From the Vault: The Invention of the Mirror, Part 3

part three of our talk about mirrors. If you haven't listened to the first two parts, should probably go back check those out first. But, rob to get US started today, I wanted to revisit one of your favorite topics, are our failures of intuition and understanding how mirrors work. So we we talked in previous parts of out uh, your

point about the rokeby Venus. You know how there's that painting of Venus looking in the mirror and we see her face and we assume she's looking at herself, but since we see her looking at us, she actually couldn't be looking at herself. She's looking at us. As you know, and as you love to point out, our misunderstanding is about the physics of mirrors. Don't stop there, and so so I actually came across one recently that I really enjoyed. Rachel and I were doing this experiment earlier today. So

so you at home can play along. Um, a couple of questions. Imagine yourself standing in front of a bathroom mirror and looking at your own reflection. You're looking at your head. You're regarding this glorious orb of bone and meat. Maybe he's got some hair on it. And the question is, how big is your reflection of your head on the Mirror? If you were to measure it? Is it smaller than your actual head, bigger than your actual head or the same size? Yeah, this is it's a great question, because

what are you gonna do? You're gonna moving closer and measure it. Well, you could measure if your normal bathroom mirror size. You could measure it without stepping forward. You can just reach out and mark the places you know, touch the mirror where your chin is and where the top of your head is. But before you do that, just just guess, before you actually measure it. The second thing is, after you do that, imagine walking backwards away from a mirror. So you take a few steps back.

What is going to happen to the size of your head in your reflection? Is it going to get larger? Is it going to stay the same size, or will it get smaller? Now My intuitions about this were apparently exactly the same as most people's intuitions about these, the answers to these questions, which are both wrong. My intuition was, well, I think my head in my reflection is going to be the same size as my real head and I think as I walk backward, the size of that head

in my reflection is going to be smaller. And in fact both of these are wrong, as intuitive as they feel, if you actually reach out and measure it, your reflection of your head is half the size of your real head and as you walk backwards away from the Mirror, from your perspective, your reflected head will stay exactly the same size, no matter how far you get away. Very odd. It seems totally counterintuitive until you start thinking about what's

actually happening with a mirror. If you imagine a mirror as a sort of window into the mirror world. It's a little bit easier to think about because if you're looking at your reflected self as a person in uh, you know, in that other mirror world, your reflection is always at exactly the halfway point between yourself and that

reflected version of yourself. So in fact, given the vantage point of your eyes, your reflected head is always going to appear to be half the size of your real head from wherever you are and as you move backwards in a mirror, if someone were standing in the same place and looking at your reflection as you move backwards, it would appear to get smaller. But since your eyes are moving back with you as you retreat from a mirror,

your reflection actually never gets smaller. It stays exactly the same. Wow, yeah, that's that's it's really mind blowing when you think about it. For sure, Um again, these just strange objects in our in our lives, but it's almost when you're talking about the reflected world, the specular world, it's not even that. That itself is not the object. That is this uh, this this unreality, this uh, this inverse kingdom that we

seem to glimp through the glass. You know, we've talked a bit in previous parts here about the possible effects on our our self image and self consciousness that could be created by different types of mirrors. Like if you have a culture where most mirrors are slightly convex, and you know convex mirrors lead to particular kinds of distortions, widening of the field u around the head and sort of, depending on where you hold it and how far away,

sort of pronouncement of certain features. Uh. You you wonder if slightly convex mirrors give way to a culture with a slightly convex self image and but but it also makes me wonder, like, what are the self image properties that cause us to believe that our face in the mirror is the same size as our real face when

actually it's half the size? It's almost kind of comical to think about you like looking at this little tiny things like a few inches uh, and thinking that it's exactly the same as yours, your big old head and meat space. Yeah, I mean it. It falls in line with some of the other ideas we've discussed here, including, you know, the idea that that is what I look like, uh,

and that it is not a flipped version of my face. Uh, you know that that effect that we we sometimes get when we see a photograph of ourselves and it does not look like our mirror reflection and therefore we're a little turned off by it because, you know, our right side of our faces on the left side, that sort of thing. Yeah, and and of course it also goes without saying that the mirror is always staring back at us. You know that, Um, that that that can't be avoided

as well. So in the last episode we talked about the emergence of metal mirrors in the ancient world, with copper and copper alloy looking glasses in Egypt and Mesopotamia from around the third millennium BC on. So these would be highly polished pieces of metal people would use to uh, would use to look at their reflections for mundane cosmetic purposes,

