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

of a high school group. I was going through the history of the glass and had just got to the part you would appreciate, extolling the flawless craftsmanship, the perfection of the glass itself, when the boy raised his hand, um, but what about that black splotch in the upper left hand corner that looks like a mistake. And one of his friends asked him what he meant, so the Bates boy started to tell him, then stopped. He looked at the mirror very closely, pushing right up to the red

velvet guard rope around the case. Then he looked behind him, as if what he had seen had been the reflection of someone of someone in black standing at his shoulder. It looked like a man, but I couldn't see the face. It's gone now, And that was all. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with

part two of our discussion of the mirror. In the last episode, we talked about some of the science of optics, about how mirrors work, why they work. We talked a little bit about mirror psychology and some of the earliest mirrors from the archaeological record, specifically obsidian mirrors found associated with the ancient Proto city of Chattel Hoyak in southern Anatolia. Yeah, and that that cold read that we opened the episode with.

That's an excerpt from Stephen King's Wonderful Haunted Mirror short story The Reaper's Image, collected in ve short story compilation Skeleton Crew. So I highly recommend anyone who hasn't read that go read that story if you want a creepy mirror story. For my money, just as creepy as anything he ever wrote, you know, as creepy as the likes of the Boogeyman or the Jaunt. You know. I was saying in the last episode that I don't think it's an accident that there are so many horror movie scenes

and ghost stories that involve a mirror. There there seems something really special about mirrors that uh takes people's minds to two supernatural and unsettling places more so than other household objects. And I think it's pretty obvious why that would be. That there appears to be something alive on the other side of the mirror, and the mirror gives you you know, it's not just that you see yourself and you see something animate in it, but that you

can also see what's behind you. In a mirror, yeah, you it allows you to seeings that you cannot directly see, uh. 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

so you can see behind you. Oh. I got some of those when I was a kid, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Yeah, or driving a car, just think about it, The very act of driving a car were utilizing at least three different mirrors at all times. It's I mean, it's just every day we take it for granted, but it's, uh, it's kind of strange when you think about it. Though. Of course, at least the mirrors warned you that that reality and reflection do not

necessarily match up. Oh that's funny if like every mirror came with a disclaimer the way the rear view mirrors on a car do. Yeah, yeah, does not reflect reality. But as a segue to one of the first things we wanted to talk about today, it's worth noting that prehistoric Anatolia is not the only place, uh, in the ancient world where there was the use of obsidian mirrors. That's right. Evidence of mirrors, and especially obsidian mirrors in Mesoamerica date back at least as far as six b c. Uh.

There there might be some earlier dates, but I think that was the earliest date. I was I was coming across in my research, and so they were used by the Maya, they were used by the Aztecs. And when they were used by the Aztecs, particularly by Aztec priests, they were used in various scrying rituals in the worship of of the god that tezcot Li PoCA, whose name actually means Lord of the smoking Mirror. Uh. So there were black mirrors used by his priests. Uh. And he

has this just overall connection to dark volcanic obsidian. Yeah. And so scrying is a practice that's found in cultures and religions all throughout the world. The arc type example you see is gazing into the crystal ball, right, Um, But but scrying really refers to any form of divination, prophecy, or revelation that involves gazing into some kind of medium, often a reflective medium such as a mirror or a

crystal ball. Yeah. But I would say one of the things about tes Catlet Polca is that, like he is really the mirror deity par excellence because his name means smoking mirror. Like, like, that's how closely connected he is with this. Um. He's he's a fascinating character. I think we've we've we've mentioned him a few different times on

