Through the Looking Glass

don't believe those rumors. I dressed myself all right now like strange people in the night, like sneak in, dress you and make sure you have your clothes on the

slightly wrong. Whatever you've heard it not true. But yes, recently I have gazed into the looking glass, because we do it all the time, right, We surround ourselves with mirrors, and from from a very early age, we encounter them, we get used to them, and eventually we die in many cases, in a in a room with a mirror, or or with a mirror right next door into this little a little bathroom in the hotel room where we finally pass away, this this portal, into this strange uncanny

ocular world. Were you just imagining Elvis in the bathroom? Yeah, well you can. You can look at it that way. You can imagine Elvis, um, you know, sadly passing away there. But then what if what have the reflected Elvis is just standing up watching you know. Well, that's the whole thing, right, And that's for an entirely different episode, But right, This idea of reflective surfaces in us peering into them has

been around for a long time. In fact, if you look at the myth of Narcissus, you will be met with this idea of this beautiful boy who cannot stop staring at himself in the mirror, and he chooses to die by the side of a reflecting pond rather um, instead of leaving his beloved himself behind. That is how attached he is to that image staring back at him. The obsession with the mirror, obsession with one's own reflection

in the mirror. Just just as much as we are we are at times horrified by reflections or or adverse to to looking in the mirror. Um and and and I just I think back to some of my earlier opportunities to peer into different mirrors, particularly I remember going to like sears somewhere with my mom, like way too much, because those trips seemed always seem to take for average. You know, you're going to buy trainers for you or your sisters, and they would have this little, uh, this

this little area with three mirrors. You know, there's like the one in front of you, and there two to the sides, ideally so that you can stand in your your new outfit or potentially what's going to be your new outfit, and twirl around and see what you're wearing

from different advantage points. But those three mirrors also create this kind of mirror world because if you if you get close enough, especially as a child and you have your board out of your mind because you're surrounded by clothes, you get close enough to the mirror and you can look in and you see the reflection the other mirror, and you see this sort of endless cascade of mirrors, just endless use, endless use, or endless sort of half glimpse glimpses of you, and you feel like if you

could just sort of stick your head into the mirror, you might be able to see down this hallway of mirrors into infinity. So there's always this we're I just I remember all these opportunities to look into a mirror and getting just a sense of there's something uncanny about it, there's something strange about the mirror, and you can't help but let your imagination run wild or feel just a

little odd gazing into one. I like that example because so often we think of mirrors just reflecting back reality, but in fact, mirrors are really sort of a distorted reality. Our perception is distorted, and in some ways mirror adds mirrors out of this idea of these delusions that we hold about ourselves. Yes, I mean that's the key. Mirrors

are truth and illusion wound up into one. And I think even though on the surface we really fall into the the eventual, everyday reality of saying, hey, that's me in the mirror. That's me, that's the real that's totally the side that I part my hair on, even though everyone else is going to see it reverse. But deep down there's something in us that knows that that's not right.

That's that's signaling at least one remaining flashing button on the on the cognitive panel is going off saying there's something uncanny going here, and I think that's why the countless tales of strange creatures in the mirror mirrors that tell the future or or reveal of secrets in the past, why they resonate so strongly with us. And if you go to stuftable your mind dot com, I wrote a little list article called twelve Terrifying fictional mirrors that runs

through a few interesting examples of this. Yeah, so check that out. But I think you're right. There's this idea that mirrors are capturing this sort of self awareness, this reality. And in fact, there's that mirror cognition test that many scientists will use with animals. In fact, we know that guerillas, we know that chimps, Banobo's dolphins, Asian elephants, they all passed that self awareness test in a mirror. In other words, you can put markings on them and they will examine

those markets. They will recognize themselves in that mirror, and sometimes they will even inspect the inside of their mouth as if like do I have something in my teeth, The look up their noses, and sometimes they will even check out their genitals. Well there you go. Where where can I Where can I go from there? From an ape looking at its own genitals in the mirror. UM A safe place. That's safe place. Well let's let's let's flee into the past for a moment. Then just a

