Doppelgängers: Hey you, you're me!

we'll see you in February. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should Know. The day after Labor Day edition, which Chuck loves. Uh. Yeah, you know, Emily show me that article all that informed part of this episode the other day. Yeah, and we'll get to it. But I started looking at this photographer's doppelganger photo series. Yeah,

and boy, some of those are crazy similar. Yeah. What about the two bears with their shirts off? Yeah, those guys struck me as extremely close, the two women with the bangs and the black tank tops looked like identical twins. To me. I could not tell them apart. Yeah, I feel like we shouldn't tease anybody anymore. There's a guy and like you said, we'll get to him, um in a little bit, but or he'll figure in in a little bit, I should say. But he's a Montreal I guess.

The quebec Qua photographer Francois Brunel, And for twenty years he's been assembling pictures of doppel gangers, people who already knew they had a doppelganger and wrote in Doppelgangers. He's looked for and found on the street and he brings them together are into a studio and photographs them together. But he does some like really cool stuff with it. It's not just like here you stand here and you

stand next to him. The way that he poses them and dresses him and everything like it creates like a sense of intimacy between them. It makes you think you're looking at identical twin photos. Yeah, I mean, you know some of them people favor one another, and then when you have them styled to look alike and postal like that, informs what you're seeing. But a handful of them, it was they look so much like identical twins that it's just it's weird to think that you could walk down

the street one day and someone who looks exactly like you. Yeah, and I mean like that is got to be pretty eerie. And luckily one of the great things about social media is that people can post their random encounters. You've got a phone with camera on it, You've got access to social media through that phone. You can just snap a picture of you and your doppelganger, post it to the internet and let everyone go crazy. And that does happen, it seems like from time to time. But this dude's

whole jam it's called them. I'm not a look alike the exclamation point. It sounds like a Disney movie from the sixties or something. Um, but that's that's a Francois Brunel's twenty Years series. Yeah, and not just hey, Chuck, you look like every tubby guy with a beard and glasses. It's like, that's that's lazy. I think when you're in the public eye, people tend to do things like that to say, Okay, you look like all of these people Um,

we're talking like real lookalikes. Um, which I you know, I think I've gotten a couple here and there over the years that that I was like, Okay, I could see that for sure, But um, doppel gangers are different. Yeah. So doppelganger, if you haven't just surmised already, it's a German word at its origin, and um, it's not one of those really clever German words. It really just means double goer, or a different interpretation is double walker. And

it's not some super old like like medieval word. It was actually coined at the end of the eighteenth entry by um an author named Jean Paul, which is an unlikely German name if you ask me. But he wrote a book called The sieben Cuss. Yeah, sieben Cuss, I nailed it, um. And that book was about a man who had a doppel ganger. Right, yeah, I think John Paul's hiding something with that name. I do think he's actually a double I think there's a dousel Doworf at

the end or something that he left off, right. Uh. Yeah, so he wrote about it in that novel. But um, as Olivia is keen to point out, Livia helped us with this one. The uh, he sort of mixes up the words when he was actually talking about a look alike human. He used the word with a T doupled ganga, but did use the word doppelganger in there as a

as a meal with two courses being served together. So I don't know if things just got a little confused or people thought it was just fine to drop the T, but double ganger became the eventual word that we use for, you know, a non related look alike, and that's I don't know if we pointed that out. The obvious thing here is that you're not not related to these people

at all. Yeah. And the other thing about a um doppel gangers again, like you said, it's not like, oh, you bear a passing resemblance or you favor one another, like you're as close to the person's double body double as you can get in. The closer you are, the more of a doppel ganger you are, basically. But um, but John Paul I can't say his name any other way. Um, he coined those terms, so it's funny that he kind of got it wrong. Everybody else is like, no, we're

gonna drop the T, like you said. But the fact that he coined the term doppel ganger doesn't mean he invented the concept. It's actually a much older concept that just didn't have the same name that we use now. Um. Apparently there's a longstanding um superstition in England in Germany dating back I think to the medieval age, maybe before Chuck, where if you saw your doppel ganger three times it meant you were about to die. And that's still I

think people still kind of believe that one. Yeah, And that's I mean, there are all kinds of old pieces of folklore and just about every country you can explore that has some sort of and it's usually not if you find your doppelganger then you know good luck will come your way. It always seems like it's some kind of uh, spooky negative thing will happen, whether you see them three times or whether. I mean, there was one I think in the North mythology where a spirit appears.

