The Invention of the Mirror, Part 2

Smoking pools of dark reflection. Propagator of uncanny doubles. Gateway to inverse kingdom. It’s time for Stuff to Blow Your Mind to venture into the world of mirrors, discussing their predecessors, their invention and way humans relate to the world on the other side.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I was guiding the tour that Sandra Bates, his brother
was a part of when he got his look into
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,

(00:25):
but what about that black splotch in the upper left
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

(00:45):
reflection of someone of someone in black standing at his shoulder.
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, the production of My Heart Radio. Hey,

(01:12):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb 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

(01:35):
with the ancient Proto city of Chattahyak 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 short story compilation Skeleton Crew.
So I highly recommend anyone who hasn't read that go
read that story if you want a creepy mirror story

(01:58):
for my money, just as creepy is 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 to two supernatural

(02:20):
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 see things that you cannot directly see. Uh.

(02:43):
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

(03:04):
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, we're 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

(03:25):
mirrors warned you that that reality and reflection do not
necessarily match up. On Oh, that's why 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

(03:47):
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.
There there might be some earlier dates, but I think
that was the earliest state 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

(04:08):
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 tez cat li PoCA, whose
name actually means Lord of the smoking mirror. So there
were black mirrors used by his priests. Uh, and he
has this just overall connection to dark volcanic obsidian. Yeah.

(04:34):
And so scrying is a practice that's found in cultures
and religions all throughout the world. The archetype 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,

(04:55):
often a reflective medium, such as a mirror or a
crystal ball. But I would say one of the things
about Tess Catlet PoCA 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 we've we've we've mentioned

(05:17):
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 Catlet Polca Trickster and Supreme Deity, edited by Aztec

(05:39):
scholar Elizabeth Bacuadano, and in this book, in a chapter
titled enemy Brothers were Divine Twins, author Gillim Oliver points
out that tes Catlet Polca 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 undoubtedly one of the manufactured

(06:03):
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. So one
way of thinking about them is that Ketzel Caudal embodies

(06:25):
certain aspects of nature, whereas test Ca PoCA 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
test cat Polka is essentially a lord of artifact and invention.
So yes, you know that smoke is part of fire,

(06:47):
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 obsidy and to make a mirror, the
utilization of of smoke and fire in in other human activities.
So you could you could look at him as a
god of technology. I know this is not intended by

(07:10):
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
of test Catlipoca, various items are associated with with the

(07:31):
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 cult items and costume elements associated
with him were obsidian mirrors. UM now mirrors were sometimes

(07:54):
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

(08:14):
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

(08:35):
returned to Mexico. So a lot of these mirrors have
been in circulation for a while 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,

(08:55):
So I guess a couple of things to keep in
mind about the mirrors. So, first of all, uh they 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 in

(09:16):
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,

(09:40):
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

(10:02):
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

(10:24):
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
amulet across the chest, which is something that we see
in the codiceas so, there seemed to have largely been

(10:46):
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 D'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 reflective

(11:08):
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 multimedia assemblage of shiny objects.
The material metaphors of access to and control of the

(11:30):
glowing spirit realm from wind, status and political power flowed.
And they also write that quote a presence of absence
defines the ambivalent nature of Testcatlet PoCA, the supreme deity
of the late post classic az Tech pantheon. In the
dark ephemeral reflection of his obsidian mirror, in the transient

(11:52):
sound of his ceramic flower pipes, lies the sensuous nature
of a god who mediates materiality and invisible ability with
omniscience and omnipresence. So a couple of years ago, I
actually was lucky enough to see uh John D's mirror
uh the Azteca City and mirror from his collection in
the British Museum. It's on display there among the collection

(12:15):
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
think I've mentioned before. I may have seen it when
I visited the British Museum, but I did not know

(12:37):
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 breeze
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
think extensively. So if you visit the British Museum today,
there's a good chance you'll be able to find it.