but also, for, say, religious symbolism. Maybe in Egypt you might put a polished piece of metal, a Metal Mirror, on the top of a staff and it might symbolize something about the sun. You know that Egypt has a

very solar oriented, uh Pantheon. But over time the mirror technology would expand to include all kinds of metals first, so not just a later forms of copper alloys, meaning especially bronze, you know higher qualities of bronze, but also things like gold and silver, and so in say, ancient Rome you can find various types of silver mirrors and things like that. So metal technology and different types of metals become more available and uh, and and so mirrors

based on those metals also proliferate. And one thing I was thinking about that this is noted in that paper by J Enoch that I referenced in the past couple of episodes, uh, is that you know, sometimes when we talk about inventions, there are these technical developments that stay relatively isolated in one place for a long time. Maybe you get some little like curio exported to some of

their culture and it gets written about. But then there are the other ones that really just proliferate throughout the globe, whether by trade and contact or just by parallel invention. And the Mirror is definitely one of these technologies that proliferates. Eventually you find it everywhere. Enoch writes. Quote, by approximately two thousand BC there existed dispersed utilization of mirrors in virtually every major region of the world, with settled society ease.

This includes Central and South America. After that time, mirror distribution and quality increased rapidly so, but by a certain point. Deep into the ancient world, mirrors are everywhere, partially as a product of of parallel invention and partially through trade in contact. In one place where it seems to be that mirrors tend to take on a lot of religious and cultural significance is in China. Yeah, I was. I

was reading about this and it was it was really fascinating. Um, you know, like you were saying, mirror technology spreads, but then also, uh, technology metaphors spread as well, and the use of of our ideas concerning mirror. So that's that was one of the things I was really looking at

when I was researching for this episode. And so it led me to a wonderful Um article about Chinese mirrors and UH and Um and particularly how different ancient philosophers looked at them and used mirror or reflection metaphor wars and it was it was titled Mirrors, minds and Metaphors, published in Philosophy East and West two thousand and eight by Aaron M Klein and uh, this particular paper was largely looking at a couple of different Chinese philosophers from

the fourth and third century, B C, e and Um and and dealing with like how they dealt with the

idea of mirrors and reflections. Um. But, but I want to first drive home that, yeah, you have middle metal mirrors that were popping up in China, uh, certainly as as early as this second millennium B C. and if you look at some of the examples of of bronze mirrors from ancient China particularly, I was looking at some images of of some mirrors discovered in a two thousand year old treasure trove that was turned up in recent years. They're quite interesting. You'll typically see one side of them

photographed because they had two different sides. One side they're going to be more or less flat, generally circular, though I think I've seen Um that had a slightly different shape. Uh. So flat, circular Um. One side is going to be featureless and reflective, but the other side is going to be often just ornately decorated. So it can be a bit be a little off putting when you see a picture and and it's described as a mirror and you're trying to figure out where you're supposed to look for

the reflection. This is so funny. I was actually looking at a bunch of mirrors in the Met Museum collection, just on their website, uh, and I kept noticing this. I would look at it, I'd be like what, that's not a mirror, but then I realized they're showing me the back of the mirror, I think, because the back has all the interesting decorations and everything on it. And

this was true of so some ancient Roman mirrors. I was looking at some Iranian mirrors, uh, some, and some ancient Chinese mirrors where in all cases all of the beautiful decorations, the inlays any writing or script or imagery on them. That was all on the back side. And it always looks like yeah, how does anybody see the reflection in this? Oh, okay, yeah, looking at the other the other side. But but certainly this would be the side with the most, most of the eye catching decoration.

This would be the side that had birds or dragons or depictions of deities, and sometimes good luck wishes were also inscribed there. Now, the two different philosophers that that Klein is looking at here were dallast, philosopher Gengi and Confucian philosopher Hina. They each had their own separate worldviews, but they seem to come together on the idea of of how we might view the Shin which kleient translates his heart mind. But I think we can also translate

it as US intention or center or core. But I think heart mind is seems to be a pretty strong translation, you know, the sort of center of being and contemplation. But both of these philosophers tended to look at ways in which this heart mind might best resemble, Um, a mirror, that it might be like a reflecting pool. Oh yeah, this seems to be something that that turns up in

a lot of thought about mirrors throughout the world. Is that the mirror is often seen as a a way to see one's true self, maybe to see the part of you that is integral. Yeah, so, so Jeong Gi wrote that that a sage's heart mind should quote in stillness, is the Mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things and and I'll break down what