This one's just a little weird. It appears just like you, but it it beat to you to wherever you're going. So if you're traveling on a journey, your doppelganger would beat you there, and people think that you would have arrived earlier. I don't know if that's the solves tardiness for the North mythology, but that one's not super evil, but it's usually, especially when you get into literature, Uh, some sort of know evil force or evil twin that's

coming along to wreck things for you. Yeah, and that Norse one that arrives, I just want to put a button on that because I did a little research it. Um it's called the bard Dooger. And the reason I know how to pronounce this because I looked up with the oh with the slash is pronounced like and it's the same thing as oh with the oom wount. I didn't know that before, did you. Yeah, well you might be a little more of a metal fan of me. It's cool looking, just like the Umlaut. Super cool. I

think it's cooler than the Umlaut. It's got like a slash through it, you know, like take that oh, whereas the Umlauts, Like, I'm adorning this. Oh it's a little different all right. Uh. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called William Wilson. Uh. It's sort of like I mentioned before about you know, evil things happening. A narrator meets a boy at school. Uh, and this one had the same name. I'm presuming William Wilson, otherwise it be a weird title. And this boy, though, only speaks in a whisper.

So it seems like all through literature it's always some sort of a creepy, shadowy figure. Yeah. There's also Dustoyevsky um put kind of a spin on it where he introduced a doppel ganger to the main character in a novel called or novella I think called The Double, and I love this. In it, the doppel ganger is like a more likable version of the main character and ends up breaking the main character character mentally, which I could

totally see that. You know, like if this this impostor comes along or this other version of you comes along and people are like a lot more. Yeah, it reminds me. Have you seen that Paul Rudd show Living with Yourself? I don't know how it escaped, but they did a season of it in two thousand nineteen. Didn't follow up on it, but he plays himself and his doppel ganger too great comedic effect, but it's also like really fascinating

and interesting. It's a really great show. It's on Netflix. Well, that's the other thing, and we'll talk about some more in history. But of course with t V, oftentimes it's flipped to a more fun thing and it's played for laughs, whether you know. I don't think Three's Company had a doppelganger episode, but it wouldn't surprise me because it can be played for a sort of mixed identity hijinks as well, totally like a one where Mr Furley was into Jack

but it was really his doppelganger. Yeah, and I mean it would probably be like its twin brother who came to visit in that case. But this still counts an unknown twin still in the cannon counts as a doppel ganger, do you think, well, yeah, I think so. Al Right, well he just negated what I said that they're not related. But well, okay, that's true. Once you find out. Here's the thing that this actually proves your point, Chuck. Once the characters find out, oh it's a twin, mystery solved,

no longer a doppelganger. It becomes a twin. But up to that point, when they're like crossing paths with one another and never in the same room at the same time, doppel ganger, Yes, exactly. But for really doesn't have a brother or does why is he acting so weird? Uh? There have been some true historical figures over the years that bought into this stuff. Um Abraham Lincoln. Uh, he and his wife, they had all kinds of kind of interesting beliefs. It was the age of spiritualism, Yeah, for sure,

So you have to take that consideration, I think. But um, Lincoln supposedly saw his image three times I think in the mirror in eighteen sixty which, uh, what was his wife's name, Mary Todd? Mary Todd. Mary Todd said, uh, you know you're gonna serve two terms as president and that's what that means, but you're gonna die before the end of the second term. And he said, well good night here. But see, I take issue with some with some of these listed historically because they're more ghostly specters

than real human doppelganger. So John Dunn's um story is strictly by location. I would not call it a doppelganger one where he saw his wife a few times while he was in Paris and she was back in England and she was actually ill and their child had died. By location doesn't count. But Percy by Shelley, he saw his doppelganger and died a few weeks later in a sailing accident. That I would say that one counts in

the lore. And then Catherine the Greates was pretty good too, right, Yeah, And I think Percy By Shelley's doppelganger had a T shirt on and said I'd rather be sailing made it even weirder. No, he had his T shirt said no plates because that was his third third choice. Who was the other one? Catherine the Great? Yeah, this was a real one to actually um Supposedly there was a servant right who discovered a double like that somehow got in there, fake their way in there and was sitting on the throne.