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

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

most exciting. And now this is in comparison to the animal elements of his rival, quetzal Kotal, who we discussed and at least I think we did a couple of episodes on the on the plume de serpent. Did we not? Oh? Absolutely, But I don't think I really understood this distinction before. So one way of thinking about them is that Ketzel Caudal embodies certain aspects of nature, whereas test Cat Polca

embodies something about technology or human artifice. Yeah, yeah, I believe that's the That's the point here is that quetzal Kotal, you know, has these natural animal elements that are his makeup, whereas Testcatlipoca is essentially a lord of artifact and invention. So yes, you know that smoke is part of fire,

and fire does not require humans. Obsidian um occurs on its own, but of course both of these are brought to new heights by by human invention, you know, the polishing of the obsidian to make a mirror, the utilization of of smoke and fire in in other human activities. So you could you could look at him as a god of technology. I know this is not intended by the people who created these ancient artworks, but some depictions

of test Catlipoca do look like a robot. Yeah yeah, yeah, sometimes that art does have that that kind of appearance to it. Now, according to Michael E. Smith in Um in that author's chapter in this book, uh the Archaeology of Testcatlipoca, various items are associated with with the cult of this deity. The most important are altars, ceramic flutes, and of course obsidian mirrors, and the mirror is likely the most important because on one hand, again it's part

of the god's name and identity. It's the substance of his prosthesis, and numerous colt items and costume elements associated with him were obsidian mirrors. Um Now. Mirrors were sometimes associated with other Aztec gods, but apparently circular obsidian mirrors were just central to the worship and identity of Testcatlet PoCA. Now.

One of the challenges to archaeological study of this mirrors, though, is that, as as Smith points out, virtually none of them were found under modern archaeological standards um and and 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 returned to Mexico. So a lot of these mirrors have been in circulation for a anisle and we're uncovered centuries ago. Now are you aware of is anything actually known about the exact provenance of of John D's mirror, like like how by what route it came to him? Um? There is I have looked at the scholarship on that before. Yeah. So I guess a couple of things to keep in

mind about the mirrors. So, first of all, uh, the are you also find rectangular obsidian mirrors in some collections that are tied to um To Aztec traditions. But some experts argue that these may not be pre Hispanic they may be postconquest artifacts. Um. The mirrors that you see in the various codices are are all circular, so that seems to be a distinction some of the experts are making.

Now that the As for the magical speculum as it's called of Dr d Um that does appear, I think all the experts agree, like that isn't that isn't an actual az Tech artifact. Um. I think the previous owner prior to D is known. I can't remember how far back, 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 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 plain and um and functional in many respects. It is a circular mirror with kind of a notch at the top,

with a hole in it. And apparently Smith points out that the whole at the top of that artifact is likely there so it could be worn as an ammu let across the chest, which is something that we see in the codiceas. So, there seemed to have largely been two standardized types or sizes of these mirrors, there was one size that was intended to adorn a sculpture, and then others like this, like the one that came into Dr De's possession, that was worn as an ornament by priests.

But it's also possible that size norms changed over time. Now Nicholas J. Saunders and Elizabeth Bacuadano right quote these reflective devices were powerfully ambiguous, not least because they shone with a quote unquote dark light. They partook of what has been called a pen Amerindian quote aesthetic of brilliance, which accorded sacredness and power to a multimediasemblage of shiny objects.

The material metaphors of access to and control of the glowing spirit realm from wind, status and political power flowed. And they also write that quote a presence of absence to finds the ambivalent nature of test catolet PoCA, the supreme deity of the late post classic Aztec pantheon, in the dark ephemeral reflection of his obsidian mirror, in the transient sound of his ceramic flower pipes, lies the sensuous nature of a god who mediates materiality and invisibility with

omniscience and omnipresence. So a couple of years ago I actually was lucky enough to see uh John D's mirror, uh, the Aztec of Citian mirror from his collection in the British Museum. It's on display there among the collection of Dr D's treasures, and I recall, yeah, looking into it, you can get a rather unsettling feeling where you you could imagine how a person could could feel the power from the other realm flowing out from this, this sort of conduit or gateway. Yeah. Yeah, this mirror is I