quick rundown on the history of mirrors. UM. Again, we have always from a very early age just lost in prehistory. You know, humans gazed into the reflective surface of some water and we're able to see their own reflection. I mean, that's just that, just that just happened, and who knows when it did. But humans started making simple mirrors probably around six BC. Uh. They use polished obsidian as a

reflective surface. Uh. Later on we started using things like copper, bronze, silver, gold, and even lad But of course all of this involves very very heavy mirrors, you know, and they have to be very small because you're making it out of obsidian or a gold or silver. UM. Contemporary mirrors didn't come

into being into the late Middle Ages. But even then there were problems with their manufacture because you're using glass, and the sand used for glass making contained all these different impurities, and so it was hard to produce a really clear glass based mirror. Uh. And and also the shock caused by the heat of adding molten metal for backing that glass almost always broke the glass. So we you know, Middle Ages, we knew how to make a mirror,

but we didn't quite have all the techniques down. It wasn't until the Renaissance, when the Florentines admitted a process for making low temperature lead backing that modern mirrors really hit the scene. Um. And for the longest it was all about just looking at yourself. There wasn't It wasn't a lot of real, uh, you know, scientific opportunity with the mirror. But of course, eventually around the sixteen sixties,

scientists started realizing we can you utilize and telescopes. Uh. And the modern mirror, by the way, is made by silvering or spraying a thin layer of silver or aluminum onto the back of a sheet of glass. And most mirrors are made today by heating aluminum in a vacuum, which then bonds to the cooler glass. So that's the basics how we started making mirrors and how we make

mirrors today. Yeah, and they became far more portable. Um. Now, let's talk about light interacting with the surface of a mirror. When a photon a packet of light hits a mirror, it's absorbed by one of the atoms in the mirror, and this causes electrons in the atom to vibrate and give off an identical photon of light, the one that you perceive in your eye yourself right, So your I

see these reflected photons as a mirror image. The mirror image is reversed, which you can easily see if you stand in front of a mirror with a shirt with words on it. Right. Yes, and again that the parting of the hair thing, you know, you always you sort of grow to thank you part your hair on one side of your your head perhaps, but you're actually doing

it on the other. Yeah. But in the case of the words you have the words on the you're appearing backwards in the mirror, and it is not right to left. That has been reversed. The image has been reversed from front to back. Now, this is a squirrelly concept, right, because you're looking in the mirror, you see your right hand up. Um, it looks as though it's right to right. It just looks like it's been left to right reversed.

But Richard Kinneman has an interesting idea about this, and he says, think about looking into the mirror, putting your right hand up and it facing east. Okay, we're on this parallel plane with the mirror. If you look at yourself in the mirror, your nose, the nose you're touching yourself, is pointing north, but the nose that's being reflected back to you is pointing south. And he's saying that this

is that front to back concept. And you and I were talking about this earlier and actually um doing some yoga in the aisles of our office to try to get to the bottom of this concept. Because the reversal situation also comes into play in a yoga class because you know, it varies depending on who your yoga teacher isn't how they do it, but a lot of the time the yoga teacher will be facing you like a mirror, like a mirror, and they're going to do the reverse

of whatever you're doing. So if we're lifting our left leg in the class, he or she is going to lift their right leg because it's going because the right leg is going to lift on the same side. Uh as far as the room is concerned, as as our other legs. So right there, front to back. Yeah, they're correcting for the reversal. It's so they're they're front to

back to you like a mirror. If it were left to right, they would turn around right and then you would be looking at their backside and they would be mirroring you from from from uh left to right in that way. So I don't know if it's still kind of a squarely concept people. That helps another way I was thinking about it, um, a pane of glass with writing printed on it, you know, you walk around to the other side of it and in it's reverse. Yeah, they I guess that's a good example, all right. So

that's some some mirror basics there. Um. As you mentioned, mirrors can be curved to focus light, so boom, you've got telescopes, You've got all sorts of uses of mirrors. But it turns out that mirrors can actually be used in therapy as well. Yes, and this is where things start getting getting an early trippy to think about, you know. And it also gets back into that uncanny world that we discussed earlier. You guys, you're looking in the mirror.