(12:57):
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 d
paper deals primarily with cal Will, the Maya form of
this same deity, but in it the author writes that
the mirrors were indeed used in acts of divination. Priests

(13:19):
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

(13:40):
so they point out that that the mirrors Roulan divination
may be linked with astrology because test Catlet PoCA 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

(14:02):
the city and I guess being like the darkness betwixt
the stars. Oh yeah, 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.
Is the earliest mirror artifacts known of are probably these

(14:23):
obsidian 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 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

(14:45):
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 Flinder's Petree suggested that stone palette in pre dynastic
Egypt could have been turned into mirrors by wetting them.
So you might have an artifact that just looks like

(15:07):
kind of a flat stone disc, and that by wetting
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

(15:29):
and Upper Egypt with a number of artifacts from predynastic 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

(15:49):
as a possible frame um and a slate disc also
a piece of reflective micah pierced with a 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

(16:12):
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

(16:32):
was looking around at these examples, it seems perhaps most
or maybe even all of the mirrors recovered from around
three thousand BC in Mesopotamia were copper mirrors. But by
the third millennium b C and moving forward, there are
a number of examples of metal mirrors found in Egypt,
usually copper early on and then as as the years

(16:52):
go on, there are more copper alloys and these would
fall into the classification of bronze mirrors. But also by
the third mill in the MBC, 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 Enoch includes some examples of ancient Egyptian

(17:15):
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 Egypt roughly b C. And what you see

(17:37):
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,
what is that? Is that a ping pong paddle? No,
it's probably a mirror. Yeah, yeah, I can definitely see it.

(17:58):
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
extremely common across all of these cultures for mirrors to

(18:19):
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 flattened disc symbolized as setting or rising sun. Mirrors

(18:40):
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 going to potentially have some real value. Uh. I

(19:02):
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
you could have seen that. Yeah. Um. But hey, so

(19:23):
there's another thing I came across while u 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 an effective mirrors that has come to be known
as the strange face in the mirror effect. Yeah, and

(19:47):
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 even more room for ambiguity. Yeah. So, while back,

(20:07):
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
the study except that it basically blocks out all light.

(20:27):
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 Optimology. The
basic finding was that subjects who were blindfolded for days
at a time started to have elaborate visual hallucinations. And

(20:48):
the most interesting part to me was not just that
they were hallucinating, but that sometimes they started to visually
hallucinate roughly accurate per scepts 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

(21:09):
a table, or other people in the room with them.
That they would get pictures of things that we're 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

(21:30):
roughly accurate perceptions of real objects around you, except they're
not based on light received through the eyes, but based
on other senses and 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

(21:52):
to feel objects around you, like a picture of water
in your hand 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

(22:15):
our visual perception as 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,

(22:38):
and there's a great deal of 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

(23:00):
power 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

(23:22):
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 own face in the mirror at the stroke
of midnight, and then you would say the devil's name

(23:45):
when when midnight tolls, and then you would see the
devil in the mirror. Yeah, this is kind of the
with the Bloody Marry 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 went on.
For some period of time, I got absolutely terrified about
Bloody Mary after a kid that I was. I was

(24:06):
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 the 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
the fish and uh and the Borheys short story about

(24:30):
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 far. They're like, oh, wow, I need to be
careful here. He's just the right age where I needed.
I need to make sure I cultivate his imagination just
so so that he's not afraid of mirrors. Well, you know,
it's funny, like I've heard a million ghost stories by

(24:52):
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
understood by all of us. It is this weirdness that
we just kind of stop asking questions about. And then

(25:13):
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 Mary type stuff we tend to and it involves
not just a mirror, but also low light or a
flickering candle light, which is just going to augment the

(25:35):
various effects that we're talking about here. Um, you can
already be weird enough to stare 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 as well as this this script of the
supernatural layered on top of everything, and yeah, I can
start feeling a little freaky. It's funny how much what

(25:56):
you say is is conforming to the study I'm about
to bring up. Uh, 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 play a
little less more in the background too, I think right.
But but given certain recent psychological research, I think there

