April 8, 2014 • 37 mins
What are we to make of the mirror world? We surround ourselves with looking glasses, yet rarely understand exactly what we're observing. Our reflected doubles gaze back at us, affecting the way we carry ourselves and the way we experience our own bodies. Travel through the looking glass in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas. Julie,
have you gazed into the mirror recently? Oh? Yes, in fact,
just a moment ago, I looked into the mirror and
(00:23):
I confirmed my shirt was indeed put on backwards by
whom by myself, because I dressed myself. Okay, I didn't
know how how how weird this was going to get. Well,
don't believe those rumors. I dressed myself all right now
like strange people in the night, like sneak in, dress
you and make sure you have your clothes on the
slightly wrong. Whatever you've heard it not true. But yes,
(00:47):
recently I have gazed into the looking glass, because we
do it all the time, right, We surround ourselves with mirrors,
and from from a very early age, we encounter them,
we get used to them, and eventually we die in
many cases, in a in a room with a mirror,
or or with a mirror right next door into this
little a little bathroom in the hotel room where we
(01:07):
finally pass away, this this portal, into this strange uncanny
ocular world. Were you just imagining Elvis in the bathroom? Yeah,
well you can. You can look at it that way.
You can imagine Elvis, um, you know, sadly passing away there.
But then what if what have the reflected Elvis is
just standing up watching you know. Well, that's the whole thing, right,
(01:27):
And that's for an entirely different episode, But right, This
idea of reflective surfaces in us peering into them has
been around for a long time. In fact, if you
look at the myth of Narcissus, you will be met
with this idea of this beautiful boy who cannot stop
staring at himself in the mirror, and he chooses to
(01:49):
die by the side of a reflecting pond rather um,
instead of leaving his beloved himself behind. That is how
attached he is to that image staring back at him.
The obsession with the mirror, obsession with one's own reflection
in the mirror. Just just as much as we are
we are at times horrified by reflections or or adverse
to to looking in the mirror. Um and and and
(02:12):
I just I think back to some of my earlier
opportunities to peer into different mirrors, particularly I remember going
to like sears somewhere with my mom, like way too much,
because those trips seemed always seem to take for average.
You know, you're going to buy trainers for you or
your sisters, and they would have this little, uh, this
this little area with three mirrors. You know, there's like
(02:34):
the one in front of you, and there two to
the sides, ideally so that you can stand in your
your new outfit or potentially what's going to be your
new outfit, and twirl around and see what you're wearing
from different advantage points. But those three mirrors also create
this kind of mirror world because if you if you
get close enough, especially as a child and you have
your board out of your mind because you're surrounded by clothes,
(02:56):
you get close enough to the mirror and you can
look in and you see the reflection the other mirror,
and you see this sort of endless cascade of mirrors,
just endless use, endless use, or endless sort of half
glimpse glimpses of you, and you feel like if you
could just sort of stick your head into the mirror,
you might be able to see down this hallway of
mirrors into infinity. So there's always this we're I just
(03:19):
I remember all these opportunities to look into a mirror
and getting just a sense of there's something uncanny about it,
there's something strange about the mirror, and you can't help
but let your imagination run wild or feel just a
little odd gazing into one. I like that example because
so often we think of mirrors just reflecting back reality,
but in fact, mirrors are really sort of a distorted reality.
(03:40):
Our perception is distorted, and in some ways mirror adds
mirrors out of this idea of these delusions that we
hold about ourselves. Yes, I mean that's the key. Mirrors
are truth and illusion wound up into one. And I
think even though on the surface we really fall into
the the eventual, everyday reality of saying, hey, that's me
in the mirror. That's me, that's the real that's totally
(04:00):
the side that I part my hair on, even though
everyone else is going to see it reverse. But deep
down there's something in us that knows that that's not right.
That's that's signaling at least one remaining flashing button on
the on the cognitive panel is going off saying there's
something uncanny going here, and I think that's why the
countless tales of strange creatures in the mirror mirrors that
(04:24):
tell the future or or reveal of secrets in the past,
why they resonate so strongly with us. And if you
go to stuftable your mind dot com, I wrote a
little list article called twelve Terrifying fictional mirrors that runs
through a few interesting examples of this. Yeah, so check
that out. But I think you're right. There's this idea
that mirrors are capturing this sort of self awareness, this reality.
(04:45):
And in fact, there's that mirror cognition test that many
scientists will use with animals. In fact, we know that guerillas,
we know that chimps, Banobo's dolphins, Asian elephants, they all
passed that self awareness test in a mirror. In other words,
you can put markings on them and they will examine
those markets. They will recognize themselves in that mirror, and
(05:06):
sometimes they will even inspect the inside of their mouth
as if like do I have something in my teeth,
The look up their noses, and sometimes they will even
check out their genitals. Well there you go. Where where
can I Where can I go from there? From an
ape looking at its own genitals in the mirror. UM
A safe place. That's safe place. Well let's let's let's
flee into the past for a moment. Then just a
(05:27):
quick rundown on the history of mirrors. UM. Again, we
have always from a very early age just lost in prehistory.
You know, humans gazed into the reflective surface of some
water and we're able to see their own reflection. I mean,
that's just that, just that just happened, and who knows
when it did. But humans started making simple mirrors probably
(05:49):
around six BC. Uh. They use polished obsidian as a
reflective surface. Uh. Later on we started using things like copper, bronze, silver, gold,
and even lad But of course all of this involves
very very heavy mirrors, you know, and they have to
be very small because you're making it out of obsidian
or a gold or silver. UM. Contemporary mirrors didn't come
(06:09):
into being into the late Middle Ages. But even then
there were problems with their manufacture because you're using glass,
and the sand used for glass making contained all these
different impurities, and so it was hard to produce a
really clear glass based mirror. Uh. And and also the
shock caused by the heat of adding molten metal for
backing that glass almost always broke the glass. So we
(06:30):
you know, Middle Ages, we knew how to make a mirror,
but we didn't quite have all the techniques down. It
wasn't until the Renaissance, when the Florentines admitted a process
for making low temperature lead backing that modern mirrors really
hit the scene. Um. And for the longest it was
all about just looking at yourself. There wasn't It wasn't
a lot of real, uh, you know, scientific opportunity with
(06:51):
the mirror. But of course, eventually around the sixteen sixties,
scientists started realizing we can you utilize and telescopes. Uh.
And the modern mirror, by the way, is made by
silvering or spraying a thin layer of silver or aluminum
onto the back of a sheet of glass. And most
mirrors are made today by heating aluminum in a vacuum,
(07:11):
which then bonds to the cooler glass. So that's the
basics how we started making mirrors and how we make
mirrors today. Yeah, and they became far more portable. Um. Now,
let's talk about light interacting with the surface of a mirror.
When a photon a packet of light hits a mirror,
it's absorbed by one of the atoms in the mirror,
and this causes electrons in the atom to vibrate and
(07:32):
give off an identical photon of light, the one that
you perceive in your eye yourself right, So your I
see these reflected photons as a mirror image. The mirror
image is reversed, which you can easily see if you
stand in front of a mirror with a shirt with
words on it. Right. Yes, and again that the parting
of the hair thing, you know, you always you sort
of grow to thank you part your hair on one
(07:53):
side of your your head perhaps, but you're actually doing
it on the other. Yeah. But in the case of
the words you have the words on the you're appearing
backwards in the mirror, and it is not right to left.
That has been reversed. The image has been reversed from
front to back. Now, this is a squirrelly concept, right,
because you're looking in the mirror, you see your right
hand up. Um, it looks as though it's right to right.
(08:17):
It just looks like it's been left to right reversed.