all this means in just a second. But but Shinja, on the other hand, wrote that the heart mind bust must be like a mirror in order to fully contemplate the way. So the use of the mirror metaphor here seems to largely revolve around, of course, the reflective qualities of water Um, and each each of these different philosophers

kind of uses a different version of that. I think with in the Dallas sense, you see more of this use of an actual body like the ocean or a lake or a pond or something, while the Confucian model that is employed here has more of a uh, more of a like a man made reflective pool, like a basin of water that you might have inside of a house or some sort of a domicile in order to view your reflection, something you might use for self care,

that sort of thing. Sure. So the idea here is that the surface of the water must be still in order to more perfectly reflective viewer's face or, in the case of something in a more natural model, the brilliance of the sky in the mountains. Now client goes on to discuss the history and understanding of mirrors and Chinese culture, and I found this was this really interesting. So one of the things that they point out is that while

in modern times we tend to think of Mirrors as passive. Uh. To the ancient Chinese, mirrors, especially metal mirrors, especially like those bronze mirrors we were discussing, they were seen as, quote, active, responsive objects. So they're there are things that respond to our world. Um, an understanding that is Um. You know. It was also linked to the observation that mirrors had

the ability to gather and produce. Oh, this is very interesting because it reminds me of the the alternate and you could argue, physically incorrect model of the eye, which, you know, it was common to believe in the ancient world that the eye was not just a passive receptor of light but actually sent something out that retrieved the image and brought it back. Uh. And I guess, you know, you could argue that the eye is not in fact totally passive because the eye moves, it focuses, it increases

or decreases the aperture that allows light in. Um. But but it it is at least only receiving light. But it was natural for people to think throughout history that the eye was going out and getting images, it was sending something. It was like beaming out the power of sight. Yeah, and in the for the ancient Chinese this, apparently, was also compounded by observations of what you could do with

a mirror. So on one hand you could take a mirror, you could focus sunlight and you could produce fire, and it was also known that a mirror left in the moonlight would gather condensation. So, uh, this is interesting because we're talking about the generation of fire or the collection of water, and water and fire are the elemental essence of Yin and Yang, the dual energies of the cosmos. Wow, quote,

this is from Klein. The fact that mirrors appeared to draw these substances from the sun and moon reinforce the cosmological power that was already associated with them. Well, you know, this makes me think of yet another way that that it could be natural to assume that a mirror has a gathering and production power, which is that by making a mirror, for example, concave, you can give it magnifying power.

And in a way it's hard not to see a lens or a mirror that has magnified buying power as in some way going out and gathering, because what it is quite literally doing is taking something that is invisible to the naked eye and making it visible. You know, Um, not not to jump around too much here, but this reminds me of something I read in M Geraldine Pinch's book on Egyptian mythology concerning the eye of raw. She writes the ancient Egyptian word for I, uh you, sounded

like a word for doing or acting. This may be why the eyes of Deities are associated with divine power as its most uh, interventional. So I keep coming back to that as well. That's kind of been in the background as we've been discussing that. You know, the idea of like what is what is a mirror doing, and is it passive or is it active? Yeah, I mean I guess it depends on your definition of passive or active there, because obviously, again like a concave mirror that produces, say,

a telescope image. You know, most of our most powerful telescopes today are not based on our on transparent refractive lenses, but they're based on mirrors. The Hubble telescope has a gigantic mirror in it and, though I think it is meant with a slightly different connotation, what even astronomers talk

about these mirrors, quote, gathering light. What they mean is, you know, they are taking an amount of information that is that is too diffuse for our eyes to make any sense of, but then turning it into an image that is recognizable to us. Yeah, yeah, I guess one of the things that that that I find super interesting about all this is that if you do see the mirror as is more active as opposed to passive, I feel like perhaps you're more inclined to engage in metaphors

for the self based on that device. You know, like, for instance, we've talked about the idea of thinking about your brain as a in your visual system is being like a security camera, like a security camera is Um, you know, to a certain extent is acting passively, but it is acting, you know it is. It is, it is doing something, and if it is doing something in the world, then perhaps we're more more inclined to compare ourselves to it or compare some aspect of our our

of our physiology, to it Um. And so, likewise we see that reflected in the Chinese view here. Um Gengi writes. Perfect persons use their heart mind like mirrors, going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. Therefore they can win out over things and not hurt themselves. So again, the idea is that a mirror is not passive, it's active, but it's responsive. It does not in sight, um anything and it also does not store the images that it