(26:20):
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
very vulnerable state when you're staring into a mirror, especially
with in low light conditions. And then on top of that,

(26:40):
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
the University of Urbino, Italy and published in a report
in the journal Reception in two thousand ten. The paper

(27:02):
was called Strange Face in the Mirror Illusion. So in
this study, Capputo 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
lit room, so it was illuminated only by a twenty
five what incandescent light that was placed on the floor

(27:24):
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 feet in front of them,
and then just to keep looking at their own reflection,
staring into their own face for ten minutes. That's it,
no drugs, no other alterations of consciousness, just a dimly
lit room, staring in your at your own face in

(27:47):
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 sub jects reported at
least one of a number of different kinds of broad
uh perceptually strange, or even hallucinatory experiences. So to read

(28:10):
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 with traits changed eighteen percent, of whom eight percent
were still alive and ten percent were deceased. See an

(28:33):
unknown person twenty eight percent, d an archetypal face such
as that of an old woman, a child, or a
portrait of an ancestory eight percent. E an animal face
such as that of a cat, pig, or lion eighteen percent,
or f fantastical and monstrous beings forty eight percent. So

(28:56):
like a lot of people get monsters in there. Yeah, uh,
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, 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

(29:17):
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 checked on what I came here to check on.
Now I'm going to go do something else, but ten minutes,
that's that's some serious time. And Caputo also reported that
there were effects beyond the purely visual distortions and hallucinations.

(29:40):
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,
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, own person or strange

(30:01):
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 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

(30:24):
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 observers felt that the other watched them with an
enigmatic expression, a situation that they found astonishing. Some participants
saw a malign expression on the other face and became anxious.

(30:47):
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.
Apparition of monstrous beings produced fear or disturbance. Dynamic deformations
of the new faces, like pulsations or shrinking, smiling, or grinding,

(31:09):
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
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

(31:32):
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
this is strange, So like, what could be leading to this?
So Caputo offers a few ideas. First of all, the
disappearance or attenuation of face traits could very well be

(31:55):
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, unchanging
visual stimuli in the periphery will tend to fade away
the longer you stare at that one fixation point. This

(32:16):
was observed by the eighteenth century English physician and poly
math Erasmus Darwin, who was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.
But it gets its name after being uh discussed by
a Swiss physician named Ignace Paul Vital trok Sler in
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

(32:38):
tons of you know, they're the little like stimulus images
that you can look up on the internet. Just google
trok slur fading or trucks Sler illusion t r O
x L E r H and you should be able
to find something you can try out. Rob. But I
quite easily experienced this illusion. Why I've got one. I'm
looking at here that is a really menacing, grinning cheshire

(32:58):
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. Like the pupils disappear for me pretty quickly.
I'd say for me, after about five or six seconds

(33:20):
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 got a brand new religion. I'm about to go
buy some meal mix in bulk. Well, the cheshire cat.

(33:42):
I think we discussed this a little bit in our
MEDUSA episodes, like this is a this is a gorgon,
This is a gorgon's face that we're staring at here.
It's a it's just a a a repackaging of the
same concept. I mean, not not that that has anything
to do with the optical fact going on here, but
at anyway, thank thank so trucks. Alert fading is a

(34:08):
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 are were there similar effects
of this and maybe tactile feelings. Like you know, if
you put a finger on part of your arm, you
will feel the touch of your own finger when it

(34:31):
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 stimuli. If you're just getting
the same sense stimulus over and over again without changing,
often it will fade into nothing in your awareness. Right.
It's like, well, like with the smell, for example, the

(34:51):
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
just have to trust that he is he either knows
that this uh, this particular smell is is not poison

(35:11):
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
just kind of like fade away over time you you're
you get used to them, and then they're just going.