So this was a case where someone was I don't think trying to, like, you know, realistically take over as queen, but at least got in there and it's like I'm gonna sit on the throne and I got past the guards because I look like you. Yeah. I also saw it interpreted as like phantasma gork too, like it didn't happen, know that it was like a phantom or adopt like a supernatural adopted doppelganger, rather than like a double or something like that. Again, not a real doppelganger to me.

And then my favorite one of all time. I've known this one since I was a kid, back when I was into the Time Life mysteries books, because I think that's where I first read it. But the German poet and philosopher good To. One of the reasons I like

this anecdote is because I love saying Gertz's name. He um was writing one time from Alsace to I want to say Dusseldorf, but I think that's wrong, but it works, right, I mean, sure, it's the name of that author, and he passed himself on the road and the other his

doppelganger was wearing some gray outfit or whatever. And then like eight years later he was on his way from Dusseldorf to Alsace going the other way, and he realized he was wearing that same outfit that his doppelganger have been wearing eight years before, and he was like, this is pretty awesome. And that was a Time Life books thing. Yeah, I remember it very well. Yeah, that sounds about right.

I didn't know how to say good It's his name at the time, though, so I was like, this really weird thing happened to goth all right, maybe we should take a little break now that we've sort of given some past examples of what may or may not be doppelgangers, and we'll talk about real doppelgangers, real life humans walking around that looked like you right after this. All right, so we mentioned, uh, the photographer um France Wis Brunell, who's been doing this project. It's called I'm Not a

look Alike. Where they where he takes pictures of these people. I'm sorry, there's an exclamation point at the end of that. Yeah, I'm not a look alike. I encourage people to go check this out when they're in a safe space and you're like not driving or whatever, to look at some of these photos because it's it's amazing. I mean some of them, like I said, look to my eye, like identical twins or the other two sort of um gentlemen probably in their sixties with a little mustache. Did you

see those guys, the shirtless ones. No, the picture I saw, they had on like little uh, sort of like newsboy caps. I don't know if I saw those guys. They look I mean, they look like identical twins and um those are the ones that This is the article that Emily sent me where it talked about that project, and then it got into a really interesting study because if you think, well,

you know, what is a doppelganger? I've always since I was a kid, I've always sort of um realize that there are only so many facial combinations you can have. And with the amount of we talked about this over the years in the show too, like over the years and through history especially, seems to happen. If you're looking through like yearbooks from like the forties and fifties and sixties, you'll like see people that look like people you know,

are like yourself. They're just only so many ways you can rearrange a face until you're bound at some point to get someone who maybe favor somebody a little bit or even more, or to the point where they look just alike. Uh. And so you might think, well, what does that have to say about what's going on inside?

Is there any anything to d n A And they looked into that, right, Yeah, I guess Brunel's work caught the attention of UM A researcher named Manel Estellor from Spain from the Careers Leukemia Research Institute who said, I want to try to figure this out, and these people are like a perfect population sample. So he took I think thirty two pairs of doppelgangers, ran them through three different facial recognition programs, and half of them I guess sixteen of the pairs. As far as the a I

was concerned in the programs, they were identical twins. That's what the AI took them for and all three programs, right. So they took those people and they analyzed their genomes and they found actually, these people have a lot of similar genes and even though they're not related. That was another part of the study. They went through and made sure that these people weren't like there was some unknown

relation that they had to one another. They didn't. They were as genetically unrelated as two random strangers would be on the street. But they shared some some very similar genes and some key places, especially like facial construction. Yeah, and they were also uh. And again this doesn't like less than the study any to me, but they were