responds with. It lets them go. And this, of course, brings me back to this, you know, this loose metaphor that we often employ of the video camera or the camera itself as a technological metaphor for how we perceive the world and think about it and remember things. Um. You know, the more I wonder if if, ultimately, that's like more of a harmful metaphor to engage in when we think about how we engage in the world. Maybe

we should think of ourselves more as a mirror. Well, I mean, we know that the reality is in fact, somewhere in between. Like I agree that it's totally a harmful metaphor to think of, say, your memory, of your vision of events, as like a video camera, because the video camera is, you know, with some constraints. You could think of it as objective in a way that your memory just is not, though then again, your memory is real, like it is storing something that is based on events

you actually witnessed. It's just not objective in the way that a video recording is. Yeah, now another interesting bit here's that Janshi also writes of mirrors illuminating and Klein writes that mirrors in early China were thought to illuminate and reveal objects as well. So that's another spin on the UH. You know that the active aspect of the mirror. Now one of the quotes you read earlier from Jeng

Gi had something in it that I didn't understand. It was the quote about in stillness, is the Mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of the ten thousand things or the ten thousands things. Well, what are the ten thousand or ten thousands things? So it's possible. I'm I'm missing some like more esoteric understanding of this, but based on reading clients article, my understanding is that it's the idea like these are the things reflected in the mirror,

all the things of the world. And and what's crucial here is that the more the heart mind is like a mirror, the more one sense of self fades away. The more I am a mirror, the more I am just a reflection of the ten thousand things in the world as opposed to myself. You know, Um, which which I find rather beautiful, really flows into this idea of you know, of of of losing oneself in the now, of losing oneself in the sort of, you know, unlanguaged

contemplation of one's immediate surroundings. Oh yeah, that sense of by becoming the mirror, you become the world. That's the sins of oneness sought after by so many different religious traditions and types of mysticism. Now, Shin Jo was not a dallast again was. It was a confusion different views of the world, but again they were mostly aligned in

this idea of the mirror like aspects of the heart mind. Um, the idea that perfectly still waters allow one to see details of one's reflection in the water, but the slightest breeze, uh, he writes, can both disturb the surface and stir the silt that has sunk to the bottom. Uh. Tilting the PAN likewise can make the water and reflection murky. Uh So uh. Client points out that, yeah, that the pan of water metaphor here is more in line with self

cultivation practices than, you know, the natural world. Um, and I guess that I kind of took it to mean this is largely just sort of creative choices based, uh, you know, based in the writings of the individual philosophers and not necessarily something that is like Taoism versus Confusism, but I could be wrong on that. And of course they're not alone in, of course, employing mirror metaphors, as

we'll discuss a little bit more mirror metaphors. It's like spread like wildfire through through our language and through our

philosophies and our literature. Um. Client also points out that Western thinkers, including nineteenth century Danish philosopher Sore and Cureka Guard and century American philosopher Richard Rorty, uh, they all also employed similar metaphors to those of these ancient Chinese thinkers, and if you want to read more about how they compare to each other, I highly recommend looking up that client article. I believe I was able to pull it up on Jay store. Um, as you know, just free

access if you're logged in. But it's it's funny that, as much as people are trying to sort of come up with metaphors to live by and, uh, and image that allows them to shape their own behavior on the basis of thinking about a mirror it seems pretty clear. There's some evidence that a literal physical mirror can also have effects on your behavior. Yeah, this idea of forced self awareness, Um, which it's just just the phrase forced

self awareness. It does make me think of all the places you one might encounter mirrors where one does not want to encounter mirrors, you know, because clearly you want a mirror when you go to a restroom. You that that is the established place that you want to check in on your appearance. But there are other places where I find I personally would rather go mirror less. One example,

I guess, would be like a waiting room. If I'm just waiting around, I don't want to encounter mirrors because mirrors not only can give you a self awareness you're not comfortable with, they can lead, I don't know if you've encountered this show, to this weird situation where you might find yourself staring at other people in ways that you might not normally stare at them because you're doing it through the mirror. M You know this is funny.