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

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

the mirrors were indeed used in acts of divination. Priests and magicians would use the mirrors to gaze into the future. Quote his obsidian mirror appears in an Aztec account describing a mirror or test cattle that showed the quote stars and fire drill a constellation even though it was daytime, and then revealed an omen forecasting the Spanish invasion. And so they point out that that the mirrors ruling divination may be linked with astrology, because test catlet Polca had

numerous astronomical avatars. So it's interesting we see this idea of of reflections in the mirror. It's you know, it's it's clearly associated with reflections of us, but also reflections of of the cosmos. I think that's that's fascinating. And then you get into the idea of the darkness of obsidy, and I guess being like the darkness betwixt the stars. Oh yeah, thank thank, thank Now, as we talked about in the last episode, there were also obsidian mirrors on

the other side of the Atlantic. In the ancient world. The earliest mirror artifacts known of are probably these obsidian discs from prehistoric Anatolia. But I was wondering, okay, where

did mirror technology go after that? So I was turning back to a sort of catalog of of different early mirror finds that are listed in a paper by J. M. Enoch in the Journal of Optometry and Vision Science in two thousand six called History of Mirrors dating back eight thousand years and Enoch notes a few types of artifacts from ancient Egypt that have been interpreted as possible mirrors,

but but are not quite certain. For example, the English egyptologist Flinders Petrie suggested that stone palettes in pre dynastic Egypt could have been turned into mirrors by wedding them. So you might have an artifact that just looks like kind of a flat stone disc, and that by wedding

this disc you could turn it into a rough mirror. Also, egyptologist Christine lily Quist argued that ancient Egyptians may have used ceramic bowls that could be filled with water to function as mirrors inside the home and lily Quist sites findings at Elbadari, which is a site along the Nile and Upper Egypt with a number of artifacts from pre dynastic times. I think this is one of the earliest sites that shows evidence of agriculture in in predynastic egypt Um.

But that around Elbadari there is possible evidence of early mirrors, including quote a slab of selenite with traces of wood as a possible frame um and a slate disc also a piece of reflective mica pierced with the whole a possible wall attachment. But moving on from here you start to get signs of metal mirrors, which are obviously you can just imagine, are going to have a very different

quality than say a wet stone would. So by the 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 was looking around at these examples, it seems perhaps most or maybe even all of the mirrors recovered from around

three thousand BC e in Mesopotamia were copper mirrors. But by the third millennium BC, in moving forward, there are a number of examples of metal mirrors found in Egypt, usually copper early on, and then as as the years go on, there are more copper alloys, and these would fall into the classification of bronze mirrors. But also by the third millennium BC, there are not only these scant artifacts, but actually records of mirrors. So this means mirrors evoked

as a concept in texts and in artistic imagery. So Enoch includes some examples of ancient Egyptian artwork from tombs that appears to show mirrors. Uh. For example, Rob, I've got one you can look at here. This is figure three in front of you, but I'll try to describe it is detail from the tomb of mirror Ruca at Sakara. And so this would have been the sixth dynasty of Egypt roughly b C. And what you see is sort

of a line of figures depicted in that profile style. Um, and they're they're doing they're they're holding up objects at each other. And I think this may be showing a sequence of the same figures interacting across time. But one of the objects they're holding up it looks like, well, what is that? Is that a ping pong paddle? No, it's probably a mirror. Yeah, yeah, I can definitely see it. I mean they're they're holding it up to their faces as if looking at their own reflection. And way way

back into history. Uh, it's clear that mirrors contain not just their practical functions they're used in cosmetics and stuff, but also their religious significance. Uh. Enoch notes that is extremely common across all of these cultures for mirrors to be associated with some kind of supernatural power, to be associated with the gods, or to have some kind of

use in divination or or association with the soul. He writes, quote, they served as symbols of the sun or moon, and may have been carried on tops of standards, a one sided, flattened disc symbolized as setting or rising on. Mirrors were sometimes used to symbolize the inner self. They also provided a way to look back. Yeah, this is all especially interesting considering the ancient Egyptians, who of course were very solar oriented culture. Uh So anything that reflects sunlight is