Something's not quite right, and it twists our perception of reality, uh in a way that we take for granted, but in a way that becomes far more substantial when we're dealing with the treatment of phantom limb syndrome. Yeah, because mirror therapy has been used in phantom limbs syndrome, also chronic pain and post stroke paralysis. And the reason that it's used is that reflected images of patients limbs or other body parts trick the brain into healing itself. Now,

think about this. The majority of people who have phantom limb um or excuse me, who have a limb ampute, hated or the nerve supply removed report experiencing some kind of phantom limb and pain, but only some report persistent

phantom limb pain, which is apparently excruciating pain. Yeah, I've heard some accounts of it are kind of kind of like they you know, you feel that that missing limb as if it's there, but as if it is, say, cramped up, like you need a move it, you need to reposition it, but it's not actually there, so you can't. It's like an itch that can never be scratched because the place of the itch only exist in the circuitry

of your mind at this point. Now, in the New England Journal of Medicine, Jack Zow and neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center described the phenomenon, and he said that researchers randomly assigned twenty two lower limb amputees with phantom limb pain to one of three groups. Now, one group had mirror movements, and patients watched the reflected image of their intact foot in a mirror while they moved both feet simultaneously, or so it felt like they were

moving both of them simultaneously. Right, So, using one of these these mirror boxes, you end up with the when you call it an illusion even that that you're watching yourself move the missing limb. Yeah, and there's a video of this. It's it's extraordinary. They just put the mirror there and it really does look as though the patient has both limbs intact moving it around, and the reporting that it feels like it is there. It's it's bolstering all of those ideas they have in their head about

this uniformity. I should add that the mirror box technique was invented by vs vs Ramaschandre, who've we've actually mentioned at least several times before in the past. This podcast does a lot of interesting work, but if you do just a quick Google search for for mirror therapy or mirror box, etcetera, you'll find his website that has a lot of resources about this this particular branch of therapy. Now,

the second group, they had a covered mirror movement. In other words, atients perform the same movements, but the mirror was covered so they did not see a moving limb. The third group was imagined movements, so they mentally pictured moving the phantom foot with their eyes closed. So what happened? Okay? They had the patients performed this fifteen minutes a day and they recorded the number, duration, and intensity of pain episodes.

After four weeks, there were two key findings. First, pain decreased significantly in all six patients who were doing the mirror movements. Second, three out of six patients in the covered mirror movements group and four out of six patients in the imagined movements group got worse and not better.

And some of this, Zal says, is that, um, it could be that these movements when you see them in the mirror, could be calming down the nerve signals in the phantom limb, or it could be replacing what he calls the bad memories of that limb, and in a nutshell, it's kind of like the visual component of this is helping to modulate that pain. Yeah, I was reading that in many cases, what you're dealing with is a situation where before the limb was amputated, there was a period

of paralysis. So in a sense, it's kind of like it's the echo of the final sensations from that limb and uh and then like you say, creating a new memory for that limb, one of movement instead of one of of paralysis. Yeah. And there's there's all sorts of things going on here. So there's there's some evidence that mirror therapy really does help. There needs to be more studies, but there's an idea that mirror neurons are a part

of this. There's also an idea that your brain is conflicted because what it feels and what it sees are completely different and it doesn't really know how to process that information. Um, But as I said, mirror therapy seems to be helpful in these situations. All Right, we'll hold on. We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to discuss more about the mirror and the person in the mirror watching. All right, we are back the next scenario we are going to paint for you.

I think it's so interesting to me because again, it's one of those simple subconscious things going on. You hang a mirror in a room, You ask people to do things, you observe them, and does just the act of this mirror hanging in the room reflecting back their image change how they behave Okay, it's an interesting concept. First, I think we should get one thing out of the way for the paranoid listeners who might be wondering, is this a two way mirror behind which there's a cabal of

secret observers watching our every movement? Uh? No, are you sure? I'm sure, because well, this is a little trick. If you're ever in a room and you're thinking, I want you're thinking to yourself, I wonder if there's a secret cabal of observers on the other side of that mirror. Turn the light off in the room if possible, or you know, break some light bulbs, whatever it takes, because if you darken the room you're in, then you will be able to see through the two way mirror into

the observer's room. Because that's how the whole situation works with two way mirrors, Yeah, to a mirrors that they don't have a coat of paint on the back of them. And what they do is they manipulate light. So in the room in which you are being observed, the lights are are really really high, and so more of that light is reflecting onto the person who's being observed. If you're in the dark room and you're the detective, well

of course the lights are down low. But if you turn the lights down low in the other room ha ha, you can see through to the evil cabal on the other side. Yeah, and break the Panopticon in that sense.

