study again, this was published in the year
two thousand four in the Journal of neuro Optomology. The
base finding was that subjects who were blindfolded for days
at a time started to have elaborate visual hallucinations. And

(21:09):
the most interesting part to me was not just that
they were hallucinating, but that sometimes they started to visually
hallucinate roughly accurate percepts based on other senses. So that
might include perceptions of their own limbs or objects that
they were manipulating, like a picture of water on a

(21:30):
table or other people in the room with them, that
they would get pictures of things that were actually there.
And this to me raises interesting questions about what site
really is. What if you are seeing things in your
brain and those things are not whole cloth fabrications but
roughly accurate perceptions of real objects around you, except they're

(21:55):
not based on light received through the eyes, but based
on other senses cognition. So maybe your appropriate reception, you know,
your internal sense of where the rest of your body
is causes you to hallucinate visual imagery of your body
parts in the right places, or your ability to feel
objects around you, like a picture of water in your hand,

(22:16):
causes you to hallucinate that picture, except it's basically an
accurate visual stimulus you're getting is just not based on light. Yeah,
this is a fascinating area of contemplation. It gets back
to something we've we've we've we've touched on before, the
idea that we think of ourselves. We we often use
technological metaphors. We often think about our visual perception as

(22:37):
being that of a like a security camera. It is
it is filming the world and preserving that that site
data as it is. But of course the more we
look at it, the more we realize that this is
not the case. We have we certainly have have visual
data coming in, but then we have the we have
other senses involved, we have memory employed, and there's a

(22:58):
great deal of a filling in the blanks and the
sort of cultivation of an internal model of reality. I
think that's very well put, and that's really going to
be relevant to what I'm about to bring up. So
all that was preamble to a really interesting series of
studies that I was just getting into about the potential
psychedelic power of mirrors, much like the potential psychedelic power

(23:21):
of a blindfold um And and another thing about this
that's interesting is that there are a number of urban
legends and folk beliefs about supernatural apparitions that will manifest
in a mirror under the right conditions. One example I
came across I was reading an article in Scientific American.
One of the authors of this article was named Susannah

(23:42):
Martinez Conde, and she talks about how thirty years ago,
when she was a child growing up in Spain, she
said that there was a there was like a superstition
that anyone could see the devil's face. And what you
had to do to see the devil's face was stare
at your her own face in the mirror at the
stroke of midnight, and then you would say the devil's

(24:05):
name when when midnight tolls, and then you would see
the devil in the mirror. Yeah, this is kind of
the with the Bloody Mary effect. You could go right.
And I gotta admit, I actually remember when I was
a child, I for a I don't know how long
this will on, for some period of time, I got
absolutely terrified about Bloody Mary. After a kid that I was,

(24:26):
I was at some summer camp and some guy was
telling me about Bloody Mary and uh, and after hearing that,
I remember I was just like petrified of being alone
in a room with a mirror. I remember this too. Yeah.
I was thinking about this recently because after we recorded
the first episode, I was telling my son, who just
who just entered fourth grade. I was telling him about

(24:46):
the fish and U and the Borhey's short story about
the creatures in the mirror, and um, he wasn't terrified
or anything of it, but he would started asking questions
and then I started thinking back to Bloody Mary, and
so for they're like, oh wow, I need to careful here.
He's just the right age where I need to I
need to make sure I cultivate his imagination just so

(25:07):
so that he's not afraid of mirrors. Well, you know,
it's funny, like I've heard a million ghost stories by
that point. Why was that the one that that got
the hooks in me? And and other ones weren't. It's
a great question. I mean, on one hand, I think
I think part of it is that the mirror is
at the center of it, and the mirror is poorly

(25:27):
understood by all of us. It is this weirdness that
we just kind of stop asking questions about. And then
if you you add something to the scenario, uh, you
can easily bring that spookiness back into the forefront, you know.
But then also with with a lot of like the
Bloody Marry type stuff we tend to and it involves
not just a mirror, but also a low light or

(25:50):
a flickering candle light, which is just going to augment
the various effects that we're talking about here. Um, you
can already be weird enough to dear at your own
face in the mirror for you know, a minute at
a time. But add in flickering and alterating candle light
throw in low light, and as well as this the