generally from the same country or the same ethnic background. Um. Although I did see UH gender varied because there was one where it was a man and a woman who looked a lot alike uh in those photos that they put together there, which is pretty interesting. But they looked into how they matched up, uh, I think with their microbiome epigenetically, which is basically how your behaviors in your environment is going to affect your genes, and then just

your straight up genome. And what they found out was they did share a lot of what are called SNPs single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are the variations in our DNA that create most of the genetic genetic variation that people have with one another. So they shared, uh a lot of them. And I wish we would have gotten like the raw numbers, because all it says is like, you know, they shared many s and p s, whereas I'd like to see sort of the actual data, which I couldn't

get to. Um. But what they did find was that epigenetically and with their microbiomes, they were basically random, so it was only genetically that they shared something. Well yeah, and they said, well, actually, I think this is probably what accounts for a lot of the differences in identical twins. Like people look at identical twins and they're like, oh, you're identical, But if you really start to look at them closely. You're like, actually, there's a lot more differences

than you'd think between them. And even though they share the same genes, I think of the same d n A. What makes identical twins slightly different is in their epigenome. And this this study basically found the same thing with applegangers. They can share a lot of similar genes that that give them the same facial traits or builds or um. I think even habits. They found a lot of them, Like if one smoke, the other was likely to smoke.

You know, they carried their weight about the same way. Um. But they found that that, Like you said that the differences were found in their epigenome, and I don't know if I know they tested it, but I didn't see that their microbio might have provided some differences to It's basically nature versus nurture, or more to the point, it's like nature and nurture working together to make us slightly different,

even when we're basically bad owned to look the same genetically. Yeah, I think the microbiome was the same as the epigenetic finding, which was I think the quote was that generally wasn't any closer than two randos. That's what they said in the paper. Randos they did, they did. I'm trying to find real quick the data the number of s MPs um. I can't find it that quick. There's a lot of numbers and weird like like capital C, lower case P, capital G. I'm like, I don't know what that is,

but I will tell you this. I looked up those those older guys in the news caps. They are spitting image. And not only are they spinning image of one another, they're spinning image of the Lennox air conditioning man look exactly like that guy down to the hat. Well. I guess if that guy ever, you know, leaves the earth and they got two backups, I mean, what's it called when you get three doppel gangers together? A tropic ganger?

I guess. So what I'd be curious to see is if and maybe I'll look more just for my own funzies into uh, the photographer's project, because what I'm curious about is if these like, how these people get along, and if they like formed friendships, if they liked each other, if they had similar interests. You know, that's that's pretty fascinating to me. I think so too, and again like that's that's the kind of stuff They can take a

really a real turn. I guess depending on how you were raised or even like you know, or you're raising your power lines. Great, that means you're into baseball cards. That kind of thing, um that we just haven't put our finger on yet, but it does seem like, you know, it's becoming clear and clear. It's not just genetics, it's not just epigenetics. It's it's all that stuff put together. And it seems like so wildly unattainable that information, um,

because it's so complicated. There's so many variables and so many factors. But if you step back and think about it, there's a finite number of variables and factors, as many as it seems to us, it's a finite number. It's not infinite, which means someday we could conceivably get a grasp on exactly what makes a person them, which I find really exciting. You know, it would be funny as if they really got along and they were like, oh my god, we have so many similarities. We look just alike.

This is such a weird thing. And they were having lunch and one of them was like boy, what a shame that Hilary lost their right and the other one by unveils and make America Great again t shirt or some chops there. Fork. They just get up in part ways silently. Yeah, that would be the best case scenario, I think. Yeah. Uh so this study, um, this next one kind of irritates me a little bit. It was

from and I think was well intentioned. But there was an Australian biologists name Tegan Lucas who looked at got off to a great start, looked at four thousand faces from the u US and throw uh Anthropometric Survey database, which is something the U. S Army puts together. And Ta Tigan Lucas is listening now, She's like, oh, he

