For the bubbleheaded young Narcissus of myth, the mirror spun a fatal
fantasy, and the beautiful boy chose to die by the side of a reflecting
pond rather than leave his “beloved” behind. For the aging narcissist
of Shakespeare’s
62nd sonnet, the mirror delivered a much-needed whack to his vanity,
the sight of a face “beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity”
underscoring the limits of self-love.
Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of
metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient
Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity
to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate
the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images
hyper-real and profoundly fake. Mirrors reveal truths you may not want
to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call their own, and
mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.
To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors
make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and
cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the
brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information
from the external world. They are using mirrors to study how the brain
decides what is self and what is other, how it judges distances and
trajectories of objects, and how it reconstructs the richly
three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a
two-dimensional snapshot taken by the retina’s flat sheet of receptor
cells. They are applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images
of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into
healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders
like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.
“In a sense, mirrors are the best ‘virtual reality’ system that we
can build,” said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. “The
object ‘inside’ the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are
concerned it exists as much as any other object.” Dr. Bertamini and his
colleagues have also studied what people believe about the nature of
mirrors and mirror images, and have found nearly everybody, even
students of physics and math, to be shockingly off the mark.
Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect
human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a
room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful
and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups
performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V.
Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne 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.
“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and
think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A byproduct
of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward
more desirable ways of behaving.” Physical self-reflection, in other
words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the
Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know
yourself.
The mirror technique does not always keep knees from jerking. When it
comes to socially acceptable forms of stereotyping, said Dr.
Bodenhausen, like branding all politicians liars or all lawyers crooks,
the presence of a mirror may end up augmenting rather than curbing the
willingness to pigeonhole.
The link between self-awareness and elaborate sociality may help
explain why the few nonhuman species that have been found to recognize
themselves in a mirror are those with sophisticated social lives. Our
gregarious great ape cousins — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and
gorillas — along with dolphins and Asian elephants, have passed the
famed mirror self-recognition test, which means they will, when given a
mirror, scrutinize marks that had been applied to their faces or bodies.
The animals also will check up on personal hygiene, inspecting their
mouths, nostrils and genitals.
Yet not all members of a certifiably self-reflective species will
pass the mirror test. Tellingly, said Diana Reiss, a professor of psychology at Hunter College
who has studied mirror self-recognition in elephants and dolphins,
“animals raised in isolation do not seem to show mirror
self-recognition.”
For that matter, humans do not necessarily see the face in the mirror
either. In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in
Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described
experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of
themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified
their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were
computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also
likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier,
homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine,
unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the
result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to
identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing,
participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.
How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us?
“Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t
look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of
behavioral science at the University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the
assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. “Which
image is you?” he said. “Our research shows that people, on average,
resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their
image that is more attractive than they actually are.”
When we look in the mirror, our relative beauty is not the only thing
we misjudge. In a series of studies, Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues
have interviewed scores of people about what they think the mirror shows
them. They have asked questions like, Imagine you are standing in front
of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on
the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you
were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?
People overwhelmingly give the same answers. To the first question
they say, well, the outline of my face on the mirror would be pretty
much the size of my face. As for the second question, that’s obvious: if
I move away from the mirror, the size of my image will shrink with each
step.
Both answers, it turns out, are wrong. Outline your face on a mirror,
and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face.
Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval
will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the
size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the
background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly,
this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving
about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches
or moves away, the size of the person’s image in the mirror will grow
or shrink as our innate sense says it should.
What is it about our reflected self that it plays by such
counterintuitive rules? The important point is that no matter how close
or far we are from the looking glass, the mirror is always halfway
between our physical selves and our projected selves in the virtual
world inside the mirror, and so the captured image in the mirror is half
our true size.
Rebecca Lawson, who collaborates with Dr. Bertamini at the University
of Liverpool, suggests imagining that you had an identical twin, that
you were both six feet tall and that you were standing in a room with a
movable partition between you. How tall would a window in the partition
have to be to allow you to see all six feet of your twin?
The window needs to allow light from the top of your twin’s head and
from the bottom of your twin’s feet to reach you, Dr. Lawson said. These
two light sources start six feet apart and converge at your eye. If the
partition is close to your twin, the upper and lower light points have
just begun to converge, so the opening has to be nearly six feet tall to
allow you a full-body view. If the partition is close to you, the light
has nearly finished converging, so the window can be quite small. If
the partition were halfway between you and your twin, the aperture would
have to be — three feet tall. Optically, a mirror is similar, Dr.
Lawson said, “except that instead of lighting coming from your twin
directly through a window, you see yourself in the mirror with light
from your head and your feet being reflected off the mirror into your
eye.”
This is one partition whose position we cannot change. When we gaze
into a mirror, we are all of us Narcissus, tethered eternally to our
doppelgänger on the other side.