But Richard Kinneman has an interesting idea about this, and
he says, think about looking into the mirror, putting your
right hand up and it facing east. Okay, we're on
this parallel plane with the mirror. If you look at
yourself in the mirror, your nose, the nose you're touching yourself,
(08:41):
is pointing north, but the nose that's being reflected back
to you is pointing south. And he's saying that this
is that front to back concept. And you and I
were talking about this earlier and actually um doing some
yoga in the aisles of our office to try to
get to the bottom of this concept. Because the reversal
situation also comes into play in a yoga class because
(09:03):
you know, it varies depending on who your yoga teacher
isn't how they do it, but a lot of the
time the yoga teacher will be facing you like a mirror,
like a mirror, and they're going to do the reverse
of whatever you're doing. So if we're lifting our left
leg in the class, he or she is going to
lift their right leg because it's going because the right
leg is going to lift on the same side. Uh
(09:25):
as far as the room is concerned, as as our
other legs. So right there, front to back. Yeah, they're
correcting for the reversal. It's so they're they're front to
back to you like a mirror. If it were left
to right, they would turn around right and then you
would be looking at their backside and they would be
mirroring you from from from uh left to right in
(09:46):
that way. So I don't know if it's still kind
of a squarely concept people. That helps another way I
was thinking about it, um, a pane of glass with
writing printed on it, you know, you walk around to
the other side of it and in it's reverse. Yeah,
they I guess that's a good example, all right. So
that's some some mirror basics there. Um. As you mentioned,
mirrors can be curved to focus light, so boom, you've
(10:06):
got telescopes, You've got all sorts of uses of mirrors.
But it turns out that mirrors can actually be used
in therapy as well. Yes, and this is where things
start getting getting an early trippy to think about, you know.
And it also gets back into that uncanny world that
we discussed earlier. You guys, you're looking in the mirror.
Something's not quite right, and it twists our perception of reality,
(10:29):
uh in a way that we take for granted, but
in a way that becomes far more substantial when we're
dealing with the treatment of phantom limb syndrome. Yeah, because
mirror therapy has been used in phantom limbs syndrome, also
chronic pain and post stroke paralysis. And the reason that
it's used is that reflected images of patients limbs or
(10:49):
other body parts trick the brain into healing itself. Now,
think about this. The majority of people who have phantom
limb um or excuse me, who have a limb ampute,
hated or the nerve supply removed report experiencing some kind
of phantom limb and pain, but only some report persistent
phantom limb pain, which is apparently excruciating pain. Yeah, I've
(11:14):
heard some accounts of it are kind of kind of
like they you know, you feel that that missing limb
as if it's there, but as if it is, say,
cramped up, like you need a move it, you need
to reposition it, but it's not actually there, so you can't.
It's like an itch that can never be scratched because
the place of the itch only exist in the circuitry
of your mind at this point. Now, in the New
(11:35):
England Journal of Medicine, Jack Zow and neurologist at Walter
Reed Army Medical Center described the phenomenon, and he said
that researchers randomly assigned twenty two lower limb amputees with
phantom limb pain to one of three groups. Now, one
group had mirror movements, and patients watched the reflected image
of their intact foot in a mirror while they moved
(11:57):
both feet simultaneously, or so it felt like they were
moving both of them simultaneously. Right, So, using one of
these these mirror boxes, you end up with the when
you call it an illusion even that that you're watching
yourself move the missing limb. Yeah, and there's a video
of this. It's it's extraordinary. They just put the mirror
(12:19):
there and it really does look as though the patient
has both limbs intact moving it around, and the reporting
that it feels like it is there. It's it's bolstering
all of those ideas they have in their head about
this uniformity. I should add that the mirror box technique
was invented by vs vs Ramaschandre, who've we've actually mentioned
(12:40):
at least several times before in the past. This podcast
does a lot of interesting work, but if you do
just a quick Google search for for mirror therapy or
mirror box, etcetera, you'll find his website that has a
lot of resources about this this particular branch of therapy. Now,
the second group, they had a covered mirror movement. In
other words, atients perform the same movements, but the mirror
(13:01):
was covered so they did not see a moving limb.
The third group was imagined movements, so they mentally pictured
moving the phantom foot with their eyes closed. So what happened? Okay?
They had the patients performed this fifteen minutes a day
and they recorded the number, duration, and intensity of pain episodes.
After four weeks, there were two key findings. First, pain
(13:24):
decreased significantly in all six patients who were doing the
mirror movements. Second, three out of six patients in the
covered mirror movements group and four out of six patients
in the imagined movements group got worse and not better.
And some of this, Zal says, is that, um, it
could be that these movements when you see them in
(13:47):
the mirror, could be calming down the nerve signals in
the phantom limb, or it could be replacing what he
calls the bad memories of that limb, and in a nutshell,
it's kind of like the visual component of this is
helping to modulate that pain. Yeah, I was reading that
in many cases, what you're dealing with is a situation
where before the limb was amputated, there was a period
(14:10):
of paralysis. So in a sense, it's kind of like
it's the echo of the final sensations from that limb
and uh and then like you say, creating a new
memory for that limb, one of movement instead of one
of of paralysis. Yeah. And there's there's all sorts of
things going on here. So there's there's some evidence that
(14:30):
mirror therapy really does help. There needs to be more studies,
but there's an idea that mirror neurons are a part
of this. There's also an idea that your brain is
conflicted because what it feels and what it sees are
completely different and it doesn't really know how to process
that information. Um, But as I said, mirror therapy seems
to be helpful in these situations. All Right, we'll hold on.
(14:53):
We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to discuss more about the mirror and the
person in the mirror watching. All right, we are back
the next scenario we are going to paint for you.
I think it's so interesting to me because again, it's
(15:14):
one of those simple subconscious things going on. You hang
a mirror in a room, You ask people to do things,
you observe them, and does just the act of this
mirror hanging in the room reflecting back their image change
how they behave Okay, it's an interesting concept. First, I
think we should get one thing out of the way
for the paranoid listeners who might be wondering, is this
(15:35):
a two way mirror behind which there's a cabal of
secret observers watching our every movement? Uh? No, are you sure?
I'm sure, because well, this is a little trick. If
you're ever in a room and you're thinking, I want
you're thinking to yourself, I wonder if there's a secret
cabal of observers on the other side of that mirror.
Turn the light off in the room if possible, or
(15:56):
you know, break some light bulbs, whatever it takes, because
if you darken the room you're in, then you will
be able to see through the two way mirror into
the observer's room. Because that's how the whole situation works
with two way mirrors, Yeah, to a mirrors that they
don't have a coat of paint on the back of them.
And what they do is they manipulate light. So in
the room in which you are being observed, the lights
(16:18):
are are really really high, and so more of that
light is reflecting onto the person who's being observed. If
you're in the dark room and you're the detective, well
of course the lights are down low. But if you
turn the lights down low in the other room ha ha,
you can see through to the evil cabal on the
other side. Yeah, and break the Panopticon in that sense.
(16:39):
But what we're talking about here is just a normal
mirror on the wall, and it actually is kind of
akin to the Panopticon situation, where uh, in the Panopicon situation,
it's the fear that someone is watching us, the belief
that someone might be watching what we're doing, and therefore
we have to perform, uh, we have to perform better,
We have to perform with more honesty less to someone
(16:59):
find a stout. But we've talked about this before. When
people are made self aware, they sort of change their
behavior if they think that they're uh consciously entering into
some sort of contract or I guess in this case
it's more subconsciously. But let's get to the nuts and
bolts here. We are talking about the Journal of Personality
and Social Social Psychology and uh Neil McCrae, Gallen V. Bodenhausen,
(17:22):
and Alan B. Milnai. They found that people in a
room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge
others based on social stereotypes about for example, sex, race,
or religion. And Bowden Housen said, when people are made
to be self aware, they are likelier to stop and
think about what they're doing. A byproduct of that awareness
(17:42):
may be a shift away from acting on autopilot towards
more desirable ways of behaving. So it's kind of interesting.
It's this this physical self reflection encouraging philosophical self reflection.
And we've talked about this before. In terms of empathy
with another person, you are less likely to judge that
(18:04):
other person if you feel a connection, If you are
projecting the image of yourself or having some sort of
self reflection, it makes you dwell a little bit more
about the person that you're considering because there I am
in the mirror, and there are the other people conceivably
in the mirror as well. I am maybe seeing myself
from from this third person vantage point to a certain
(18:24):
extent here, I am just another person amid all these people.