But what we're talking about here is just a normal mirror on the wall, and it actually is kind of akin to the Panopticon situation, where uh, in the Panopicon situation, it's the fear that someone is watching us, the belief that someone might be watching what we're doing, and therefore we have to perform, uh, we have to perform better, We have to perform with more honesty less to someone

find a stout. But we've talked about this before. When people are made self aware, they sort of change their behavior if they think that they're uh consciously entering into some sort of contract or I guess in this case it's more subconsciously. But let's get to the nuts and bolts here. We are talking about the Journal of Personality and Social Social Psychology and uh Neil McCrae, Gallen V. Bodenhausen,

and Alan B. Milnai. They found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about for example, sex, race, or religion. And Bowden Housen said, when people are made to be self aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they're doing. A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot towards more desirable ways of behaving. So it's kind of interesting.

It's this this physical self reflection encouraging philosophical self reflection. And we've talked about this before. In terms of empathy with another person, you are less likely to judge that other person if you feel a connection, If you are projecting the image of yourself or having some sort of self reflection, it makes you dwell a little bit more about the person that you're considering because there I am in the mirror, and there are the other people conceivably

in the mirror as well. I am maybe seeing myself from from this third person vantage point to a certain extent here, I am just another person amid all these people. And also, just to get back down to the existential none of it all there, I am who is that guy there is? And uh, yeah, you can see where that would just really throw your brain for for a loop there. Philosophically speaking, Yeah, you can't know yourself until you know others. Right, I'm looking at the man in

the mirror. I'm hoping that he'll change his way. Do you see a man in the mirror? Um looking? That's right, it does. It does bring up an interesting observation, though. We have no mirrors in our office place, and I wonder if that is by design, because clearly our our office is impeccably designed, but with the open floor plan and all you know, you know, I say that, but

I now that I remember. I believe we used to have a coworker who kept a mirror on their desk so they could keep an eye on people moving behind them, standing behind them. That sounds more like a how stuff works in in thing, Yeah, which is which is interesting kind of almost a magical use of mirrors, using the mirror as a protective uh instrument, And you see that a lot in the in folklore mythology, the idea that

the that the mirror just is. There are plenty of stories about mirrors that are magical and cursed and awful and gay ways to other realms. There's also the idea that there's something pure about the mirror, that it reveals the soul, the truth. Yeah, it can help you spot or spot the absence that that that lets you perceive

vampires and then all that sort of stuff. I think this idea of a coworker having a mirror to look at others is interesting because it kind of loops into this idea of the Venus effect, because you could if you're just passing by, I think that person was looking at themselves. And this placed directly into this idea of the famous paintings of the goddess Venus looking into a

small mirror. And if you were to look at these paintings, you would have seem assume that Venus is admiring her own face because you see her face in the mirror. But that's your viewpoint, which is different from hers. If you can see her in the mirror, then she would

see you in the mirror. Right. This is interesting. You can really go down the rabbit hole looking up images, I mean looking at paintings of people looking in mirrors, because in some cases you get you have a situation like with these various Venus images, where again they're looking in a mirror, but the reflection that you see is looking right at you, which means that she, he or she is not looking at themselves. They are looking at

the painter, at the viewer of the painting. However, you want to get into that gray area of observer versus art. But but then you look at other works and and

you'll find the that they'll actually have it right. I was looking at a number of works by Norman Rockwell, who I tend to take for granted as an artist because Norman Rockwell is not really my thing, and and it's he's you know, he's been so mainstream, such a slice of pie Americana, you kind of forget that, Hey, this guy really was a talented artist, and he has a number of images that involved mirrors, including that that

the famous self portrait where he is looking there. It's just like a triple self portrait, because you see he has his back turn to you and he's looking in the mirror at himself as he paints an image of himself. Sadly, he's wearing glasses that obscure his eyes, so he can't

really tell if the venus effect is in play. And I wonder if that is why, because he wanted to avoid that conundrum of where should he where where is he looking in this this strange triple self portrait or he's just painting us that way, right, But anyway, you see plenty of him and he I think he has another one of a of a little girl looking into the mirror, and in this one she's definitely looking at her own reflection, and you really get into the venus effect.