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

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

the strange face in the mirror effect. Yeah, and this is this is great because it's it's one that we can certainly take all of this and apply it to the mirrors that surround us today. But then if we're talking about these various older variations of the mirror that are maybe smoky or darker um, smaller um, it allows even more room for ambiguity. Yeah. So a while back, I did an episode of the artifact that I called

the Psychedelic Blindfold. I don't know if you ever got a chance to listen to this one, Rob, but it was one that I've been thinking about a lot ever since. And in fact, though it's called the psychedelic blindfold, there's actually nothing special about the blindfold that was used in the study except that it basically blocks out all light. What was really special about this research was the amount

of time that the blindfold was worn. The basic finding in this study again, this was published in the year two thousand four in the Journal of neuro Optomology. The base finding was that subjects who were blindfolded for days at a time started to have elaborate visual hallucinations. And the most interesting part to me was not just that they were hallucinating, but that sometimes they started to visually

hallucinate roughly accurate percepts based on other senses. So that might include perceptions of their own limbs or objects that they were manipulating, like a picture of water on a table or other people in the room with them, that they would get pictures of things that were actually there. And this to me raises interesting questions about what site

really is. What if you are seeing things in your brain and those things are not whole cloth fabrications but roughly accurate perceptions of real objects around you, except they're not based on light received through the eyes, but based

on other senses cognition. So maybe your appropriate reception, you know, your internal sense of where the rest of your body is causes you to hallucinate visual imagery of your body parts in the right places, or your ability to feel objects around you, like a picture of water in your hand, causes you to hallucinate that picture, except it's basically an accurate visual stimulus you're getting is just not based on light. Yeah,

this is a fascinating area of contemplation. It gets back to something we've we've we've we've touched on before, the idea that we think of ourselves. We we often use technological metaphors. We often think about our visual perception as being that of a like a security camera. It is it is filming the world and preserving that that site data as it is. But of course the more we look at it, the more we realize that this is

not the case. We have we certainly have have visual data coming in, but then we have the we have other senses involved, we have memory employed, and there's a great deal of a filling in the blanks and the sort of cultivation of an internal model of reality. I think that's very well put, and that's really going to

be relevant to what I'm about to bring up. So all that was preamble to a really interesting series of studies that I was just getting into about the potential psychedelic power of mirrors, much like the potential psychedelic power 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 Martinez Conde, and she talks about how thirty years ago, when she was a child growing up in Spain, she said that there was a there was like a superstition

that anyone could see the devil's face. And what you had to do to see the devil's face was stare at your her own face in the mirror at the stroke of midnight, and then you would say the devil's name when when midnight tolls, and then you would see the devil in the mirror. Yeah, this is kind of the with the Bloody Mary effect. You could go right. And I gotta admit, I actually remember when I was a child, I for a I don't know how long this will on, for some period of time, I got

absolutely terrified about Bloody Mary. After a kid that I was, I was at some summer camp and some guy was telling me about Bloody Mary and uh, and after hearing that, I remember I was just like petrified of being alone in a room with a mirror. I remember this too. Yeah. I was thinking about this recently because after we recorded the first episode, I was telling my son, who just

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

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

we just kind of stop asking questions about. And then if you you add something to the scenario, uh, you can easily bring that spookiness back into the forefront, you know. But then also with with a lot of like the Bloody Marry type stuff we tend to and it involves not just a mirror, but also a low light or a flickering candle light, which is just going to augment

the various effects that we're talking about here. Um, you can already be weird enough to dear at your own face in the mirror for you know, a minute at a time. But add in flickering and alterating candle light throw in low light, and as well as this the script of the supernatural layered on top of everything, and yeah, I can start feeling a little freaky. It's funny how much what you say is is conforming to the study I'm about to bring up, though, I should report, by

the way that Um, Susanna Martinez Conde. She says in the article that when she tried to see the devil's face in the mirror as a child, nothing happened. So you know, you win some, you lose some. You gotta