And also, just to get back down to the existential
none of it all there, I am who is that
guy there is? And uh, yeah, you can see where
that would just really throw your brain for for a
loop there. Philosophically speaking, Yeah, you can't know yourself until
you know others. Right, I'm looking at the man in
(18:46):
the mirror. I'm hoping that he'll change his way. Do
you see a man in the mirror? Um looking? That's right,
it does. It does bring up an interesting observation, though.
We have no mirrors in our office place, and I
wonder if that is by design, because clearly our our
office is impeccably designed, but with the open floor plan
(19:06):
and all you know, you know, I say that, but
I now that I remember. I believe we used to
have a coworker who kept a mirror on their desk
so they could keep an eye on people moving behind them,
standing behind them. That sounds more like a how stuff
works in in thing, Yeah, which is which is interesting
kind of almost a magical use of mirrors, using the
mirror as a protective uh instrument, And you see that
(19:28):
a lot in the in folklore mythology, the idea that
the that the mirror just is. There are plenty of
stories about mirrors that are magical and cursed and awful
and gay ways to other realms. There's also the idea
that there's something pure about the mirror, that it reveals
the soul, the truth. Yeah, it can help you spot
or spot the absence that that that lets you perceive
vampires and then all that sort of stuff. I think
(19:49):
this idea of a coworker having a mirror to look
at others is interesting because it kind of loops into
this idea of the Venus effect, because you could if
you're just passing by, I think that person was looking
at themselves. And this placed directly into this idea of
the famous paintings of the goddess Venus looking into a
small mirror. And if you were to look at these paintings,
(20:09):
you would have seem assume that Venus is admiring her
own face because you see her face in the mirror.
But that's your viewpoint, which is different from hers. If
you can see her in the mirror, then she would
see you in the mirror. Right. This is interesting. You
can really go down the rabbit hole looking up images,
I mean looking at paintings of people looking in mirrors,
(20:31):
because in some cases you get you have a situation
like with these various Venus images, where again they're looking
in a mirror, but the reflection that you see is
looking right at you, which means that she, he or
she is not looking at themselves. They are looking at
the painter, at the viewer of the painting. However, you
want to get into that gray area of observer versus art.
(20:53):
But but then you look at other works and and
you'll find the that they'll actually have it right. I
was looking at a number of works by Norman Rockwell,
who I tend to take for granted as an artist
because Norman Rockwell is not really my thing, and and
it's he's you know, he's been so mainstream, such a
slice of pie Americana, you kind of forget that, Hey,
this guy really was a talented artist, and he has
(21:15):
a number of images that involved mirrors, including that that
the famous self portrait where he is looking there. It's
just like a triple self portrait, because you see he
has his back turn to you and he's looking in
the mirror at himself as he paints an image of himself. Sadly,
he's wearing glasses that obscure his eyes, so he can't
really tell if the venus effect is in play. And
(21:36):
I wonder if that is why, because he wanted to
avoid that conundrum of where should he where where is
he looking in this this strange triple self portrait or
he's just painting us that way, right, But anyway, you
see plenty of him and he I think he has
another one of a of a little girl looking into
the mirror, and in this one she's definitely looking at
her own reflection, and you really get into the venus effect.
(21:58):
It's well in movies because what happens when you point
a camera at an actor looking in a mirror, Well,
you have to be careful to avoid having the camera
in the mirror that the actor is looking into. You want,
uh the the film to show an actor looking at
his or her own face, So you get into all
sorts of weird angles that potentially don't match up with
(22:20):
optical reality. Well, an optical reality is the thing here,
and that's what the venus effect points to, is this
idea that we really cannot fuss out ourselves that well
in the mirror in terms of actual dimensions. Yeah, that's
why the venus effect, or or any kind of like
filmmaking shenanigans does. It tends not to throw us out
of the experience because we ultimately, by and large don't
(22:43):
have a good grasp on the ocular reality. We don't
really understand how mirrors work. We just kind of gloss
over their uncanny nature. Yeah, And to exemplify this, Marco
Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues have
talked to scores of people about their perception in the mirror,
and they've conducted a number of studies and what they
found is that people think, like if if you ask
(23:06):
them the question, imagine you're standing in front of a
bathroom mirror, how big do you think the image of
your face is on the surface? And or if you
ask them the question, um, what would happen to the
size of that image if you were to step backward
away from the class. So think about those for a second, Like,
the the answer seems to be obvious, right, how big
is my face in the mirror. It's the size of
my face because it's my reflection, right, Yeah, And that's
(23:29):
pretty much what people answered. And then as for the
second question about moving away from the mirror, they say, well,
of course, the size of my image will shrink with
each step. Not so, this is not true. If you
outline your face on a mirror, it will be exactly
half the size of your real face, and if you
step back, the size of the outline won't change. It
will remain half the size of your image. And people
(23:52):
fail to understand that the image on the surface of
the mirror is half the size of the observer because
a mirror is always halfway between the observer and the
image that appears inside the mirror. Exactly like if you
think back to the old Mark's Brother gag and duck Suit,
it doesn't matter if you haven't seen duck Suit. I'm
sure most of you have not. You still know the
gag because it's it keeps repeating itself in countless pieces
(24:15):
of media where someone thinks they're looking into a mirror
but they're not. It's just an empty frame and there's
someone pretending to be them on the other side, matching
their movements precisely, and generally the ruse will last for
just a few seconds until one of the the reflective
people out maneuvers the other one does an unexpected movement.
(24:36):
The mimic can't mimic. And that's exactly what happened this
morning in my about from you for the person who
dressed me. You need to get real mirrors instead of
just empty frames. But anyway, if there's someone standing on
the other side of that fake mirror impersonating you, they're
going to be as far away from the mirror as
you are, so they're gonna be half your size. Now,
there are some actual processing errors in people who have
(24:59):
mirror or agnosia. Now, this is a condition where people
lose their sense of reflection, and you sometimes see this
in stroke patients who have had damage to their brains.
They might have right parietal lesions, and these cases the
patient still have um intact the knowledge about mirrors right. Um,
they can describe what they do and how they work,
(25:21):
but they can't seem to put it into practice or
to really figure out their bodies in in in time
and space. For example, if you have a patient stand
in front of a mirror and the researcher holds a
pen over the patient's left shoulder and ask him or
her to reach for it. Well, most people would just
reach backwards, right, You just put your hand up and
reach backwards and get it. But people with mirror agnosia,
(25:42):
they will reach forwards and actually bang their hand into
the glass because they don't the depth and the perception
is all off. Well, I know, there's also something known
as mirrord self misidentification and clinical psychology. A two thousand
one study from the Choir Center for Cognitive Science looked
at two dementia patients. The two individuals could no longer
(26:03):
recognize their own faces in the mirror, but they had
no problem recognized that the faces of others in reflection.
It turns out both individuals suffered from right side brain lesions,
the portion of the brain particularly associated with self facial
recognition and even the use of self describing adjectives. So
a couple of ways that there can be uh, something
(26:24):
a little off in uh the architecture of the brain
that affects the way that we interact with that uncanny reflection. Now,
so that's all about distortion um and all the ways
in which we might get these images wrong. But I
thought it would be interesting just to flip this around
(26:44):
the mirror image and think back to Vermeer, because it's
this great documentary that's actually already out called Tim's Vermeer,
and this inventor set out to try to figure out
how Vermier could create such photo realistic depictions with his
paintbrush in an era that was two hundred years before
(27:07):
the camera was invented. And it comes down to mirrors,
which is and I won't go deeply into this, but
here you have someone who has created this machine with
two mirrors two make this painting. This image has photo
realistic because what we see with our you know, three
(27:29):
D rich world around us always getting flattened by you know,
two D on our retinas. Um. So, a little interesting
documentary if you want to check it out. Yeah, it's
a it's directed by Teller of Penn and Teller and
uh and I've heard about it a few months back
and sort of made a mental note to check it out,
and then somehow lost that that mental note. But but yeah,
(27:49):
it looks. It looks musty because it's it appears to
examine not only the question of how does this, How
did this great artist create this work? But also just
sort of the nature of art and Nate and how
we we protect our ideas of how art is created.