(35:34):
But this is not the full answer to the question, right,
Because so Caputo's interpretive section continues to say that truck
slur 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,
like if you're staring at your own nose or staring
at your own eyes very intently. But a lot of

(35:56):
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,
and this part is more difficult to explain. Caputo and
and other co authors have done subsequent research following up

(36:17):
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
normally combines individual face traits like nose, eyes, lips, and

(36:39):
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
am just staring at another person's face for too long,
I stop seeing it as a unified face, and I

(37:01):
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
who you find beautiful and you love their beautiful eyes,
and then you look too long and those eyes become eyeballs,

(37:22):
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
of what could possibly be causing the again, it's it's
not really fully understood. But in his original study in

(37:43):
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.
Frequent apparitions of strange faces of known or unknown people

(38:03):
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,
there's there's still big questions about what exactly leads to

(38:26):
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.
And then and then the visual stimulus is suddenly restored

(38:48):
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 apps their gaps there, and the brain
does some strange filling in process, But we don't really know.
But what we do know for sure is that this
phenomenon is actually not contained simply to mirror gazing. You

(39:13):
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
at each other's faces. This was published in Consciousness and Cognition,

(39:33):
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.
So what makes mirror special in this regard is that
they are a tool that anybody can use to try

(39:56):
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
guess the beauty of date night is that you ideally

(40:16):
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,
just a a like a blank cell that you find

(40:38):
yourself engaging with this person in right. I don't want to,
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 know you should not stare uninterrupted
without moving your eyes or blinking at somebody's face for
ten minutes. Though it sounds like it's the kind of
thing that could be a dating fat right, Like if
someone's like, look dating a normal dating scenario, you're just

(40:59):
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 a dating show where both people are are covered

(41:20):
in like heavy monster effects makeup. So yeah, 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,
you know, two individuals they're doing a blind date thing,
except one is made up like a bird woman and

(41:42):
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
may be a pumpkin head in it. Yeah, listeners will
have to report back because again I'm not going to

(42:03):
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 and
Dissociation in the year twenty nineteen called Strange Face Illusions

(42:23):
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 artists
who were later asked to reproduce their best approximation of

(42:44):
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 and has
kind of a you know, blank isn't real and can't

(43:04):
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 guide one
is called. Here, No, I think you're looking at the
alien face. The monstrous monkey one is the Okay, I

(43:25):
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
from this. On one hand, we should point out that, um,
you know, it's worth noting that there are other reasons

(43:47):
that are facing a mirror maybe 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
something of that nature, but not a reflection of yourself.

(44:07):
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 re contextualizing what
we've just been talking about is that, um, faces are powerful.
Faces are powerful and profound stimuli that can cause powerful

(44:31):
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 judging you for
staring at them. Say, you know, I think I would
love to hear from anyone out there whose profession requires

(44:52):
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, you know,
used to in the same room. But we're also looking
at other things. You know, maybe we're looking over to

(45:13):
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 eye contact,
prolonged you know, face to face communication. What is that Like?

(45:36):
Do you find yourself susceptible to some of these effects?
You know, what is the appropriate amount of face 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 don't want
to talk to somebody who refuses to make eye contact

(45:57):
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 me
of something we talked about in a previous episode about sunglasses,

(46:18):
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 of staring, and a certain amount

(46:40):
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 strange, you're and in doing so, reveal strength

(47:02):
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, you know, how much you

(47:22):
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 instead of just
allowing the the the face hallucination to decompose into various

(47:43):
contours of meat and bone. Maybe that's one of the
you know, we came back. We've discussed this something 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,

(48:05):
it is a it is a means of of not
only you know, 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

(48:25):
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 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 but 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

(48:48):
it to be a very enjoyable horror movie, but but
a troubling one. So I wish 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 remember which 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. Just googled Haunted

(49:12):
Mirror movie got a selection of movie 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, 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

(49:34):
a little more complicated. I guess that's why maybe weird
scenes with mirrors are 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 uh you know,

(49:56):
I'm gonna put the cloth back over the haunted mirror.
But we'll be back to this us 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 podcasts. 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 on Friday's

(50:16):
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 production of

(50:44):
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