It's well in movies because what happens when you point a camera at an actor looking in a mirror, Well, you have to be careful to avoid having the camera in the mirror that the actor is looking into. You want, uh the the film to show an actor looking at his or her own face, So you get into all sorts of weird angles that potentially don't match up with

optical reality. Well, an optical reality is the thing here, and that's what the venus effect points to, is this idea that we really cannot fuss out ourselves that well in the mirror in terms of actual dimensions. Yeah, that's why the venus effect, or or any kind of like filmmaking shenanigans does. It tends not to throw us out of the experience because we ultimately, by and large don't have a good grasp on the ocular reality. We don't really understand how mirrors work. We just kind of gloss

over their uncanny nature. Yeah, And to exemplify this, Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues have talked to scores of people about their perception in the mirror, and they've conducted a number of studies and what they found is that people think, like if if you ask them the question, imagine you're standing in front of a bathroom mirror, how big do you think the image of

your face is on the surface? And or if you ask them the question, um, what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step backward away from the class. So think about those for a second, Like, the the answer seems to be obvious, right, how big is my face in the mirror. It's the size of my face because it's my reflection, right, Yeah, And that's

pretty much what people answered. And then as for the second question about moving away from the mirror, they say, well, of course, the size of my image will shrink with each step. Not so, this is not true. If you outline your face on a mirror, it will be exactly half the size of your real face, and if you step back, the size of the outline won't change. It

will remain half the size of your image. And people fail to understand that the image on the surface of the mirror is half the size of the observer because a mirror is always halfway between the observer and the image that appears inside the mirror. Exactly like if you think back to the old Mark's Brother gag and duck Suit, it doesn't matter if you haven't seen duck Suit. I'm

sure most of you have not. You still know the gag because it's it keeps repeating itself in countless pieces of media where someone thinks they're looking into a mirror but they're not. It's just an empty frame and there's someone pretending to be them on the other side, matching their movements precisely, and generally the ruse will last for just a few seconds until one of the the reflective people out maneuvers the other one does an unexpected movement.

The mimic can't mimic. And that's exactly what happened this morning in my about from you for the person who dressed me. You need to get real mirrors instead of just empty frames. But anyway, if there's someone standing on the other side of that fake mirror impersonating you, they're going to be as far away from the mirror as you are, so they're gonna be half your size. Now, there are some actual processing errors in people who have

mirror or agnosia. Now, this is a condition where people lose their sense of reflection, and you sometimes see this in stroke patients who have had damage to their brains. They might have right parietal lesions, and these cases the patient still have um intact the knowledge about mirrors right. Um, they can describe what they do and how they work, but they can't seem to put it into practice or to really figure out their bodies in in in time

and space. For example, if you have a patient stand in front of a mirror and the researcher holds a pen over the patient's left shoulder and ask him or her to reach for it. Well, most people would just reach backwards, right, You just put your hand up and reach backwards and get it. But people with mirror agnosia, they will reach forwards and actually bang their hand into the glass because they don't the depth and the perception is all off. Well, I know, there's also something known

as mirrord self misidentification and clinical psychology. A two thousand one study from the Choir Center for Cognitive Science looked at two dementia patients. The two individuals could no longer recognize their own faces in the mirror, but they had no problem recognized that the faces of others in reflection. It turns out both individuals suffered from right side brain lesions, the portion of the brain particularly associated with self facial

recognition and even the use of self describing adjectives. So a couple of ways that there can be uh, something a little off in uh the architecture of the brain that affects the way that we interact with that uncanny reflection. Now, so that's all about distortion um and all the ways