And also personal obsession, like because it seems like the
the the the Texan individual who really set out to
(28:11):
try and replicate the process of creating these these these
works of art. He has a very obsessive mind. And uh,
and you really want to examine it for the length
of the documentary. Oh yeah, I mean he I think
he worked ten years on this. He even recreated the room.
But um that Vermier used he used the same kind
of paints. Yeah, paints that would have existed back in
(28:35):
the day. He's traveling to see of Amir's work in person. Yes,
that he gets the Queen to show him that exact
painting up close, so he can really get Hugh right
when it comes to the color. And he's asking kind
of dangerous questions at least as far as the artistic
community is concerned, because a lot of people don't want
the you know, to to to face the possibility that
(28:58):
someone like Vermier would have used the best available technology
of the time to help create it, because on some
level it's kind of like saying, oh, well, this artist,
we thought they were a great painter, but they really
were a great painter who also use photoshop. Like there's
something poisonous about that idea to us, even though it
doesn't necessarily make sense. Yeah, actually, because people think of
it as painting by numbers, that you just get this
(29:20):
guy right and and he makes the same machine and
um and using the same technique. A guy who is
an unskilled artist is able to replicate a masterpiece by
using this technique. And we actually could probably do a
whole episode on this, because there are some people who
are weighing in and saying, well, that's not a big deal,
because there are some trained artists that don't use the gimmick,
(29:42):
that don't use the machine, and they can make pretty
much exact replicas of Vermeer's work just with with their
naked eye. And it seems to me ultimately the situation though,
is that it's it's it's always about the artist at
the center, no matter what kind of technology they're using.
But you see the same argument in various me dams.
For instance, in music, like I've seen threads where people
(30:03):
were talking about electronic music and they're saying, well, the
you know, the genius that say, you know, an early
X twin album is not not going to be replicators
or an APEX twin album doesn't mean the same thing
anymore because supposedly anybody can create that because the technology
is there. But that doesn't really hold up because it's
ultimately it's not about the tools. It's about the artist. Yes,
(30:23):
and that artist is replicated in the mirror right many
many times over and over again in different ways, smaller,
bigger dimensions. All right, Before we go to listener mail,
I just want to read just a quick excerpt from
the poem of Mirrors by your Hey Lewis Borges. He says,
I see them as infinite elemental executioners of an ancient
pact to multiply the world, like the act of the
(30:46):
getting Sleepless bringing doom. They prolong this hollow, unstable world
in their dizzy spider's web. Sometimes in the afternoon they
are blurred by the breath of a man who is
not dead. So there you go. There's more to that poem,
and I recommend you go check it out and do
a Google search for Mirrors by your Hey Lewis borees. Alright,
(31:10):
let's read a couple of emails here. We have one
from Amber and it's about outsourcing memory that we just covered,
and she says, hey, guys, I loved this topic. I
listened to you guys at work while I complete all
my tasks via data entry in some shape and form. Anyways,
I found this so fascinating because I thought of all
(31:32):
the things I used to rely on for outsourcing my memory.
Everywhere I go, I always have my phone. It's actually
funny because when someone in my group of friends asked
a questions, no one seems to look it up. I
am a Google fiend and always have to find an
answer right then and there. It's strange how if we
think the information will be stored, we don't memorize it.
For instance, I use an app for my workout routines,
(31:53):
and if I didn't have it, I'd be lost, Whereas
my husband goes and just does whatever, remembers his own
routines and talk about blast from the past. Lately, there's
been a craze and I've joined it via an app
called time Hop. This app will go back one to
three four years on your Facebook and say what you
posted on that day. So of course I don't remember
how I felt last year today, but now I can
(32:15):
just pull it up and see what was going on
in my life at that time. Anyway, I think he's
always putting out such a great information and keeping my
mind sharp throughout my daily grind. Sincerely, Amber, Huh. Now
that that was interesting because we talked about this idea
of revisiting yourself in your states throughout the history of you. Right,
so if you go back on your timeline four years ago,
(32:36):
that's just sort of the beginnings of how you can
begin to construct that memory. Yeah, because there are all
these slightly different views that spread all the way back
through time. I've been thinking about this a lot, probably
more than I should, in response to this craze on Facebook.
I'm sure you've seen it where they're all these which
X Man character are you? Which soda are you? And
(32:58):
now even which how stuff podcaster are you? Have you
taken this yet? Yeah? Yeah, who'd you get me? It
was weird like that, but but it made me because
I took it, and I you know, when I answered truthfully,
I got myself. And even when I just kind of
answered semi truthfully, I ended up getting myself for some reason.
But ultimately it's such a hollow question, like because you
(33:19):
have to ask yourself which you are you. There's no
unified you. They are all these different yews, and the
idea that there's a centralized self is just a complete illusion.
So the mirrors of you, I mean, because you are
somewhat like some other people in the office taste wise, right,
so you would have that reflected back. I'm just not
going to stout for the whole mirror thing. All right. Well,
(33:41):
I have a a few bits of listener mail here
to run through a quick all right, This one comes
to us from Fernando. Fernando says, hello, Julian Robert. I
was listening to your podcast episode A Musical time Machine
for the Brain, and it got me thinking, what if
time and space is like a music record, and everything
that has happened is happening and will ever happen exists
on the same plane. Our human perception would be the
(34:03):
needle that is only able to process the data, uh literally,
giving us the illusion of the beginning and an end.
I can't recall if I've heard this idea before, but
I know it helped me understand the concept of nonlinear time.
Love the show and keep up the great work. Well, yes,
that idea, um that I've heard that almost exact um
(34:24):
analogy before, particularly with a DVD. The idea that time
that our our existence, our life is a movie on
a DVD in time space is the DVD the physical
DVD itself. There's no beginning or end. Everything has always happened,
but our perception of it happening is the enigma. I
love the DVD idea because it's all there waiting for
you to dip into it. Max tech Mark, I believe
(34:46):
was the individual we can at least partially attribute that to.
But yeah, essentially that's what's happening alright. One more bit
of listener mail, um Eric write, since it says Julie
talked about going to sleep with basil in her mouth,
this is a very bad idea due to choking has
so please don't do it. We like Julie on the
podcast and we would be sad if you couldn't do
it for some reason like being dead. Julie, explain yourself.
(35:08):
Thank you, um Eric. I don't remember that the what
we were talking about specifically, but something about I don't know. Oh,
I think we're talking about having some self yes, lucid
dreaming yes. And we were talking about the ability to
to lose a dream taste, and I said, maybe if
I put basil under my tongue or something that that
would trigger that. But you don't do this. I did.
(35:30):
The person who dresses me plucked it out just in time.
So um, I'm fine, Eric, Thank you for writing in though.
All right, Okay, so hey, you wanna get in touch
with us, you wanna wrap with us about mirrors. We
would love to hear from you. Your experience is looking
to mirrors and in the mirrors, you're any uncanny uh
ideas that have come to you about mirrors, about the
(35:52):
nature of mirrors, your favorite weird mirrors from from folk tales,
horror movies and what have you. Let us know about
all those. You can find us as all ways at
the mother Ship Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Also,
you gotta check this out, guys. Robert has an awesome
new series coming out Monsters Monster Science, I think is
what we're calling it, and you can find that on
(36:14):
Mind Stuff Show on YouTube exactly. And I'm not going
to give a whole lot here away, but I do
want to just add here that Robert is wearing a
fine turtle neck in this Yes, yes, we we purchased
a turtleneck especially for this production, so hopefully it'll be
a hit. Um, you know, monsters the Science of Monsters.