got off to a great start on the US Anthropometric Survey. Chuck. Well, I think Teagan Lucas overachieved because what they did was looked across eight facial features and calculated the like, the chances that you look just like someone else's one in a trillion. I see these pictures of these doppelgangers. I'm like, there's just no way because I'm looking at the evidence and it turns out that Teagan really got into like measuring the millimeter of a nostril and stuff like that,

and the comparison it was just too identical. Like I think with identical twins you wouldn't get that close. No, But I think that's what she was going for, is like, you know, would it be possible for two identical people to be walking around? And one of the applications of her research is if we're creating facial recognition systems, which

we done an episode on before. It was pretty eerie if I remember correctly, But if we're creating these things, if we're building cute computers to recognize people's faces, are there going to be any kind of like false positives out there? Because there's two people out there who are that similar, and the chances are really low unless we just keep going population wise, and even with the number of people out today, I frankly don't think it's that low of a chance that there are two people who

are identical across eight measures of your face. And she wouldn't she wouldn't reveal what the eight measures were because apparently her work was that like groundbreaking that they She's like, I can't let anybody know what to what to hide or disguise. But those. The point is it's eight different dimensions, and like you said, I think like nostril with ear length, that kind of stuff down to the millimeter, and she found that it's like a one in a trillion chance

that there are two people walking around like that. The thing is, there's eight billion people on the planet, and that's means there's no doppelgangers. It's not well, it's not close to a trillion, but it's not as far off from a trillion. Is like if there were two people on the planet. So if you have two people on the planet and a one into trillion chance that they're gonna look alike, the chance that they're going to look

like is basically nothing. But as you get closer to a trillion, there's a really good chance that there are going to be two people walking around that are identical. And we're at eight millions, so we're at I think a one in a hundred and twenty five chance that today on Earth there are two people who look exactly alike across those eight measures. The point is for you and me to just be looking at stuff. We don't

need those eight measures to be exactly right. If they're close enough, that's when people look like doppelgangers to you and me, but we're not artificial intelligence. We're sentient beings. Well, yeah, we're artificial, and I think we're intelligent, but we're not those two things together. Are we artificial? Sure? I just want to druin freak people out a little bit. Okay. The Josh bott in the Chuck butter Hard at work

here does not compute. Well, I think we What we're arriving at is a point that we've failed to make earlier, which is there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes adoppel ganger. Like how I like, do you have to look to someone to say you're a doppel ganger? Right? You know, like I look like the guy I look like the bass player for Jason Isabel in the four Unit,

But is he my doppel ganger? Probably not? Okay. So one of the reasons why I think people would kind of look at you and then the bass player for Jason Isabel and the four Unit sure, um, and put you guys together and said, oh, they really look alike is because we use like shortcuts when we're looking at at people's faces or even just people in general. So let's say you're both wearing the same hat and the

same you both have a similar beard, I'm guessing. Yeah, I don't want to name him because I don't want to just keep calling that because I love that group. His name is Jimbo Heart. And when you look at a picture of Jimbo Heart, he knows a great name to like, look him up. He's got the beard. He's you know, when I'm reading, I got on my black room glasses. I like to wear my hats these days, my you know, various sort of cowboy hats and Fedora's sure. Yeah,

I mean the guy looks like me. Okay, so if you put you guys together, you both want the same glasses, You've got a beard, got hats on, and all that stuff. People would be like spitting image. Take the glasses off, shave the beard, take the hat off, and then put you guys together. How close would you really be? And probably not that close. I can tell you I can

see him without a beard, and he's not nearly as close. Okay, Right, so there you go, Like we make these shortcuts with our face with our minds um to just kind of as like kind of a shorthand for like, oh that's Chuck, I don't have to analyze them anymore because that uses up a lot of brain power and energy, and I'm kind of low on carbs today, so I just know that that's Chuck where it really turned out to be Jimbo Heart the basis for the unit that's right, Uh, right,