I almost brought this up in our queuing episode because there is a famous anecdote from the history of q design where I don't remember all the details now, but I think it was like people waiting for an elevator

in a very busy building. Um, they were unhappy with their wait times and the person who was designing the building said, Hey, I think we can solve this problem, not by speeding up the wait times, but just by putting a big mirror in the room where everybody's waiting, and that will solve the problem of boredom, because people will be very interested in looking at their own reflections

while they wait for the elevator. And allegedly, according to this sort of this tale about about queuing, uh, this did solve the problem because people are, you know, now they're obsessed looking at themselves in the mirror. They're no longer boared the way it just breezes by and they're no longer complaining. I think I ended up not talking about that because I couldn't verify that the story was

actually true. It's one of those possibly Apocryphal Tales, but but this is sort of the the site of what you're saying here, that you know, the people behind the story at least, are like hey, people are gonna love

to look at themselves in a mirror in a waiting room. Well, and I would say the other area where I tend to not want to encounter mirrors would be an exercise environment, particularly a yoga environment, because on one hand you do encounter mirrors a lot of times, sometimes a whole wall of mirrors in a Yoga Studio, and of course that that sort of thing can be very helpful if you're wanting to see what you look like in a pose, like how straight is my arm? Well, a mirror allows

you to find out. But on the other hand, for me, and I think for a lot of people like one of the reasons you do you engage in yoga is to sort of become the mirror. You know you you don't want to. You know you want to be in your body, you want to think about the poses that you're doing, but you don't want to necessarily engage with this kind of egoic self by looking at your appearance, because that kind of can bring you back around into

the very sort of thinking you're trying to overcome. Yeah, ironically, looking in a mirror seems like one of the worst possible things to do if you're trying to become the mirror in the Taoist sense. Yeah, but again with Yoga. It's kind of a mixed you can see it both ways because, yes, it can be very helpful in a physical sense, but maybe not so much in a mental sense. I don't know. You can also make an argument that

it's something. It would help you, I guess, overcome uh, that kind of thinking as well, if you're forced to uh, to be in the presence of your own reflection, but not obsess about it, I guess. But coming back to that idea of forced self awareness in psychology, there are a ton of psychological studies, uh, that have just tried to see if people's behavior changes when there's a big mirror in the room with them, if when they can

see their own reflection. And you know, you can think, for pretty understandable reasons, that this might be the case. It's a reasonable thing to test out because, for example, people tend to behave differently when they're being watched as opposed to when they're not being watched. So might assume

people would behave differently when they can see themselves. Yeah, yeah, so one of these studies that I was looking at was in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology back in I believe, by McRae Bodenhausen and milne, and they found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes,

stereotypes concerning, for example, sex, race or religion. Okay, so the idea there might be, you know, if this finding holds up, you might interpret it to mean that people who can see their own reflection or sort of more self conscious about the more the ethics of their own behavior and are less likely to do something that they might be ashamed about just because the you know, the

mirror reflection creates a kind of self consciousness. Yeah, I think the idea would be the difference between like setting there having stereotypical thoughts and then setting there seeing yourself and on some level going hey, there, I am having stereotypical thoughts. Right, it invites you to sort of judge yourself and correct yourself. So there's a funny wrinkle that I was reading about in a New York Times article from two thousand and eight by Natalie Angier that mentions

the same study by mccrae at all. But so it's in the context of Engineer's writing about a number of studies along these lines that sort of forced self awareness by way of a mirror can cause people to behave differently,

and often in positive ways. So so angier points out research that has found subjects in a room with a mirror are more likely to quote, work harder, be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non mirrored settings. But the funny detail about the mccrae at all finding was, again yes, that that people in a room with a mirror, in the presence of a mirror, seemed to be less

likely to rely on stereotypes. And they found this was true about negative stereotypes, about things like sex, race and religion, but not for all types of stereotypes. So, to quote from the article, 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.

And I thought that was funny because maybe the idea there is that when people say something like Oh, all politicians are liars or all lawyers or Crooks. That is something that people maybe are less likely to feel ashamed about doing and more likely to feel self righteous about doing so. It actually makes you more likely to do that kind of thing. Oh it's been like, look at me, setting there dropping truth bombs in my head about politics.