If you like my blog series Monster of the Week,
(36:37):
and it's kind of that in video form with some
tunanigan thrown and so yes, so check it out. Check
that out. We'll have all we'll have a little bit
of a teaser. It'll go up this week. So yeah,
check that out. Check out our various social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
Google Plus. You'll find all those links at stuff to
Blow your mind dot com and as always, you can
(36:58):
reach us via email. Yeah, so, if you have some
thoughts that you would like send to us, please do
send them to blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, stick
at how Stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas. Julie,
have you gazed into the mirror recently? Oh? Yes, in fact,
just a moment ago, I looked into the mirror and
(00:23):
I confirmed my shirt was indeed put on backwards by
whom by myself, because I dressed myself. Okay, I didn't
know how how how weird this was going to get. Well,
don't believe those rumors. I dressed myself all right now
like strange people in the night, like sneak in, dress
you and make sure you have your clothes on the
slightly wrong. Whatever you've heard it not true. But yes,
(00:47):
recently I have gazed into the looking glass, because we
do it all the time, right, We surround ourselves with mirrors,
and from from a very early age, we encounter them,
we get used to them, and eventually we die in
many cases, in a in a room with a mirror,
or or with a mirror right next door into this
little a little bathroom in the hotel room where we
(01:07):
finally pass away, this this portal, into this strange uncanny
ocular world. Were you just imagining Elvis in the bathroom? Yeah,
well you can. You can look at it that way.
You can imagine Elvis, um, you know, sadly passing away there.
But then what if what have the reflected Elvis is
just standing up watching you know. Well, that's the whole thing, right,
(01:27):
And that's for an entirely different episode, But right, This
idea of reflective surfaces in us peering into them has
been around for a long time. In fact, if you
look at the myth of Narcissus, you will be met
with this idea of this beautiful boy who cannot stop
staring at himself in the mirror, and he chooses to
(01:49):
die by the side of a reflecting pond rather um,
instead of leaving his beloved himself behind. That is how
attached he is to that image staring back at him.
The obsession with the mirror, obsession with one's own reflection
in the mirror. Just just as much as we are
we are at times horrified by reflections or or adverse
to to looking in the mirror. Um and and and
(02:12):
I just I think back to some of my earlier
opportunities to peer into different mirrors, particularly I remember going
to like sears somewhere with my mom, like way too much,
because those trips seemed always seem to take for average.
You know, you're going to buy trainers for you or
your sisters, and they would have this little, uh, this
this little area with three mirrors. You know, there's like
(02:34):
the one in front of you, and there two to
the sides, ideally so that you can stand in your
your new outfit or potentially what's going to be your
new outfit, and twirl around and see what you're wearing
from different advantage points. But those three mirrors also create
this kind of mirror world because if you if you
get close enough, especially as a child and you have
your board out of your mind because you're surrounded by clothes,
(02:56):
you get close enough to the mirror and you can
look in and you see the reflection the other mirror,
and you see this sort of endless cascade of mirrors,
just endless use, endless use, or endless sort of half
glimpse glimpses of you, and you feel like if you
could just sort of stick your head into the mirror,
you might be able to see down this hallway of
mirrors into infinity. So there's always this we're I just
(03:19):
I remember all these opportunities to look into a mirror
and getting just a sense of there's something uncanny about it,
there's something strange about the mirror, and you can't help
but let your imagination run wild or feel just a
little odd gazing into one. I like that example because
so often we think of mirrors just reflecting back reality,
but in fact, mirrors are really sort of a distorted reality.
(03:40):
Our perception is distorted, and in some ways mirror adds
mirrors out of this idea of these delusions that we
hold about ourselves. Yes, I mean that's the key. Mirrors
are truth and illusion wound up into one. And I
think even though on the surface we really fall into
the the eventual, everyday reality of saying, hey, that's me
in the mirror. That's me, that's the real that's totally
(04:00):
the side that I part my hair on, even though
everyone else is going to see it reverse. But deep
down there's something in us that knows that that's not right.
That's that's signaling at least one remaining flashing button on
the on the cognitive panel is going off saying there's
something uncanny going here, and I think that's why the
countless tales of strange creatures in the mirror mirrors that
(04:24):
tell the future or or reveal of secrets in the past,
why they resonate so strongly with us. And if you
go to stuftable your mind dot com, I wrote a
little list article called twelve Terrifying fictional mirrors that runs
through a few interesting examples of this. Yeah, so check
that out. But I think you're right. There's this idea
that mirrors are capturing this sort of self awareness, this reality.
(04:45):
And in fact, there's that mirror cognition test that many
scientists will use with animals. In fact, we know that guerillas,
we know that chimps, Banobo's dolphins, Asian elephants, they all
passed that self awareness test in a mirror. In other words,
you can put markings on them and they will examine
those markets. They will recognize themselves in that mirror, and
(05:06):
sometimes they will even inspect the inside of their mouth
as if like do I have something in my teeth,
The look up their noses, and sometimes they will even
check out their genitals. Well there you go. Where where
can I Where can I go from there? From an
ape looking at its own genitals in the mirror. UM
A safe place. That's safe place. Well let's let's let's
flee into the past for a moment. Then just a
(05:27):
quick rundown on the history of mirrors. UM. Again, we
have always from a very early age just lost in prehistory.
You know, humans gazed into the reflective surface of some
water and we're able to see their own reflection. I mean,
that's just that, just that just happened, and who knows
when it did. But humans started making simple mirrors probably
(05:49):
around six BC. Uh. They use polished obsidian as a
reflective surface. Uh. Later on we started using things like copper, bronze, silver, gold,
and even lad But of course all of this involves
very very heavy mirrors, you know, and they have to
be very small because you're making it out of obsidian
or a gold or silver. UM. Contemporary mirrors didn't come
(06:09):
into being into the late Middle Ages. But even then
there were problems with their manufacture because you're using glass,
and the sand used for glass making contained all these
different impurities, and so it was hard to produce a
really clear glass based mirror. Uh. And and also the
shock caused by the heat of adding molten metal for
backing that glass almost always broke the glass. So we
(06:30):
you know, Middle Ages, we knew how to make a mirror,
but we didn't quite have all the techniques down. It
wasn't until the Renaissance, when the Florentines admitted a process
for making low temperature lead backing that modern mirrors really
hit the scene. Um. And for the longest it was
all about just looking at yourself. There wasn't It wasn't
a lot of real, uh, you know, scientific opportunity with
(06:51):
the mirror. But of course, eventually around the sixteen sixties,
scientists started realizing we can you utilize and telescopes. Uh.
And the modern mirror, by the way, is made by
silvering or spraying a thin layer of silver or aluminum
onto the back of a sheet of glass. And most
mirrors are made today by heating aluminum in a vacuum,
(07:11):
which then bonds to the cooler glass. So that's the
basics how we started making mirrors and how we make
mirrors today. Yeah, and they became far more portable. Um. Now,
let's talk about light interacting with the surface of a mirror.
When a photon a packet of light hits a mirror,
it's absorbed by one of the atoms in the mirror,
and this causes electrons in the atom to vibrate and
(07:32):
give off an identical photon of light, the one that
you perceive in your eye yourself right, So your I
see these reflected photons as a mirror image. The mirror
image is reversed, which you can easily see if you
stand in front of a mirror with a shirt with
words on it. Right. Yes, and again that the parting
of the hair thing, you know, you always you sort
of grow to thank you part your hair on one
(07:53):
side of your your head perhaps, but you're actually doing
it on the other. Yeah. But in the case of
the words you have the words on the you're appearing
backwards in the mirror, and it is not right to left.
That has been reversed. The image has been reversed from
front to back. Now, this is a squirrelly concept, right,
because you're looking in the mirror, you see your right
hand up. Um, it looks as though it's right to right.
(08:17):
It just looks like it's been left to right reversed.