And you know you've seen this and here's a good example of how this can play tricks on people. Uh, And this is just one example. A lot of people have done that kind of fun thing where you switch out a face on someone and put it on someone else, and it's like it should be obvious, but it's like

it just looks like a weird, uncanny version of that person. Uh. The one that Livia picked out was from M I T when they put George Bush's face on Dick Cheney's head and Bill Clinton's face on al. Gore said that dates the creation of that particular meme or whatever it was. Uh, the Dick Cheney one looks like you gotta look a bunch of times before you realize that's George Bush's face. Um the al or when I mean it's so clearly

that's it's just kind of funny looking. But the Bush Cheney swap actually kind of worked in that I guess goes to sort of prove that you look at things like hair and uh, stuff like that as you know that big Clinton mop for that big Al Gore mop that he had, or Cheny's bald head and that's a big clue. Yeah. And also like the I think one of the foundations of the swap is that it can't

be like an egregious change. Like if you remember back to I think it was Conan that used to put Steve Bushemy eyes on different celebrities and see what they look like. That's an agreed just change, it's not going to work. But it was Dick Cheney and George Bush's eyes look similar enough that if you put George Bush's eyes on Dick Cheney's face, You're not really going to notice because it's not that agreed just have a changed.

And there was a study i think from seven Swinging Groovy study and it basically tried to figure out how people register face is in what order and they found that first we look at the eyes, then we look at the mouth, and then we look at the nose, and those are the things we kind of take in.

But there's other research and I think This is also kind of like supported by the same study, Like when you look at someone's face, you don't go all right, let me see the eyes, got that, let me see the mouth, look at that and then the right right, Oh, I want to kill that person. No, like we just look at the whole thing, look at the whole package.

Which is why it's so easy for us to overlook differences between even identical twins or doppelgangers and make people look closer together than they are, because our brains are lazy and fat. That's right. And it also depends on as far as whether you might look like someone about you know, it just sort of makes sense if you look and it's hard to say that someone's average looking.

But what we mean by that is, and Livia points out, as you know, you're not six ft nine and have flaming red hair and freckles, like those things will make you very much stand out. Whereas if you live in a population of you know, Middle Georgia and you you know, you're a little tubby, you've got a beard, you've got dark hair, uh, and you dress a certain way, then

you might look like a lot of people. Sure, And um, that actually raises a recent um internet sensation, a guy named Neil Douglas UM was I think flying to Ireland on a Ryanair flight and uh went to get in his seat and saw that there was somebody sitting in his seat, and the person looked up and it was his doppel gang. I mean, isn't that even more bizarre? Like it wasn't in like the back of the plane, like this guy was in his seat, which makes it

even more eerie. And so they snapped a selfie and like posted it and every everyone just went bonkers because these guys had no idea who the other one was and weren't related, but they looked a lot like each other. But there's this BBC article that covered it where they basically said, okay, but let's really stop and think about this. That's amazing and the fact that he was in his in the other guy's seat is even more amazing. But how how unlikely is it that these two, you know,

we're on the same plane. And they figured out that based on a number of different factors like the hair, the face, the beard, the nose, um I think the brown eyes. That there's something like maybe eighty thousand people walking around out there that looked just like them essentially. Ye,

that's a lot of people. It is a lot of people that look essentially like those two enough that that the internet would go crazy if you put two of them together and said these two are strangers and they just met, uh and and posted a picture of it. It was a pretty fun picture because they're so delighted

clearly with seeing each other. And then another guy. There's a triple picture somewhere too of another guy that was like, hey, I'm one of those seventy four thousand, and they put all three of them close to each other and they looked pretty similar. Um. The one sort of difference here is and height is one of the dudes was five evan the other was six three. Because there's other pictures of them out drinking together in Island, I guess they

kind of hung out and stuff, which is great. Well, I read they kept running into each other and finally, okay, let's go get a pint together, Like they were at the same hotel and like they kept running into one another, so they went with it. See, if you believe in like weird fate or intervention, you might wonder if like maybe I should give some thought to what This means, like, am I supposed to do something special with this person? Right?