in which we might get these images wrong. But I thought it would be interesting just to flip this around the mirror image and think back to Vermeer, because it's this great documentary that's actually already out called Tim's Vermeer, and this inventor set out to try to figure out how Vermier could create such photo realistic depictions with his paintbrush in an era that was two hundred years before

the camera was invented. And it comes down to mirrors, which is and I won't go deeply into this, but here you have someone who has created this machine with two mirrors two make this painting. This image has photo realistic because what we see with our you know, three D rich world around us always getting flattened by you know, two D on our retinas. Um. So, a little interesting

documentary if you want to check it out. Yeah, it's a it's directed by Teller of Penn and Teller and uh and I've heard about it a few months back and sort of made a mental note to check it out, and then somehow lost that that mental note. But but yeah, it looks. It looks musty because it's it appears to examine not only the question of how does this, How did this great artist create this work? But also just sort of the nature of art and Nate and how we we protect our ideas of how art is created.

And also personal obsession, like because it seems like the the the the Texan individual who really set out to try and replicate the process of creating these these these works of art. He has a very obsessive mind. And uh, and you really want to examine it for the length of the documentary. Oh yeah, I mean he I think he worked ten years on this. He even recreated the room. But um that Vermier used he used the same kind of paints. Yeah, paints that would have existed back in

the day. He's traveling to see of Amir's work in person. Yes, that he gets the Queen to show him that exact painting up close, so he can really get Hugh right

when it comes to the color. And he's asking kind of dangerous questions at least as far as the artistic community is concerned, because a lot of people don't want the you know, to to to face the possibility that someone like Vermier would have used the best available technology of the time to help create it, because on some level it's kind of like saying, oh, well, this artist, we thought they were a great painter, but they really

were a great painter who also use photoshop. Like there's something poisonous about that idea to us, even though it doesn't necessarily make sense. Yeah, actually, because people think of it as painting by numbers, that you just get this guy right and and he makes the same machine and um and using the same technique. A guy who is an unskilled artist is able to replicate a masterpiece by

using this technique. And we actually could probably do a whole episode on this, because there are some people who are weighing in and saying, well, that's not a big deal, because there are some trained artists that don't use the gimmick, that don't use the machine, and they can make pretty much exact replicas of Vermeer's work just with with their

naked eye. And it seems to me ultimately the situation though, is that it's it's it's always about the artist at the center, no matter what kind of technology they're using. But you see the same argument in various me dams.

For instance, in music, like I've seen threads where people were talking about electronic music and they're saying, well, the you know, the genius that say, you know, an early X twin album is not not going to be replicators or an APEX twin album doesn't mean the same thing anymore because supposedly anybody can create that because the technology is there. But that doesn't really hold up because it's

ultimately it's not about the tools. It's about the artist. Yes, and that artist is replicated in the mirror right many many times over and over again in different ways, smaller, bigger dimensions. All right, Before we go to listener mail, I just want to read just a quick excerpt from the poem of Mirrors by your Hey Lewis Borges. He says, I see them as infinite elemental executioners of an ancient pact to multiply the world, like the act of the

getting Sleepless bringing doom. They prolong this hollow, unstable world in their dizzy spider's web. Sometimes in the afternoon they are blurred by the breath of a man who is not dead. So there you go. There's more to that poem, and I recommend you go check it out and do a Google search for Mirrors by your Hey Lewis borees. Alright, let's read a couple of emails here. We have one from Amber and it's about outsourcing memory that we just covered,

and she says, hey, guys, I loved this topic. I listened to you guys at work while I complete all my tasks via data entry in some shape and form. Anyways, I found this so fascinating because I thought of all the things I used to rely on for outsourcing my memory. Everywhere I go, I always have my phone. It's actually funny because when someone in my group of friends asked a questions, no one seems to look it up. I am a Google fiend and always have to find an

answer right then and there. It's strange how if we think the information will be stored, we don't memorize it. For instance, I use an app for my workout routines, and if I didn't have it, I'd be lost, Whereas my husband goes and just does whatever, remembers his own routines and talk about blast from the past. Lately, there's been a craze and I've joined it via an app called time Hop. This app will go back one to three four years on your Facebook and say what you