(26:11):
script of the supernatural layered on top of everything, and yeah,
I can start feeling a little freaky. It's funny how
much what you say is is conforming to the study
I'm about to bring up, though, I should report, by
the way that Um, Susanna Martinez Conde. She says in
the article that when she tried to see the devil's
face in the mirror as a child, nothing happened. So
you know, you win some, you lose some. You gotta

(26:32):
play a little less more in the background too, I think, right. Um,
But but given certain recent psychological research, I think there
could be some plausible reasons to assume that some legends
like this of seeing faces in the mirror, seeing the devil,
or seeing bloody Mary are based on real experiences that
some people had, because you can get yourself into a

(26:54):
very vulnerable state when you're steering into a mirror, especially
with in low light conditions. And then on top of that,
there are apparently special effects of staring at a face
in a mirror that manifest as a very common predisposition
to hallucinate. As far as I can tell. This effect
was first observed by a psychologist named Giovanni Caputo of

(27:16):
the University of Urbino, Italy and published in a report
in the journal Perception in two thousand and ten. The
paper was called Strange Face in the Mirror Illusion. So,
in this study, Caputo recruited fifty subjects who were all
in their twenties, a range of one to twenty nine
years of age, and they didn't know what was being tested.
What happened is Caputo would place them in a dimly

(27:38):
lit room, so it was illuminated only by a twenty
five what incandescent light that was placed on the floor
behind the subject. And then they were asked to stare
into a mirror that was about zero point four meters
which is about one point three ft in front of them,
and then just to keep looking at their own reflection,
staring into their own face for ten minutes. That it

(28:00):
no drugs, no other alterations of consciousness, just a dimly
lit room, staring in your at your own face in
a mirror for ten minutes. And then afterwards they were
asked to write about the experience and report anything that
they remembered about it, and the results reported by Caputo
are extremely striking. The majority of subjects reported at least

(28:22):
one of a number of different kinds of broad uh
perceptually strange or even hallucinatory experiences. So to read from
the study quote, descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included
a huge deformations of one's own face reported by sixty
six percent of the fifty participants. Be a parents face

(28:45):
with traits changed eighteen percent, of whom eight percent were
still alive and ten percent were deceased. See an unknown
person twenty eight percent, d an archetypal face such as
that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait
of an ancestor e an animal face such as that

(29:06):
of a cat, pig, or lion eighteen percent, or f
fantastical and monstrous beings percent. So like a lot of
people get monsters in there. Yeah, yeah, it's It's impressive
and and really not surprising at all. I think if
anyone has has spent any amount of time, I mean,

(29:26):
we've all spent time looking at ourselves in the mirror,
I think enough to realize. Yeah, the more that you
look at yourself, the weirder you look um, and most
of us will leave that situation before you get to
the monster scenario. You know, you're more likely to check
out when you start seeing uh, when you start noticing
resemblance to parents and so forth, and you're like, I
think I've looked at my mirror enough. I think I

(29:48):
checked on what I came here to check on. Now
I'm going to go do something else. But ten minutes
that's sas some serious time. And Caputo also reported that
there were effects beyond the purely visual distortions and hallucinations.
There were also sort of conceptual disruptions and and strong
emotional reactions and feelings that people experienced staring into the
mirror like this again to read from his results quote,

(30:12):
The participants reported that apparition of new faces in the
mirror caused sensations of otherness when the new face appeared
to be that of another unknown person or strange other
looking at him or her from within or beyond the mirror.
All fifty participants experienced some form of this dissociative identity
effect at least for some apparition of strange faces, and

(30:34):
often reported strong emotional responses in these instances, and I
thought this was interesting. So it's saying that, like, even
for people who didn't note any visual distortions or visual hallucinations,
they did report at least some kind of feeling of
dissociation with the face that was looking back at them.
But coming back to the results quote, for example, some

(30:55):
observers felt that the other watched them with an enigmatic
expression and a situation that they found astonishing. Some participants
saw a malign expression on the other face and became anxious.
Other participants felt that the other was smiling or cheerful
and experienced positive emotions in response. The apparition of deceased
parents or of archetypal portraits produced feelings of silent query.