So that's funny. Does a mirror make you more self righteous? Uh, this is just a little anecdote, but I wonder. Well, I mean that would fall the right in line with the UH you know, with with the with the idea of ego being bound up in the reflection and uh you know, reflective contemplation of self, Um, and and even the myth, the myth of narcissus becoming just entranced by

his own reflection. There's another thing I want to talk about, another one of the ways that mirrors have played a major role in scientific research, and this is the so called mirror self recognition test, and this has come up on the show a couple of times before, but I

just thought it would be interesting to revisit briefly. So this is sometimes presented as a test to see if animals possess consciousness like we have, you know, self conscious awareness, and though I don't have any reason to doubt that at least some types of animals have something analogous to human consciousness. We don't know, but it seems like a

reasonable assumption to me. I'm not convinced that consciousness is really what these studies demonstrate, but they do demonstrate something interesting. Maybe it's better to call the mirror self recognition test a test for self awareness or something like that. So the setup is pretty simple. You take an animal and you put a mark somewhere on its body so that it can't see the mark naturally and it's not aware

that you've put it there. So an example might be that you put a yellow dot on an animal's forehead or on its throat while it's under general anesthesia, so it doesn't know that you've put it there and it can't see it unless it looks in a mirror. And then you give that animal access to a mirror. Now, most animals don't react in a particularly notable way to mirrors, except unless they're they're reacting to their image in a

mirror as if it were another animal. But some animals, especially after they've been exposed to mirrors for extended periods, presumably to learn how they work. They start to respond with behaviors indicating that they may actually understand that the reflection in the mirror is an image of themselves, of

their own body. So in the case of putting a yellow dot on their forehead or on their their throat, they will reach up and touch themselves in the spot where the yellow dot is or try to groom themselves on that spot, which requires a different kind of consciousness. That's you know that that an animal, you could presume, would not do that unless they had some kind of inkling that this image on the mirror was actually their

own body. Yeah, and it's again when we approach mirrors with this uh, you know, less everyday understanding and we try and we lean into what's actually going on, it is pretty remarkable because it means, it would mean, that that animal has on some level an understanding of the

virtual world. It's funny that you say that because that same New York Times article by Angier, it quotes one researcher, I can't remember the name, but somebody, who says that in a way mirrors were the first virtual reality, and I like that metaphor. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because we often like what we doing when we uh, we're looking at ourselves in the mirror, you know, just the normal stuff like, you know, getting ready to leave the house or something.

We're moving around, we're causing our reflected self to move around, we are we are, you know, controlling our avatar in the mirror world. It's just very responsive. Usually, let's you have one of those roles, you know those, uh, those cheaply made mirrors, and then you can make it a little bit of active. And then how about when you go and get your hair cut and you get that that wonderful the two mirror trick, when you have to look at the back of your head? That thing just

I'm I'm stupid. That thing just breaks my brain. I can never figure out how to make two mirrors work to look at the back of my head. I keep moving them around and I just can't see it. How about when the barber, the hairstylis holds it behind your head? I guess they've got experience, I don't know, but anyway. So, coming back to the mirror self recognition test, as as used on animals as a test for whatever this this x factor is consciousness or self awareness or psycho somatic

representational consciousness whatever you would call it. One of the first big studies on this was by a researcher named Gordon G Gallop, and it was called chimpanzees self recognition, published in the journal Science in the year nineteen seventy, and I'll just read the abstract. It's very short quote. After prolonged exposure to their reflected images and mirrors, chimpanzees marked with red dye showed evidence of being able to recognize their own reflections. Monkeys did not appear to have

this capacity. So he was comparing different species here, right, different species of primates. On one hand you've got a great ape, the chimpanzee, but then you've also got a number of different monkey species. The monkeys used in the study were reesus monkeys, stump tailed macaques and something called Cino mulgus monkeys, which had never heard of before. But these are also known as crab eating macaques. CINOMALGUS is does that mean crab eating? Maybe Um? weirdly enough, I

believe I'm looking this up. I believe it actually means dog milk, having to do with some erroneous claim that that these monkeys were capable of milking female dots Oki Doki. You know, you learn something new every day anyway. So

coming back to the study by Gallop. So the chimpanzees who had experience with mirrors, uh, they were able to reach for the red dot on themselves when they saw it in the mirror, but the monkeys did not do the same, and this would again seem to indicate that the chimpanzees had the ability to learn over time that the animal they're seeing in the mirror is themselves, while the monkeys don't usually have this capacity. Uh. And so the Red Dye helps provide a clear point of comparison

that you can test on command between different species. But in fact Gallup reported that you you didn't actually need the die test to observe that chimpanzees could adapt to the presence of a mirror and understand what it was, because you could observe spontaneous behaviors that were pretty interesting.