But Richard Kinneman has an interesting idea about this, and
he says, think about looking into the mirror, putting your
right hand up and it facing east. Okay, we're on
this parallel plane with the mirror. If you look at
yourself in the mirror, your nose, the nose you're touching yourself,
(08:41):
is pointing north, but the nose that's being reflected back
to you is pointing south. And he's saying that this
is that front to back concept. And you and I
were talking about this earlier and actually um doing some
yoga in the aisles of our office to try to
get to the bottom of this concept. Because the reversal
situation also comes into play in a yoga class because
(09:03):
you know, it varies depending on who your yoga teacher
isn't how they do it, but a lot of the
time the yoga teacher will be facing you like a mirror,
like a mirror, and they're going to do the reverse
of whatever you're doing. So if we're lifting our left
leg in the class, he or she is going to
lift their right leg because it's going because the right
leg is going to lift on the same side. Uh
(09:25):
as far as the room is concerned, as as our
other legs. So right there, front to back. Yeah, they're
correcting for the reversal. It's so they're they're front to
back to you like a mirror. If it were left
to right, they would turn around right and then you
would be looking at their backside and they would be
mirroring you from from from uh left to right in
(09:46):
that way. So I don't know if it's still kind
of a squarely concept people. That helps another way I
was thinking about it, um, a pane of glass with
writing printed on it, you know, you walk around to
the other side of it and in it's reverse. Yeah,
they I guess that's a good example, all right. So
that's some some mirror basics there. Um. As you mentioned,
mirrors can be curved to focus light, so boom, you've
(10:06):
got telescopes, You've got all sorts of uses of mirrors.
But it turns out that mirrors can actually be used
in therapy as well. Yes, and this is where things
start getting getting an early trippy to think about, you know.
And it also gets back into that uncanny world that
we discussed earlier. You guys, you're looking in the mirror.
Something's not quite right, and it twists our perception of reality,
(10:29):
uh in a way that we take for granted, but
in a way that becomes far more substantial when we're
dealing with the treatment of phantom limb syndrome. Yeah, because
mirror therapy has been used in phantom limbs syndrome, also
chronic pain and post stroke paralysis. And the reason that
it's used is that reflected images of patients limbs or
(10:49):
other body parts trick the brain into healing itself. Now,
think about this. The majority of people who have phantom
limb um or excuse me, who have a limb ampute,
hated or the nerve supply removed report experiencing some kind
of phantom limb and pain, but only some report persistent
phantom limb pain, which is apparently excruciating pain. Yeah, I've
(11:14):
heard some accounts of it are kind of kind of
like they you know, you feel that that missing limb
as if it's there, but as if it is, say,
cramped up, like you need a move it, you need
to reposition it, but it's not actually there, so you can't.
It's like an itch that can never be scratched because
the place of the itch only exist in the circuitry
of your mind at this point. Now, in the New
(11:35):
England Journal of Medicine, Jack Zow and neurologist at Walter
Reed Army Medical Center described the phenomenon, and he said
that researchers randomly assigned twenty two lower limb amputees with
phantom limb pain to one of three groups. Now, one
group had mirror movements, and patients watched the reflected image
of their intact foot in a mirror while they moved
(11:57):
both feet simultaneously, or so it felt like they were
moving both of them simultaneously. Right, So, using one of
these these mirror boxes, you end up with the when
you call it an illusion even that that you're watching
yourself move the missing limb. Yeah, and there's a video
of this. It's it's extraordinary. They just put the mirror
(12:19):
there and it really does look as though the patient
has both limbs intact moving it around, and the reporting
that it feels like it is there. It's it's bolstering
all of those ideas they have in their head about
this uniformity. I should add that the mirror box technique
was invented by vs vs Ramaschandre, who've we've actually mentioned
(12:40):
at least several times before in the past. This podcast
does a lot of interesting work, but if you do
just a quick Google search for for mirror therapy or
mirror box, etcetera, you'll find his website that has a
lot of resources about this this particular branch of therapy. Now,
the second group, they had a covered mirror movement. In
other words, atients perform the same movements, but the mirror
(13:01):
was covered so they did not see a moving limb.
The third group was imagined movements, so they mentally pictured
moving the phantom foot with their eyes closed. So what happened? Okay?
They had the patients performed this fifteen minutes a day
and they recorded the number, duration, and intensity of pain episodes.
After four weeks, there were two key findings. First, pain
(13:24):
decreased significantly in all six patients who were doing the
mirror movements. Second, three out of six patients in the
covered mirror movements group and four out of six patients
in the imagined movements group got worse and not better.
And some of this, Zal says, is that, um, it
could be that these movements when you see them in
(13:47):
the mirror, could be calming down the nerve signals in
the phantom limb, or it could be replacing what he
calls the bad memories of that limb, and in a nutshell,
it's kind of like the visual component of this is
helping to modulate that pain. Yeah, I was reading that
in many cases, what you're dealing with is a situation
where before the limb was amputated, there was a period
(14:10):
of paralysis. So in a sense, it's kind of like
it's the echo of the final sensations from that limb
and uh and then like you say, creating a new
memory for that limb, one of movement instead of one
of of paralysis. Yeah. And there's there's all sorts of
things going on here. So there's there's some evidence that
(14:30):
mirror therapy really does help. There needs to be more studies,
but there's an idea that mirror neurons are a part
of this. There's also an idea that your brain is
conflicted because what it feels and what it sees are
completely different and it doesn't really know how to process
that information. Um, But as I said, mirror therapy seems
to be helpful in these situations. All Right, we'll hold on.
(14:53):
We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to discuss more about the mirror and the
person in the mirror watching. All right, we are back
the next scenario we are going to paint for you.
I think it's so interesting to me because again, it's
(15:14):
one of those simple subconscious things going on. You hang
a mirror in a room, You ask people to do things,
you observe them, and does just the act of this
mirror hanging in the room reflecting back their image change
how they behave Okay, it's an interesting concept. First, I
think we should get one thing out of the way
for the paranoid listeners who might be wondering, is this
(15:35):
a two way mirror behind which there's a cabal of
secret observers watching our every movement? Uh? No, are you sure?
I'm sure, because well, this is a little trick. If
you're ever in a room and you're thinking, I want
you're thinking to yourself, I wonder if there's a secret
cabal of observers on the other side of that mirror.
Turn the light off in the room if possible, or
(15:56):
you know, break some light bulbs, whatever it takes, because
if you darken the room you're in, then you will
be able to see through the two way mirror into
the observer's room. Because that's how the whole situation works
with two way mirrors, Yeah, to a mirrors that they
don't have a coat of paint on the back of them.
And what they do is they manipulate light. So in
the room in which you are being observed, the lights
(16:18):
are are really really high, and so more of that
light is reflecting onto the person who's being observed. If
you're in the dark room and you're the detective, well
of course the lights are down low. But if you
turn the lights down low in the other room ha ha,
you can see through to the evil cabal on the
other side. Yeah, and break the Panopticon in that sense.
(16:39):
But what we're talking about here is just a normal
mirror on the wall, and it actually is kind of
akin to the Panopticon situation, where uh, in the Panopicon situation,
it's the fear that someone is watching us, the belief
that someone might be watching what we're doing, and therefore
we have to perform, uh, we have to perform better,
We have to perform with more honesty less to someone
(16:59):
find a stout. But we've talked about this before. When
people are made self aware, they sort of change their
behavior if they think that they're uh consciously entering into
some sort of contract or I guess in this case
it's more subconsciously. But let's get to the nuts and
bolts here. We are talking about the Journal of Personality
and Social Social Psychology and uh Neil McCrae, Gallen V. Bodenhausen,
(17:22):
and Alan B. Milnai. They found that people in a
room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge
others based on social stereotypes about for example, sex, race,
or religion. And Bowden Housen said, when people are made
to be self aware, they are likelier to stop and
think about what they're doing. A byproduct of that awareness
(17:42):
may be a shift away from acting on autopilot towards
more desirable ways of behaving. So it's kind of interesting.
It's this this physical self reflection encouraging philosophical self reflection.
And we've talked about this before. In terms of empathy
with another person, you are less likely to judge that
(18:04):
other person if you feel a connection, If you are
projecting the image of yourself or having some sort of
self reflection, it makes you dwell a little bit more
about the person that you're considering because there I am
in the mirror, and there are the other people conceivably
in the mirror as well. I am maybe seeing myself
from from this third person vantage point to a certain
(18:24):
extent here, I am just another person amid all these people.