(31:19):
Apparition of monstrous beings produced fear or disturbance. Dynamic deformations
of the new faces, like pulsations or shrinking, smiling, or grinding,
produced an overall sense of inquietude for things out of control.
So these kinds of emotional reactions I think makes sense,
especially given that that so many people were seeing some

(31:41):
kind of visual disturbance or hallucination. But to come back
to the visual perceptions themselves, what could possibly explain this
bizarre effect. You look at your own face over time
and it starts to kind of transform into other things.
You see other people's faces. Maybe you see a cat
face or a monster face. Maybe you become a minotaur,
maybe you become your grandfather. Uh. You know this is

(32:04):
this is strange. So like, what could be leading to this?
So Caputo offers a few ideas. First of all, the
the disappearance or attenuation of face traits could very well
be caused by what's known as truck slur fading. Uh.
This is a name for a very well documented optical
illusion that goes like this. Okay, if you if you
fixate your gaze on a particular point without moving it,

(32:28):
unchanging visual stimuli in the periphery will tend to fade
away the longer you stare at that one fixation point.
This was observed by the eighteenth century English physician and
Pauly math Erasmus Darwin. It was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
But it gets its name after being uh discussed by
a Swiss physician named Ignace Paul Vital truck Sler in

(32:50):
the early eighteen hundreds, who did some experiments with patches
of color against a screen or a wall. But if
you want to try this out for yourself, there are
tons of you know, they're the little like stimulus images
that you can look up on the internet. Just google
truk slur fading or truck slur illusion t R O
x L e R and you should be able to
find something you can try out. Rob But I quite

(33:11):
easily experienced this illusion. Why I've got one. I'm looking
at here that is a really menacing, grinning cheshire cat face,
but it's got an X right in the middle of it.
And if I stare at the X, I think, really,
it only takes about five seconds before the colors of
the cat face fade to almost nothing. Alright, staring at
the X on its nose intently, Yeah, yeah, it does.

(33:35):
Like the pupils disappear for me pretty quickly, I'd say
for me, after about five or six seconds of intense
staring at the X, the face is gone, but the
teeth remain. I only see the grin and after about
like five to ten minutes, it's telling me to go
out and remove traffic signs. So it's it's a haunting
face to stare into too much. I feel great I've

(33:56):
got a brand new religion. I'm about to go buy
some meal mix in bulk. Well, the chesire cat. I
think we discussed this a little bit in our MEDUSA episodes,
like this is a this is a gorgon, this is
a gorgon space that we're staring at here. It's a
it's just a a repackaging of the same concept. I mean,
not not that that has anything to do with the

(34:17):
optical fact going on here, but at any rate, So,
truck slur fading is a specific example of a broader
phenomenon of neural adaptation, the desensitization of sensory neurons to
unchanging stimuli. And you can think of other examples that

(34:41):
are were there similar effects of this and maybe tactle feelings.
Like you know, if you um put a finger on
part of your arm, you will feel the touch of
your own finger when it first lands there. But if
you just leave it there, you kind of stop noticing it. Uh.
Similar thing with smells, you know, all kinds of me life.
You're just getting the same sense stimulus over and over

(35:04):
again without changing. Often it will fade into nothing in
your awareness. Right, It's like like with the smell for example,
the idea is you're being alerted to this smell because
something about it is important, like maybe it's potentially dangerous, etcetera.
But if you're around it enough, it's like it's like
the brain is decided, Okay, he gets the point. We've
sent the memo, we've done all we can do. We

(35:25):
just have to trust that he is he either knows
that this, uh, this particular smell is is not poison
or he's done something about it. Right, And so that
does seem to be an explanation for what's going on
generally with truck slur fading. You you stare at a
single point and then other things in the visual field.
If you're really staring intently, you're not moving your eyes around,
you're not blinking. Those other colors, those other images, they

(35:49):
just kind of like fade away over time you you're
you get used to them, and then they're just going.
But this is not the full answer to the question, right,
Because so Caputo's interpretive section continues to say, the trucksler
fading might be a good explanation for why, like outer
features of the face might seem to fade or disappear
or possibly distort while we're fixated on a central point,

(36:11):
like if you're staring at your own nose or staring
at your own eyes very intently. But a lot of
the subjects reported not only fading or distortion of the
outer parts of the face, but the sensation of totally
new visual traits, such as you know, like different features
or animal faces, monster faces, the faces of other people.