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

with in low light conditions. And then on top of that, there are apparently special effects of staring at a face in a mirror that manifest as a very common predisposition to hallucinate. As far as I can tell. This effect was first observed by a psychologist named Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino, Italy and published in a report in the journal Perception in two thousand and ten. The

paper was called Strange Face in the Mirror Illusion. So, in this study, Caputo recruited fifty subjects who were all in their twenties, a range of one to twenty nine years of age, and they didn't know what was being tested. What happened is Caputo would place them in a dimly lit room, so it was illuminated only by a twenty five what incandescent light that was placed on the floor

behind the subject. And then they were asked to stare into a mirror that was about zero point four meters which is about one point three ft in front of them, and then just to keep looking at their own reflection, staring into their own face for ten minutes. That it no drugs, no other alterations of consciousness, just a dimly lit room, staring in your at your own face in

a mirror for ten minutes. And then afterwards they were asked to write about the experience and report anything that they remembered about it, and the results reported by Caputo are extremely striking. The majority of subjects reported at least one of a number of different kinds of broad uh perceptually strange or even hallucinatory experiences. So to read from the study quote, descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included a huge deformations of one's own face reported by sixty

six percent of the fifty participants. Be a parents face with traits changed eighteen percent, of whom eight percent were still alive and ten percent were deceased. See an unknown person twenty eight percent, d an archetypal face such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor e an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion eighteen percent, or f fantastical and monstrous beings percent. So like a lot of people get monsters in there. Yeah, yeah, it's It's impressive

and and really not surprising at all. I think if anyone has has spent any amount of time, I mean, we've all spent time looking at ourselves in the mirror, I think enough to realize. Yeah, the more that you look at yourself, the weirder you look um, and most of us will leave that situation before you get to the monster scenario. You know, you're more likely to check out when you start seeing uh, when you start noticing resemblance to parents and so forth, and you're like, I

think I've looked at my mirror enough. I think I checked on what I came here to check on. Now I'm going to go do something else. But ten minutes that's sas some serious time. And Caputo also reported that there were effects beyond the purely visual distortions and hallucinations.

There were also sort of conceptual disruptions and and strong emotional reactions and feelings that people experienced staring into the mirror like this again to read from his results quote, The participants reported that apparition of new faces in the mirror caused sensations of otherness when the new face appeared to be that of another unknown person or strange other looking at him or her from within or beyond the mirror.

All fifty participants experienced some form of this dissociative identity effect at least for some apparition of strange faces, and often reported strong emotional responses in these instances, and I thought this was interesting. So it's saying that, like, even for people who didn't note any visual distortions or visual hallucinations, they did report at least some kind of feeling of dissociation with the face that was looking back at them.

But coming back to the results quote, for example, some observers felt that the other watched them with an enigmatic expression and a situation that they found astonishing. Some participants saw a malign expression on the other face and became anxious. Other participants felt that the other was smiling or cheerful and experienced positive emotions in response. The apparition of deceased parents or of archetypal portraits produced feelings of silent query.

Apparition of monstrous beings produced fear or disturbance. Dynamic deformations of the new faces, like pulsations or shrinking, smiling, or grinding, produced an overall sense of inquietude for things out of control. So these kinds of emotional reactions I think makes sense, especially given that that so many people were seeing some kind of visual disturbance or hallucination. But to come back to the visual perceptions themselves, what could possibly explain this

bizarre effect. You look at your own face over time and it starts to kind of transform into other things. You see other people's faces. Maybe you see a cat face or a monster face. Maybe you become a minotaur, maybe you become your grandfather. Uh. You know this is this is strange. So like, what could be leading to this? So Caputo offers a few ideas. First of all, the the disappearance or attenuation of face traits could very well

be caused by what's known as truck slur fading. Uh. This is a name for a very well documented optical illusion that goes like this. Okay, if you if you fixate your gaze on a particular point without moving it, unchanging visual stimuli in the periphery will tend to fade away the longer you stare at that one fixation point. This was observed by the eighteenth century English physician and Pauly math Erasmus Darwin. It was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

But it gets its name after being uh discussed by a Swiss physician named Ignace Paul Vital truck Sler in the early eighteen hundreds, who did some experiments with patches of color against a screen or a wall. But if you want to try this out for yourself, there are tons of you know, they're the little like stimulus images that you can look up on the internet. Just google truk slur fading or truck slur illusion t R O x L e R and you should be able to find something you can try out. Rob But I quite