And also, just to get back down to the existential
none of it all there, I am who is that
guy there is? And uh, yeah, you can see where
that would just really throw your brain for for a
loop there. Philosophically speaking, Yeah, you can't know yourself until
you know others. Right, I'm looking at the man in
(18:46):
the mirror. I'm hoping that he'll change his way. Do
you see a man in the mirror? Um looking? That's right,
it does. It does bring up an interesting observation, though.
We have no mirrors in our office place, and I
wonder if that is by design, because clearly our our
office is impeccably designed, but with the open floor plan
(19:06):
and all you know, you know, I say that, but
I now that I remember. I believe we used to
have a coworker who kept a mirror on their desk
so they could keep an eye on people moving behind them,
standing behind them. That sounds more like a how stuff
works in in thing, Yeah, which is which is interesting
kind of almost a magical use of mirrors, using the
mirror as a protective uh instrument, And you see that
(19:28):
a lot in the in folklore mythology, the idea that
the that the mirror just is. There are plenty of
stories about mirrors that are magical and cursed and awful
and gay ways to other realms. There's also the idea
that there's something pure about the mirror, that it reveals
the soul, the truth. Yeah, it can help you spot
or spot the absence that that that lets you perceive
vampires and then all that sort of stuff. I think
(19:49):
this idea of a coworker having a mirror to look
at others is interesting because it kind of loops into
this idea of the Venus effect, because you could if
you're just passing by, I think that person was looking
at themselves. And this placed directly into this idea of
the famous paintings of the goddess Venus looking into a
small mirror. And if you were to look at these paintings,
(20:09):
you would have seem assume that Venus is admiring her
own face because you see her face in the mirror.
But that's your viewpoint, which is different from hers. If
you can see her in the mirror, then she would
see you in the mirror. Right. This is interesting. You
can really go down the rabbit hole looking up images,
I mean looking at paintings of people looking in mirrors,
(20:31):
because in some cases you get you have a situation
like with these various Venus images, where again they're looking
in a mirror, but the reflection that you see is
looking right at you, which means that she, he or
she is not looking at themselves. They are looking at
the painter, at the viewer of the painting. However, you
want to get into that gray area of observer versus art.
(20:53):
But but then you look at other works and and
you'll find the that they'll actually have it right. I
was looking at a number of works by Norman Rockwell,
who I tend to take for granted as an artist
because Norman Rockwell is not really my thing, and and
it's he's you know, he's been so mainstream, such a
slice of pie Americana, you kind of forget that, Hey,
this guy really was a talented artist, and he has
(21:15):
a number of images that involved mirrors, including that that
the famous self portrait where he is looking there. It's
just like a triple self portrait, because you see he
has his back turn to you and he's looking in
the mirror at himself as he paints an image of himself. Sadly,
he's wearing glasses that obscure his eyes, so he can't
really tell if the venus effect is in play. And
(21:36):
I wonder if that is why, because he wanted to
avoid that conundrum of where should he where where is
he looking in this this strange triple self portrait or
he's just painting us that way, right, But anyway, you
see plenty of him and he I think he has
another one of a of a little girl looking into
the mirror, and in this one she's definitely looking at
her own reflection, and you really get into the venus effect.
(21:58):
It's well in movies because what happens when you point
a camera at an actor looking in a mirror, Well,
you have to be careful to avoid having the camera
in the mirror that the actor is looking into. You want,
uh the the film to show an actor looking at
his or her own face, So you get into all
sorts of weird angles that potentially don't match up with
(22:20):
optical reality. Well, an optical reality is the thing here,
and that's what the venus effect points to, is this
idea that we really cannot fuss out ourselves that well
in the mirror in terms of actual dimensions. Yeah, that's
why the venus effect, or or any kind of like
filmmaking shenanigans does. It tends not to throw us out
of the experience because we ultimately, by and large don't
(22:43):
have a good grasp on the ocular reality. We don't
really understand how mirrors work. We just kind of gloss
over their uncanny nature. Yeah, And to exemplify this, Marco
Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues have
talked to scores of people about their perception in the mirror,
and they've conducted a number of studies and what they
found is that people think, like if if you ask
(23:06):
them the question, imagine you're standing in front of a
bathroom mirror, how big do you think the image of
your face is on the surface? And or if you
ask them the question, um, what would happen to the
size of that image if you were to step backward
away from the class. So think about those for a second, Like,
the the answer seems to be obvious, right, how big
is my face in the mirror. It's the size of
my face because it's my reflection, right, Yeah, And that's
(23:29):
pretty much what people answered. And then as for the
second question about moving away from the mirror, they say, well,
of course, the size of my image will shrink with
each step. Not so, this is not true. If you
outline your face on a mirror, it will be exactly
half the size of your real face, and if you
step back, the size of the outline won't change. It
will remain half the size of your image. And people
(23:52):
fail to understand that the image on the surface of
the mirror is half the size of the observer because
a mirror is always halfway between the observer and the
image that appears inside the mirror. Exactly like if you
think back to the old Mark's Brother gag and duck Suit,
it doesn't matter if you haven't seen duck Suit. I'm
sure most of you have not. You still know the
gag because it's it keeps repeating itself in countless pieces
(24:15):
of media where someone thinks they're looking into a mirror
but they're not. It's just an empty frame and there's
someone pretending to be them on the other side, matching
their movements precisely, and generally the ruse will last for
just a few seconds until one of the the reflective
people out maneuvers the other one does an unexpected movement.
(24:36):
The mimic can't mimic. And that's exactly what happened this
morning in my about from you for the person who
dressed me. You need to get real mirrors instead of
just empty frames. But anyway, if there's someone standing on
the other side of that fake mirror impersonating you, they're
going to be as far away from the mirror as
you are, so they're gonna be half your size. Now,
there are some actual processing errors in people who have
(24:59):
mirror or agnosia. Now, this is a condition where people
lose their sense of reflection, and you sometimes see this
in stroke patients who have had damage to their brains.
They might have right parietal lesions, and these cases the
patient still have um intact the knowledge about mirrors right. Um,
they can describe what they do and how they work,
(25:21):
but they can't seem to put it into practice or
to really figure out their bodies in in in time
and space. For example, if you have a patient stand
in front of a mirror and the researcher holds a
pen over the patient's left shoulder and ask him or
her to reach for it. Well, most people would just
reach backwards, right, You just put your hand up and
reach backwards and get it. But people with mirror agnosia,
(25:42):
they will reach forwards and actually bang their hand into
the glass because they don't the depth and the perception
is all off. Well, I know, there's also something known
as mirrord self misidentification and clinical psychology. A two thousand
one study from the Choir Center for Cognitive Science looked
at two dementia patients. The two individuals could no longer
(26:03):
recognize their own faces in the mirror, but they had
no problem recognized that the faces of others in reflection.
It turns out both individuals suffered from right side brain lesions,
the portion of the brain particularly associated with self facial
recognition and even the use of self describing adjectives. So
a couple of ways that there can be uh, something
(26:24):
a little off in uh the architecture of the brain
that affects the way that we interact with that uncanny reflection. Now,
so that's all about distortion um and all the ways
in which we might get these images wrong. But I
thought it would be interesting just to flip this around
(26:44):
the mirror image and think back to Vermeer, because it's
this great documentary that's actually already out called Tim's Vermeer,
and this inventor set out to try to figure out
how Vermier could create such photo realistic depictions with his
paintbrush in an era that was two hundred years before
(27:07):
the camera was invented. And it comes down to mirrors,
which is and I won't go deeply into this, but
here you have someone who has created this machine with
two mirrors two make this painting. This image has photo
realistic because what we see with our you know, three
(27:29):
D rich world around us always getting flattened by you know,
two D on our retinas. Um. So, a little interesting
documentary if you want to check it out. Yeah, it's
a it's directed by Teller of Penn and Teller and
uh and I've heard about it a few months back
and sort of made a mental note to check it out,
and then somehow lost that that mental note. But but yeah,
(27:49):
it looks. It looks musty because it's it appears to
examine not only the question of how does this, How
did this great artist create this work? But also just
sort of the nature of art and Nate and how
we we protect our ideas of how art is created.