(36:31):
And this part is more difficult to explain. Caputo and
and other co authors have done subsequent research following up
on the the strange face in the mirror effect, but
the exact cause of these perceptions does remain somewhat obscure,
at least as far as I can tell. A part
of the explanation could have to do with the long
gazing process causing a disruption of the mental faculty that

(36:54):
normally combines individual face traits like nose, eyes, lips, and
so forth into a unified experience of a face. You know,
that's something you probably know from experience that like, when
you see a face, you tend to see it as
a face, not as the individual parts of a face. Right,
And and this is something though I find when I

(37:15):
am just staring at another person's face for too long
I stopped seeing it as a unified face, and I
start it's kind of like it's almost like you're seeing
just parts of the face floating around, you know, like
you're no longer seeing the face altogether. And it's a
weird feeling. And I have to look away from the
person's face at that point. Oh you ever, like you
gaze at somebody's eyes too long, and you maybe somebody

(37:36):
who you find beautiful and you love their beautiful eyes,
and then you look too long and those eyes become eyeballs,
and then you see them as organs, right, and this
is you know, the sclera, and they've got some kind
of jelly inside them. And then you're like, oh, oh, no,
I did it. I did the I did the bad. Yeah.
And then you see the skull beneath the flesh and
it's all done. But to read from Caputo's interpretation of

(37:58):
of what could possibly be causing again, it's it's not
really fully understood. But in his original study in two
thousand ten, Caputo says, quote, this long term viewing of
face stimuli of marginal strength. I remember that's especially because
the low light conditions right may generate a haphazard assembly
of face traits that generate deformed faces or scrambled faces.

(38:20):
Frequent apparitions of strange faces of known or unknown people
support the idea that the illusion involves a high level
mechanism that is specific to global face processing. On the
other hand, the frequent apparition of fantastical and monstrous beings
and of animal faces cannot, in our opinion, be explained
by any actual theory of face processing. And so yeah,

(38:43):
there's there's still big questions about what exactly leads to
this effect. It might have something to do with with
transition points. Say like maybe you're staring at a central
part of the reflection, you're looking at your own eyes
or something, and then troksler fading kicks in and the
outer parts of the face start to kind of fade away,
and you lose some color definition and stuff like that.

(39:05):
And then and then the visual stimulus is suddenly restored
when you blink or you move your eyes or something,
and that that part that has faded away snaps back
into focus. Maybe something in that transition causes you to
see something weird. Perhaps their gaps there and the brain
does some strange filling in process, but we don't really know.

(39:25):
But what we do know for sure is that this
phenomenon is actually not contained simply to mirror gazing. You
can recreate similar effects by having people gaze directly into
other people's faces for ten minutes in low light. This
was explored in another paper that Caputo published in called
Strange Face Illusions during intersubjective gazing, so people just looking

(39:49):
at each other's faces. This was published in Consciousness and Cognition,
so it definitely happened with pairs of other people. So
it seems like the mirror is not really the special part.
The real keys are faces as stimulus, either yours or
somebody else's, long exposure times, just uninterrupted staring and low light.

(40:11):
So what makes mirrors special in this regard is that
they are a tool that anybody can use to try
to experience these strange face effects, you know, without having
to recruit somebody else who is game for a really
awkward experiment. Yeah. Now, the the idea of two people's
faces for ten minutes low light, I mean essentially this
is this is any date night scenario, right, But I

(40:33):
guess the beauty of date night is that you ideally
you have maybe a beverage you have some sort of
at least an appetizer. There there's people watching, or you know,
ideally there's people watching. There's maybe art on the walls,
there are other things to captivate your attention, and then
you can keep coming back to the person across from you.
It's not it's not some sort of a you know,

(40:55):
just a like a blank cell that you find yourself
engaging with this per sit in. Right. I don't want
you know, I don't like to be judgmental, but I'm
gonna say, if you're doing date night this way, you're
doing it wrong. You should not stare uninterrupted without moving
your eyes or blinking at somebody's face for ten minutes.
So it sounds like it's the kind of thing that
could be a dating fat right, Like if someone's like,

(41:16):
look dating a normal dating scenario, you're just not able
to bond with the person. You need just ten minutes
of uninterrupted um facial viewing and uh, and then you'll
know whether this is your soulmate or not, or that
is a minotaur. You can't really love me until you've
seen me as a minotaur. Right though, Interestingly enough, that's
like a show now where they're there's some sort of