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

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

some meal mix in bulk. Well, the chesire cat. I think we discussed this a little bit in our MEDUSA episodes, like this is a this is a gorgon, this is a gorgon space that we're staring at here. It's a it's just a a repackaging of the same concept. I mean, not not that that has anything to do with the optical fact going on here, but at any rate, So, truck slur fading is a specific example of a broader phenomenon of neural adaptation, the desensitization of sensory neurons to

unchanging stimuli. And you can think of other examples that are were there similar effects of this and maybe tactle feelings. Like you know, if you um put a finger on part of your arm, you will feel the touch of your own finger when it first lands there. But if you just leave it there, you kind of stop noticing it. Uh. Similar thing with smells, you know, all kinds of me life. You're just getting the same sense stimulus over and over again without changing. Often it will fade into nothing in

your awareness. Right, It's like like with the smell for example, the idea is you're being alerted to this smell because something about it is important, like maybe it's potentially dangerous, etcetera. But if you're around it enough, it's like it's like the brain is decided, Okay, he gets the point. We've sent the memo, we've done all we can do. We just have to trust that he is he either knows that this, uh, this particular smell is is not poison

or he's done something about it. Right, And so that does seem to be an explanation for what's going on generally with truck slur fading. You you stare at a single point and then other things in the visual field. If you're really staring intently, you're not moving your eyes around, you're not blinking. Those other colors, those other images, they just kind of like fade away over time you you're you get used to them, and then they're just going.

But this is not the full answer to the question, right, Because so Caputo's interpretive section continues to say, the trucksler fading might be a good explanation for why, like outer features of the face might seem to fade or disappear or possibly distort while we're fixated on a central point, like if you're staring at your own nose or staring

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

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

so forth into a unified experience of a face. You know, that's something you probably know from experience that like, when you see a face, you tend to see it as a face, not as the individual parts of a face. Right, And and this is something though I find when I am just staring at another person's face for too long I stopped seeing it as a unified face, and I start it's kind of like it's almost like you're seeing just parts of the face floating around, you know, like

you're no longer seeing the face altogether. And it's a weird feeling. And I have to look away from the person's face at that point. Oh you ever, like you gaze at somebody's eyes too long, and you maybe somebody who you find beautiful and you love their beautiful eyes, and then you look too long and those eyes become eyeballs, and then you see them as organs, right, and this is you know, the sclera, and they've got some kind of jelly inside them. And then you're like, oh, oh, no,

I did it. I did the I did the bad. Yeah. And then you see the skull beneath the flesh and it's all done. But to read from Caputo's interpretation of of what could possibly be causing again, it's it's not really fully understood. But in his original study in two thousand ten, Caputo says, quote, this long term viewing of

face stimuli of marginal strength. I remember that's especially because the low light conditions right may generate a haphazard assembly of face traits that generate deformed faces or scrambled faces. Frequent apparitions of strange faces of known or unknown people support the idea that the illusion involves a high level

mechanism that is specific to global face processing. On the other hand, the frequent apparition of fantastical and monstrous beings and of animal faces cannot, in our opinion, be explained by any actual theory of face processing. And so yeah, there's there's still big questions about what exactly leads to this effect. It might have something to do with with

transition points. Say like maybe you're staring at a central part of the reflection, you're looking at your own eyes or something, and then troksler fading kicks in and the outer parts of the face start to kind of fade away, and you lose some color definition and stuff like that. And then and then the visual stimulus is suddenly restored when you blink or you move your eyes or something, and that that part that has faded away snaps back

into focus. Maybe something in that transition causes you to see something weird. Perhaps their gaps there and the brain does some strange filling in process, but we don't really know. But what we do know for sure is that this phenomenon is actually not contained simply to mirror gazing. You can recreate similar effects by having people gaze directly into

other people's faces for ten minutes in low light. This was explored in another paper that Caputo published in called Strange Face Illusions during intersubjective gazing, so people just looking at each other's faces. This was published in Consciousness and Cognition, so it definitely happened with pairs of other people. So it seems like the mirror is not really the special part.