And also personal obsession, like because it seems like the
the the the Texan individual who really set out to
(28:11):
try and replicate the process of creating these these these
works of art. He has a very obsessive mind. And uh,
and you really want to examine it for the length
of the documentary. Oh yeah, I mean he I think
he worked ten years on this. He even recreated the room.
But um that Vermier used he used the same kind
of paints. Yeah, paints that would have existed back in
(28:35):
the day. He's traveling to see of Amir's work in person. Yes,
that he gets the Queen to show him that exact
painting up close, so he can really get Hugh right
when it comes to the color. And he's asking kind
of dangerous questions at least as far as the artistic
community is concerned, because a lot of people don't want
the you know, to to to face the possibility that
(28:58):
someone like Vermier would have used the best available technology
of the time to help create it, because on some
level it's kind of like saying, oh, well, this artist,
we thought they were a great painter, but they really
were a great painter who also use photoshop. Like there's
something poisonous about that idea to us, even though it
doesn't necessarily make sense. Yeah, actually, because people think of
it as painting by numbers, that you just get this
(29:20):
guy right and and he makes the same machine and
um and using the same technique. A guy who is
an unskilled artist is able to replicate a masterpiece by
using this technique. And we actually could probably do a
whole episode on this, because there are some people who
are weighing in and saying, well, that's not a big deal,
because there are some trained artists that don't use the gimmick,
(29:42):
that don't use the machine, and they can make pretty
much exact replicas of Vermeer's work just with with their
naked eye. And it seems to me ultimately the situation though,
is that it's it's it's always about the artist at
the center, no matter what kind of technology they're using.
But you see the same argument in various me dams.
For instance, in music, like I've seen threads where people
(30:03):
were talking about electronic music and they're saying, well, the
you know, the genius that say, you know, an early
X twin album is not not going to be replicators
or an APEX twin album doesn't mean the same thing
anymore because supposedly anybody can create that because the technology
is there. But that doesn't really hold up because it's
ultimately it's not about the tools. It's about the artist. Yes,
(30:23):
and that artist is replicated in the mirror right many
many times over and over again in different ways, smaller,
bigger dimensions. All right, Before we go to listener mail,
I just want to read just a quick excerpt from
the poem of Mirrors by your Hey Lewis Borges. He says,
I see them as infinite elemental executioners of an ancient
pact to multiply the world, like the act of the
(30:46):
getting Sleepless bringing doom. They prolong this hollow, unstable world
in their dizzy spider's web. Sometimes in the afternoon they
are blurred by the breath of a man who is
not dead. So there you go. There's more to that poem,
and I recommend you go check it out and do
a Google search for Mirrors by your Hey Lewis borees. Alright,
(31:10):
let's read a couple of emails here. We have one
from Amber and it's about outsourcing memory that we just covered,
and she says, hey, guys, I loved this topic. I
listened to you guys at work while I complete all
my tasks via data entry in some shape and form. Anyways,
I found this so fascinating because I thought of all
(31:32):
the things I used to rely on for outsourcing my memory.
Everywhere I go, I always have my phone. It's actually
funny because when someone in my group of friends asked
a questions, no one seems to look it up. I
am a Google fiend and always have to find an
answer right then and there. It's strange how if we
think the information will be stored, we don't memorize it.
For instance, I use an app for my workout routines,
(31:53):
and if I didn't have it, I'd be lost, Whereas
my husband goes and just does whatever, remembers his own
routines and talk about blast from the past. Lately, there's
been a craze and I've joined it via an app
called time Hop. This app will go back one to
three four years on your Facebook and say what you
posted on that day. So of course I don't remember
how I felt last year today, but now I can
(32:15):
just pull it up and see what was going on
in my life at that time. Anyway, I think he's
always putting out such a great information and keeping my
mind sharp throughout my daily grind. Sincerely, Amber, Huh. Now
that that was interesting because we talked about this idea
of revisiting yourself in your states throughout the history of you. Right,
so if you go back on your timeline four years ago,
(32:36):
that's just sort of the beginnings of how you can
begin to construct that memory. Yeah, because there are all
these slightly different views that spread all the way back
through time. I've been thinking about this a lot, probably
more than I should, in response to this craze on Facebook.
I'm sure you've seen it where they're all these which
X Man character are you? Which soda are you? And
(32:58):
now even which how stuff podcaster are you? Have you
taken this yet? Yeah? Yeah, who'd you get me? It
was weird like that, but but it made me because
I took it, and I you know, when I answered truthfully,
I got myself. And even when I just kind of
answered semi truthfully, I ended up getting myself for some reason.
But ultimately it's such a hollow question, like because you
(33:19):
have to ask yourself which you are you. There's no
unified you. They are all these different yews, and the
idea that there's a centralized self is just a complete illusion.
So the mirrors of you, I mean, because you are
somewhat like some other people in the office taste wise, right,
so you would have that reflected back. I'm just not
going to stout for the whole mirror thing. All right. Well,
(33:41):
I have a a few bits of listener mail here
to run through a quick all right, This one comes
to us from Fernando. Fernando says, hello, Julian Robert. I
was listening to your podcast episode A Musical time Machine
for the Brain, and it got me thinking, what if
time and space is like a music record, and everything
that has happened is happening and will ever happen exists
on the same plane. Our human perception would be the
(34:03):
needle that is only able to process the data, uh literally,
giving us the illusion of the beginning and an end.
I can't recall if I've heard this idea before, but
I know it helped me understand the concept of nonlinear time.
Love the show and keep up the great work. Well, yes,
that idea, um that I've heard that almost exact um
(34:24):
analogy before, particularly with a DVD. The idea that time
that our our existence, our life is a movie on
a DVD in time space is the DVD the physical
DVD itself. There's no beginning or end. Everything has always happened,
but our perception of it happening is the enigma. I
love the DVD idea because it's all there waiting for
you to dip into it. Max tech Mark, I believe
(34:46):
was the individual we can at least partially attribute that to.
But yeah, essentially that's what's happening alright. One more bit
of listener mail, um Eric write, since it says Julie
talked about going to sleep with basil in her mouth,
this is a very bad idea due to choking has
so please don't do it. We like Julie on the
podcast and we would be sad if you couldn't do
it for some reason like being dead. Julie, explain yourself.
(35:08):
Thank you, um Eric. I don't remember that the what
we were talking about specifically, but something about I don't know. Oh,
I think we're talking about having some self yes, lucid
dreaming yes. And we were talking about the ability to
to lose a dream taste, and I said, maybe if
I put basil under my tongue or something that that
would trigger that. But you don't do this. I did.
(35:30):
The person who dresses me plucked it out just in time.
So um, I'm fine, Eric, Thank you for writing in though.
All right, Okay, so hey, you wanna get in touch
with us, you wanna wrap with us about mirrors. We
would love to hear from you. Your experience is looking
to mirrors and in the mirrors, you're any uncanny uh
ideas that have come to you about mirrors, about the
(35:52):
nature of mirrors, your favorite weird mirrors from from folk tales,
horror movies and what have you. Let us know about
all those. You can find us as all ways at
the mother Ship Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Also,
you gotta check this out, guys. Robert has an awesome
new series coming out Monsters Monster Science, I think is
what we're calling it, and you can find that on
(36:14):
Mind Stuff Show on YouTube exactly. And I'm not going
to give a whole lot here away, but I do
want to just add here that Robert is wearing a
fine turtle neck in this Yes, yes, we we purchased
a turtleneck especially for this production, so hopefully it'll be
a hit. Um, you know, monsters the Science of Monsters.
If you like my blog series Monster of the Week,
(36:37):
and it's kind of that in video form with some
tunanigan thrown and so yes, so check it out. Check
that out. We'll have all we'll have a little bit
of a teaser. It'll go up this week. So yeah,
check that out. Check out our various social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
Google Plus. You'll find all those links at stuff to
Blow your mind dot com and as always, you can
(36:58):
reach us via email. Yeah, so, if you have some
thoughts that you would like send to us, please do
send them to blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, stick
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