(41:37):
a dating show where both people are are covered in
like heavy monster effects makeup. So yeah, I'm serious. I
am serious. It's a show on Netflix. I have not
watched it, but I watched the trailer for it, and
the trailer was amusing. Um it at least has some
cool monster like makeup effects stuff, so it'll be like, uh,

(41:57):
you know, two individuals they're doing a blind date thing,
except one is made up like a bird woman and
the other is I don't know, like a like a
baseball headed mutant, that sort of thing, a baseball headed mutant.
I like it. Yeah, I can't wait till this like
back reflects onto the pickup line process and stuff. It's like,
you know, Darling, let me be your pumpkin head. There

(42:18):
may be a pumpkin head in it. Yeah. Yeah, listeners
will have to report back because again I'm not going
to actually watch this show. Just one more thing I
wanted to mention before wrapping up on the strange face
in the Mirror research so I said that Caputo has
done a number of studies following up on this and
reproducing it in different contexts since then. One that I
thought was interesting was published in the journal of trauma

(42:39):
and dissociation in the year twenty nineteen called strange face
illusions during eye to eye gazing and die adds specific
effects on derealization, depersonalization, and dissociative identity. Again, the study
reproduced the findings with some new areas of focus. But
the main thing I wanted to mention from this one
was that fifteen of the test subjects here were sketch

(43:00):
artists who were later asked to reproduce their best approximation
of some of the strange faces they saw, and Rob,
here you go, you can you can tell me what
you think of these. One I really like is a
guy with a furry face with glasses and his eyes
have mustaches. That one, yeah, that one looks pretty creepy

(43:21):
and has kind of a you know, blank isn't real
and can't hurt you kind of a vibe to it,
as does the big vacant eyed lizard man looking face.
And then one of them is just kind of a
muppet and the other one, um, just kind of looks
like a caricature, the monstrous monkey woman. That's what the
big eyed one is called. Here, No, I think you're

(43:41):
looking at the alien face. The monstrous monkey one is okay,
I like the muppet one. Yeah, the monstrous monkey woman.
Then it doesn't look very monstrous to me. Looks looks adorable,
it looks great. Let this monkey woman teach children about
the alphabet this. This should be on Sesame Street. Now
it's uh, there's so many additional directions to go in

(44:02):
from this. On one hand, we should point out that, um,
you know, it's worth noting that there are other reasons
that are facing a mirror may be extra unnerving. Um. There's,
of course what is often referred to as mirrored self misidentification.
And this is the delusion that wants reflection in a
mirror is some manner of double or a relative or

(44:23):
something of that nature, but not a reflection of yourself.
And this is actually a right hemisphere cranial dysfunction, uh
that I think is often tied to like, uh, you know,
major brain disease or some sort of traumatic injury to
the head. I mean. Another way of of re contextualizing
what we've just been talking about is that, um, faces

(44:45):
are powerful. Faces are powerful and profound stimuli that can
cause powerful and profound reactions in the brain, and mirrors
are a way of getting lots of access to face
stimuli without you know, in the in the privacy of
your own bathroom, you know, without anybody judging you or

(45:05):
judging you for staring at them. Say, you know, I
think I would love to hear from anyone out there
whose profession requires them to make um, eye contact or
just to stare people's faces for this kind of an
extended amount of time. Because on one hand, and granted
we we do all of our recordings through zoom now,
but you know, used to It's like part of our
whole thing is we have these long conversations about topics, um,

(45:28):
you know, used to in the same room, but we're
also looking at other things. You know, maybe we're looking
over to seth to make sure the recording is going okay.
We're certainly looking at our notes to see where we
are in the outline, uh, you know, or even looking
elsewhere in the room. But I realized, like some people
were in a profession where like maybe they're a therapist
or or something, and they maybe have to make prolonged

(45:52):
eye contact, prolonged you know, face to face communication. What
is that like? Do you find yourself susceptible to some
of these effects. Yeah, what is the appropriate amount of
faith staring? I mean, too little can seem like maybe
you're not making an effort to connect with somebody, and
too much is creepy and invasive, like you know, balancing
that I think is one of those uh, those ongoing
social ballets we always have to manage. Yeah, Like you