So Um Gallup reported with his small group of chimpanzees that when he first introduced a mirror to their enclosure, for the first few days the chimpanzees would react to the mirror as if another animal had been introduced to the area. So Gallup called this a social stimulus reaction and it would produce behaviors like bobbing, threatening, vocalizing. It was like there's there's another animal that's roughly like me in here and I need to, you know, figure out

what his steel is. One of the things that's that has always interested me about mirror tests is that among animals that that are known to have failed the mirror test, you do see that distinction, like, for instance, with cats. Sometimes they react with hostility towards the reflection, but other times it's just straight up indifference. I witnessed this the other day. I was actually putting a rather large mirror on the wall of our house and I had it

had it leaned up against the couch there. The cat came over and checked it out and, you know, she just kind of looked in. It didn't seem that interested, and then she found the instruction booklet for the Mirror and sat on it and that was her complete interaction with this new mirror. So, you know, it's it's like Oh, I oh, they're like it's it seems like there's such a there's such a gap between those two different possible reactions, though, that this is a thing that I must attack and

put in its place, or that it's just nothing at all. Yeah, I have always noticed. Now, I know sometimes dogs will react to a mirror and bark at it, but that's never been my experience in real life. Dogs I've always known to be utterly it's like they can't even see the mirror, you know, no reaction at all to their reflection. Um, and I wonder if that has to do with just, you know, the different sense world the dog lives in, and we've talked about many times. I mean, I don't

I don't know this. I'm just wondering maybe if another, if the image of another dog is not a come a need by some kind of dog smell, it doesn't even really register as a dog. Yeah, that I think that that makes a lot of sense because, yes, we discussed before, dogs live in just an entirely different a smell, realm than human beings and and likewise, Um, you know, cats are are so based, you know, so much of

their perception is based on their hearing. If it doesn't, if it doesn't sound like a cat, could it possibly be a cat? If it doesn't smell like another dog, then what is it? Is it even real? Yeah, but I don't know. I mean maybe that's something that. Hey, if you know about good research on the subjects and send it our way. I always want to know about dogs and their level of self awareness. I mean because the REVERB, because what is what are you doing? When

you show a mirror to an animal like this? You're giving them a oftentimes near perfect visual version of another animal. Uh and yeah, the dog might not care about that. The cat might not care about that. But what if you bring something in it smells like another dog, what have you? Play the sound effect of a mewing kitten on a on a good speaker in your house. I think you'll find that you'll get totally different reactions from

these animals. Oh Yeah, so my dog, who does not care about reflections and mirrors at all, will go absolutely nuts if we say, bring in an object from another house that a dog lives in. This unleash is a storm of sniffing and interest and in this item. Oh, but sorry. Anyway, coming back to to the Gallop study, so I mentioned that when a mirror is first put into the enclosure, at least as Gallop reported in in the chimpanzees that he was working with, when the mirror

first went into the enclosure. They would at first react as if it was another animal. You know, they would try to threaten it, they might Um do displays at

it or make vocalizations at it. But these social type reactions decreased rapidly over the course of two or three days and by like day four or five they were just not doing this anymore and the social reactions over the course of a few days tended to be replaced with behaviors that Um that were directed toward the self and which Gallop took as evidence of understanding that the

chimpanzees were interacting with representations of their own bodies. So to read from gallops report quote, such self directed responding took the form of grooming parts of the body which would otherwise be virtually inaccessible without the Mirror, picking bits of food from between the teeth while watching the mirror image, visually guided manipulation of the anal genital areas by means of the Mirror, picking extraneous material from the nose by

inspecting the reflected image, making faces at the Mirror, blowing bubbles and manipulating food wads with the lips by watching the reflection. In all instances of self directed behavior, the self is the referent through the reflection, whereas in cases of social behavior the reflection is the referent. So once they've been exposed to a mirror for a few days, the chimpanzees would start performing all kinds of exploratory and

grooming behaviors with respect to their own bodies, which is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's very difficult to try and put ourselves in the mind of a chimpanzee, Um, but but on a human law like, imagine if you had had no access to mirrors and then you were given one, like it would, it would really just, you know, open open a gateway into a new realm of self awareness

and self grooming. Yeah, so, as Gallup reported, in this study at least the chimpanzees passed the mirror self self recognition test and the monkeys did not, the recess monkeys and the macaques did not. But since then a number of studies have found other animals, to quote, pass versions of the mirror self recognition test. Uh, though, again I want to emphasize there is debate about some of these findings and again, debate about the best ways to interpret them.