The real keys are faces as stimulus, either yours or somebody else's, long exposure times, just uninterrupted staring and low light. So what makes mirrors special in this regard is that they are a tool that anybody can use to try to experience these strange face effects, you know, without having to recruit somebody else who is game for a really

awkward experiment. Yeah. Now, the the idea of two people's faces for ten minutes low light, I mean essentially this is this is any date night scenario, right, But I guess the beauty of date night is that you ideally you have maybe a beverage you have some sort of at least an appetizer. There there's people watching, or you know,

ideally there's people watching. There's maybe art on the walls, there are other things to captivate your attention, and then you can keep coming back to the person across from you. It's not it's not some sort of a you know, just a like a blank cell that you find yourself engaging with this per sit in. Right. I don't want you know, I don't like to be judgmental, but I'm gonna say, if you're doing date night this way, you're

doing it wrong. You should not stare uninterrupted without moving your eyes or blinking at somebody's face for ten minutes. So it sounds like it's the kind of thing that could be a dating fat right, Like if someone's like, look dating a normal dating scenario, you're just not able to bond with the person. You need just ten minutes of uninterrupted um facial viewing and uh, and then you'll know whether this is your soulmate or not, or that is a minotaur. You can't really love me until you've

seen me as a minotaur. Right though, Interestingly enough, that's like a show now where they're there's some sort of a dating show where both people are are covered in like heavy monster effects makeup. So yeah, I'm serious. I am serious. It's a show on Netflix. I have not watched it, but I watched the trailer for it, and

the trailer was amusing. Um it at least has some cool monster like makeup effects stuff, so it'll be like, uh, you know, two individuals they're doing a blind date thing, except one is made up like a bird woman and the other is I don't know, like a like a baseball headed mutant, that sort of thing, a baseball headed mutant. I like it. Yeah, I can't wait till this like back reflects onto the pickup line process and stuff. It's like, you know, Darling, let me be your pumpkin head. There

may be a pumpkin head in it. Yeah. Yeah, listeners will have to report back because again I'm not going to actually watch this show. Just one more thing I wanted to mention before wrapping up on the strange face in the Mirror research so I said that Caputo has done a number of studies following up on this and

reproducing it in different contexts since then. One that I thought was interesting was published in the journal of trauma and dissociation in the year twenty nineteen called strange face illusions during eye to eye gazing and die adds specific effects on derealization, depersonalization, and dissociative identity. Again, the study

reproduced the findings with some new areas of focus. But the main thing I wanted to mention from this one was that fifteen of the test subjects here were sketch artists who were later asked to reproduce their best approximation of some of the strange faces they saw, and Rob, here you go, you can you can tell me what you think of these. One I really like is a guy with a furry face with glasses and his eyes

have mustaches. That one, yeah, that one looks pretty creepy and has kind of a you know, blank isn't real and can't hurt you kind of a vibe to it, as does the big vacant eyed lizard man looking face. And then one of them is just kind of a muppet and the other one, um, just kind of looks like a caricature, the monstrous monkey woman. That's what the big eyed one is called. Here, No, I think you're looking at the alien face. The monstrous monkey one is okay,

I like the muppet one. Yeah, the monstrous monkey woman. Then it doesn't look very monstrous to me. Looks looks adorable, it looks great. Let this monkey woman teach children about the alphabet this. This should be on Sesame Street. Now it's uh, there's so many additional directions to go in from this. On one hand, we should point out that, um, you know, it's worth noting that there are other reasons

that are facing a mirror may be extra unnerving. Um. There's, of course what is often referred to as mirrored self misidentification. And this is the delusion that wants reflection in a mirror is some manner of double or a relative or something of that nature, but not a reflection of yourself. And this is actually a right hemisphere cranial dysfunction, uh that I think is often tied to like, uh, you know, major brain disease or some sort of traumatic injury to

the head. I mean. Another way of of re contextualizing what we've just been talking about is that, um, faces are powerful. Faces are powerful and profound stimuli that can cause powerful and profound reactions in the brain, and mirrors are a way of getting lots of access to face stimuli without you know, in the in the privacy of your own bathroom, you know, without anybody judging you or