(46:14):
don't want to talk to somebody who refuses to make
eye contact with you. But if the eye contact is
just too like unflinching, it can feel a bit too intense.
You know. It feels like you're playing a game of
of of eyeballs Chicken with them, you know, and it's
no fun. No eyeball Chicken, no eyeball road rage. You know,
you gotta you gotta manage right of way. This reminds

(46:35):
me of something we talked about in a previous episode
about sunglasses, about how you have UM if an individual
is wearing sunglasses, uh, the other people are more inclined
to believe that that person is staring at them, versus
if they were not wearing sunglasses at all. Um, So
I don't I don't know. Again, We're we're creatures that
are hyper aware of staring. Um, that know the power

(46:58):
of staring and theertain amount of eye contact is required.
But yeah, there's this careful balance that has to be
um in effect. And then you throw mirrors into this
whole scenario and it just it makes everything a little stranger.
I think that's one of the big the big take
homes that we keep coming back to with mirrors is
mirrors make reality a little bit stranger, and in doing so,

(47:21):
reveal strength strange things about our reality. Like one of
those things is that you don't really have a face.
You have you are, to a certain extent just this
a symbolage of of of organs on the front of
a head. And we don't think about it, but if
you stare in a mirror long enough, you might come
to realize that. Likewise, uh, you know, realizations about um,

(47:42):
you know, how much you look like like a parent
or a family member, or like some you know, random
celebrity face or some face in a painting, or even
the face of a beast or a monster. Very true.
The concept of a face is a kind of blessed
hallucination that we're always able to you know, we're usually
able to maintain in just a allowing the the the
face hallucination to decompose into various contours of meat and bone.

(48:05):
Maybe that's one of the you know, we came back.
We've discussed this, I think in both episodes. Why why
the mirror is so often in the toolkit of the
magician and the priest and the soothsayer and so forth.
And I think part of it is, you could see,
the mirror is a very basic tool for breaking reality,
or at least bending reality. You know, it is a
it is a means of of not only you know,

(48:28):
creating effects and creating illusions, but also taking the potency
out of the the ever present illusion of the way
we perceive the world. Yeah, I think we're gonna have
to keep thinking about this, and we're gonna have to
come back in part three because there's more mirrors to come.
We have so much more, there's so much, so much
to talk about with this one. I mean, i'd be
I'd be perfectly happy to to do this one for

(48:50):
you know, four or five episodes. So we'll just we'll see,
we'll see how how much gas is in the tank.
But uh, yeah, we'll definitely be back with the part three.
Maybe the oculus will make you forget all of your
past and you'll have to do six seven eight just
on fraternity. Well, I don't know if I could watch
Oculus again. I found it to be a very enjoyable
horror movie, but but a troubling one. So I wish

(49:13):
there were more haunted mirror movies. I don't know that
there's been a lot of them. I was looking around
the other day and I think I found one from
the maybe it's God. I can't rememberich decade, sixty seventies
or eighties, somewhere in that thirty year period, but there
aren't as many as you might think. I think there were.
There may be some various anthology episodes concerning mirrors. I
just googled Haunted Mirror movie got a selection of movie

(49:34):
posters and covers. They all look really terrible, which is strange.
I mean, I guess it's also totally understandable because on
one hand, it seems easy, like, oh, you just need
a creepy mirror. Just go by a mirror, make a mirror, uh,
you know, just as this prop that doesn't actually move.
But you get into how you shoot mirrors and how
you use the mirror to make things, you know, creepier,
and it gets a little more complicated. I guess that's

(49:55):
why maybe weird scenes with mirrors are largely more memorable,
you know, like I think of I think of like
the old that, like the nineteen nineteen seventies Macbeth adaptation
has a great sequence with a mirror in it. So
stuff of that nature comes to mind. All right, we're
gonna go and close it now. We're gonna put the

(50:16):
uh you know, I'm gonna put the cloth back over
the haunted mirror. But we'll be back to discuss our
reflections some more in the next episode. In the meantime,
if you would like more stuff to blow your mind,
you can find it wherever you get your podcast. Just
look for the Stuff to Blow your Mind feed We
have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have Artifacts
on Wednesday, Stuff to blow your Mind on Monday, and

(50:36):
on Friday's we do a little weird how Cinema. That's
their time to talk about some strange and interesting film.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other
to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello,
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

(51:04):
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