So I do find these studies really interesting, but I would say interpret them with caution. Yeah, yeah, it's I think a lot of times, just the idea of the mirror test is is sort of engage with, you know, kind of simplistically, at least by you know, not non scientists and general public sort of thing. Uh. And Yeah, you do see plenty of articles that question the the usefulness of, say, trying to get an octopus to look

in the mirror. Right, but with all those caveats. Some of the examples of animals that have, in some way or another, been interpreted to have passed the mirror self recognition test? Uh. These would include other great apes, so animals like guerrillas and Orangutans and, I think Binobo's to

some extent, elephants, some corvids, but not others. Definitely Magpies have, in some studies, or at least one study, been found to try to groom a spot on their body where a dot of die has been placed, and also perhaps some dolphins. I think of his bottle nose dolphins, though their behaviors are harder to interpret than the behaviors of animals that can groom themselves with beaks or hands or trunk you know, I haven't read anything recently about Dolphin Cognition.

I'd love to come back to dolphins and and really go in at great depth, but I guess one question that comes to mind is, in an underwater environment, to what extent was is a dolphin going to encounter a reflection of itself? Would you would it be able to encounter a reflection of itself at the surface of the water? Uh, from the submerged side? I don't know. I don't know the answer because some of these other animals, it seems

like you could, you know, perhaps simplistically ask the question. Well, wouldn't they occasionally encounter reflections of themselves in the water? You know, wouldn't they have? Wouldn't they encounter that stimuli in the natural world under the right conditions? Yeah, maybe, I don't know. Or maybe I don't know. Maybe when you go to a still pool of water and you're an orangutan or something, you're you're just thirsty and you're just getting the water real fast. You don't stop and look.

Who knows? Yeah, I I know it is. It's particularly weird when you think about humans in their mirrors, about how we inflict them on the World Uh, you know, we don't think about this a lot. We don't think. Well, I don't really put a lot of mirrors outside, but of course you have traffic mirrors and every vehicle that we put out there on the street they have at least two mirrors on the outside of the vehicle. So just the other day I was watching a bird. I'm

almost positive it was not a corvette. It was, but it kept coming landing right next to the Automobile Mirror, looking at itself and then flying up and then flying back down and then flying up then flying back down to the mirror. And it did this on a loop for like, Um, you know, like two or three dozen times. I wonder if it was interpreting the reflection as a as a strange bird, as another animal. Yeah, perhaps. So.

Just one last note. So as far as I can tell it seems that dogs do not generally pass the mirror self recognition test, but I was reading an article on NPR from years ago. Is from like two thousand eleven, I think. Um, that was talking about one researcher who was proposing an alternate uh, an alternate version of the

mirror self recognition test for a dog. That would involve smells rather than reflection, which is a little bit different, because the smell would have to be like, you know, the smell of something produced by the body, like the smell of its own urine or something like that. Uh, and this raises interesting questions about like what is the boundary of the self for something like a dog? Is the smell of its own urine in a way itself for distinguishable as something that is produced by the body

but not co extensive with the body? Interesting, Rob, rob what's that magic I feel? What's that strange sensation in the air? Is that the fairy king of a four part series coming down to bless this episode with with, with the extended life of going on into yet one more part? I think it is. Yes, Um and I realized at this point we're we're definitely in the hall

of Mirrors. Uh, it's it's you know, we're so far into the topic we may not be able to determine how much further we have to go and how far we have in fact come, but we will be back for at least one more mirror episode. I know we have some more stuff to talk about concerning will metal mirrors. For starters, we haven't really uh discussed them at length yet, and we also have some more about mirrors in as they're as they are used in, or invoked in technological

metaphors in in some other cultures around the world. So there's there's a lot more to discuss and perhaps, uh, if there, if you get to us in time, you might be able to ask hey, how about this, and maybe we can even include it into the next episode.

I'm not sure the time will work perfectly on that, but certainly if you're listening to these episodes and you have thoughts about your own interactions with mirrors, your pets and their interactions with mirrors, cultural ideas concerning mirrors, all of it is on the table. Ryan, let us know what you're thinking and in the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of stuff to blow your mind, how on over to the stuff to blow your mind

podcast feed. That is where you will find our episodes, our core episodes, published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a little bit of a listener mail which we do on Mondays. On Wednesdays we do the artifact unless it has been uh preempted by an advertisement of some sort, and then on Fridays we do Weird House cinema. That's our time to talk about a strange movie, and on the weekends we do where we run 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 a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact that stuff to blow your mind, dot com stuff to blow your mind is production of I heart radio. For more podcasts for my heart radio, visit the IHEART radio APP, apple podcasts or wherever you listening to your favorite shows. Doesn't Matt Four Point Four Po