posted on that day. So of course I don't remember how I felt last year today, but now I can just pull it up and see what was going on in my life at that time. Anyway, I think he's always putting out such a great information and keeping my mind sharp throughout my daily grind. Sincerely, Amber, Huh. Now that that was interesting because we talked about this idea

of revisiting yourself in your states throughout the history of you. Right, so if you go back on your timeline four years ago, that's just sort of the beginnings of how you can begin to construct that memory. Yeah, because there are all these slightly different views that spread all the way back through time. I've been thinking about this a lot, probably more than I should, in response to this craze on Facebook. I'm sure you've seen it where they're all these which

X Man character are you? Which soda are you? And now even which how stuff podcaster are you? Have you taken this yet? Yeah? Yeah, who'd you get me? It was weird like that, but but it made me because I took it, and I you know, when I answered truthfully, I got myself. And even when I just kind of answered semi truthfully, I ended up getting myself for some reason. But ultimately it's such a hollow question, like because you have to ask yourself which you are you. There's no

unified you. They are all these different yews, and the idea that there's a centralized self is just a complete illusion. So the mirrors of you, I mean, because you are somewhat like some other people in the office taste wise, right, so you would have that reflected back. I'm just not going to stout for the whole mirror thing. All right. Well, I have a a few bits of listener mail here to run through a quick all right, This one comes

to us from Fernando. Fernando says, hello, Julian Robert. I was listening to your podcast episode A Musical time Machine for the Brain, and it got me thinking, what if time and space is like a music record, and everything that has happened is happening and will ever happen exists on the same plane. Our human perception would be the needle that is only able to process the data, uh literally, giving us the illusion of the beginning and an end.

I can't recall if I've heard this idea before, but I know it helped me understand the concept of nonlinear time. Love the show and keep up the great work. Well, yes, that idea, um that I've heard that almost exact um analogy before, particularly with a DVD. The idea that time that our our existence, our life is a movie on a DVD in time space is the DVD the physical DVD itself. There's no beginning or end. Everything has always happened,

but our perception of it happening is the enigma. I love the DVD idea because it's all there waiting for you to dip into it. Max tech Mark, I believe was the individual we can at least partially attribute that to. But yeah, essentially that's what's happening alright. One more bit of listener mail, um Eric write, since it says Julie talked about going to sleep with basil in her mouth, this is a very bad idea due to choking has

so please don't do it. We like Julie on the podcast and we would be sad if you couldn't do it for some reason like being dead. Julie, explain yourself. Thank you, um Eric. I don't remember that the what we were talking about specifically, but something about I don't know. Oh, I think we're talking about having some self yes, lucid dreaming yes. And we were talking about the ability to to lose a dream taste, and I said, maybe if I put basil under my tongue or something that that

would trigger that. But you don't do this. I did. The person who dresses me plucked it out just in time. So um, I'm fine, Eric, Thank you for writing in though. All right, Okay, so hey, you wanna get in touch with us, you wanna wrap with us about mirrors. We would love to hear from you. Your experience is looking to mirrors and in the mirrors, you're any uncanny uh ideas that have come to you about mirrors, about the nature of mirrors, your favorite weird mirrors from from folk tales,

horror movies and what have you. Let us know about all those. You can find us as all ways at the mother Ship Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Also, you gotta check this out, guys. Robert has an awesome new series coming out Monsters Monster Science, I think is what we're calling it, and you can find that on

Mind Stuff Show on YouTube exactly. And I'm not going to give a whole lot here away, but I do want to just add here that Robert is wearing a fine turtle neck in this Yes, yes, we we purchased a turtleneck especially for this production, so hopefully it'll be a hit. Um, you know, monsters the Science of Monsters. If you like my blog series Monster of the Week, and it's kind of that in video form with some tunanigan thrown and so yes, so check it out. Check

that out. We'll have all we'll have a little bit of a teaser. It'll go up this week. So yeah, check that out. Check out our various social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus. You'll find all those links at stuff to Blow your mind dot com and as always, you can reach us via email. Yeah, so, if you have some thoughts that you would like send to us, please do send them to blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, stick at how Stuff Works dot com.