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

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

is that like? Do you find yourself susceptible to some of these effects. Yeah, what is the appropriate amount of faith staring? I mean, too little can seem like maybe you're not making an effort to connect with somebody, and too much is creepy and invasive, like you know, balancing that I think is one of those uh, those ongoing social ballets we always have to manage. Yeah, Like you don't want to talk to somebody who refuses to make

eye contact with you. But if the eye contact is just too like unflinching, it can feel a bit too intense. You know. It feels like you're playing a game of of of eyeballs Chicken with them, you know, and it's no fun. No eyeball Chicken, no eyeball road rage. You know,

you gotta you gotta manage right of way. This reminds me of something we talked about in a previous episode about sunglasses, about how you have UM if an individual is wearing sunglasses, uh, the other people are more inclined to believe that that person is staring at them, versus if they were not wearing sunglasses at all. Um, So I don't I don't know. Again, We're we're creatures that are hyper aware of staring. Um, that know the power of staring and theertain amount of eye contact is required.

But yeah, there's this careful balance that has to be um in effect. And then you throw mirrors into this whole scenario and it just it makes everything a little stranger. I think that's one of the big the big take homes that we keep coming back to with mirrors is mirrors make reality a little bit stranger, and in doing so, reveal strength strange things about our reality. Like one of those things is that you don't really have a face.

You have you are, to a certain extent just this a symbolage of of of organs on the front of a head. And we don't think about it, but if you stare in a mirror long enough, you might come to realize that. Likewise, uh, you know, realizations about um, you know, how much you look like like a parent or a family member, or like some you know, random celebrity face or some face in a painting, or even the face of a beast or a monster. Very true.

The concept of a face is a kind of blessed hallucination that we're always able to you know, we're usually able to maintain in just a allowing the the the face hallucination to decompose into various contours of meat and bone. Maybe that's one of the you know, we came back. We've discussed this, I think in both episodes. Why why the mirror is so often in the toolkit of the magician and the priest and the soothsayer and so forth.

And I think part of it is, you could see, the mirror is a very basic tool for breaking reality, or at least bending reality. You know, it is a it is a means of of not only you know, creating effects and creating illusions, but also taking the potency out of the the ever present illusion of the way we perceive the world. Yeah, I think we're gonna have to keep thinking about this, and we're gonna have to come back in part three because there's more mirrors to come.

We have so much more, there's so much, so much to talk about with this one. I mean, i'd be I'd be perfectly happy to to do this one for you know, four or five episodes. So we'll just we'll see, we'll see how how much gas is in the tank. But uh, yeah, we'll definitely be back with the part three. Maybe the oculus will make you forget all of your past and you'll have to do six seven eight just on fraternity. Well, I don't know if I could watch Oculus again. I found it to be a very enjoyable

horror movie, but but a troubling one. So I wish there were more haunted mirror movies. I don't know that there's been a lot of them. I was looking around the other day and I think I found one from the maybe it's God. I can't rememberich decade, sixty seventies or eighties, somewhere in that thirty year period, but there aren't as many as you might think. I think there were.

There may be some various anthology episodes concerning mirrors. I just googled Haunted Mirror movie got a selection of movie posters and covers. They all look really terrible, which is strange. I mean, I guess it's also totally understandable because on one hand, it seems easy, like, oh, you just need a creepy mirror. Just go by a mirror, make a mirror, uh, you know, just as this prop that doesn't actually move.

But you get into how you shoot mirrors and how you use the mirror to make things, you know, creepier, and it gets a little more complicated. I guess that's why maybe weird scenes with mirrors are largely more memorable, you know, like I think of I think of like the old that, like the nineteen nineteen seventies Macbeth adaptation has a great sequence with a mirror in it. So stuff of that nature comes to mind. All right, we're

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

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

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