If the movie Serendipity with John Cusack really spoke to you, I don't. I never even saw that. You mentioned that movie a lot. What happened in the movie great. I don't want to spoil it from anybody. Was there a doubelganger? No, okay, but it was. It was they kept running into one another and like it just kind of was, Oh, it's just the chance of true love, over and over. It was a good movie. Okay. Then they go to some ice cream shop in New York, famous ice cream shop.

I don't remember that. I think you're talking about Midnight Cowboy. Yeah, that's right. Um, let's go get some ice creams. That was a great John voch Um there was. There was another one that came along recently too, that I think is even better than than the other one. There's a dude named Sean mccartel who was hanging around a pool in Vegas and his double, Chuck. Just look it up, Sean mccartel doppelganger. His double happened to be floating along

in the same pool wearing the exact same glasses. Apparently they were the only two people at the pool wearing glasses, not sunglasses, but glasses. Glasses, the same glasses, same hat. They actually do have like the same build and same height and everything. They are the spinning one another and they were just randomly in the same pool in Las Vegas at the same time. So funny. Yeah, I think my first thought would be, like, what kind of crimes can we commit? Well, yeah, the bank mm hmm, that's

my first thought. That's terrible. We're just kidding. Um, are we do for another break? Yeah? Or should we wait? Think? So, yeah, let's take a break. All right, We'll take a break

and come back and sort this all out. So one of the reasons they think, chuck that um, we have like a propensity to notice doppelgangers and also just be just crazed by them is that we are really really good at picking out faces, so good in fact, that we have a region of our brain that it's starting to become clear is is intended exclusively for seeing faces.

And that actually bucks the current trend of understanding with neuroscience where different parts of the brain get recruited to kind of specialize in different things from since re input over time you put a lot of sound in one part of the brain, it's gonna be like, all right, fine, I'll handle sound from now on. Um. This it seems you're born with this ability to recognize faces. Uh. The regions called the fusiform gyrus, and they've done some really

interesting studies about it. And I think we should actually do an entire episode on the fusiform gyrus and face face blindness, Hubba, and can you tell them hot? I'm all about it because this one experiment is something I would actually like to do. Um. It's pretty freaky. They got people in a room, they gave them a mild electric current straight to the fusiform gyrus. Isn't that right? And they said, you know, we're gonna do this and just look at me and tell me what you see.

And basically they shape shifted in front of their very face when they gave them this electrical stimulation, so it changed their person reception of what they look like. It didn't change their height or weight, or their clothing or their skin color or anything like that, but it sounds like it literally in their own perception at least transformed what their face looked liked, which has got to be

really weird. Yeah, oh man, I can't imagine seeing that, especially you're seeing while you're undergoing open brain surgery and you're conscious. And then they started messing with parts of it. Right. There was a follow up study too that I find

just even more fascinating. They recruited some participants who were blind from birth, so they've never seen human face ever with their eyes, and they gave them, um, they put them in an m r I and they gave them models of like three D models of faces and had them rubbed the faces, and the fusiform gyrus lit up, so like it is strictly for faces. They also they were like, okay, well maybe it's just you know, it's

it's it's for other things too. They gave them three D models of cubes and other stuffs that that weren't faces. Nothing happened in the fusiform gyros. So we have a place in the brain that's strictly for recognizing faces. And I think that's probably why we can pick out doppelgangers so easily, because our our brains are kind of a tune to look for faces everywhere. Yeah, and you know, if you're thinking this might be like I mentioned, committing

a crime sort of been passing. But if you think this could be a big problem as far as the advent uh and more widespread use of facial recognition AI, especially with CCTV and trying to catch bad people doing bad things. Uh. And we've talked about this in the past on I think a couple of different episodes. But that stuff works okay, but it doesn't work great with dark skin, it doesn't work great for people of color, um,

black people, Asian people. It gets confused a lot. And this is already Uh, you know, people have been wrongly

imprisoned because facial recognition AI has a mistake. Yeah, there's a one guy is recently's two thousand nineteen from New Jersey, UM named Nigier Parks, and he had to end up spending five grand to defend himself, spent I think, uh, twenty days in jail, possibly because he was accused or I guess AI facial recognition system accused him of shoplifting and then trying to hit a police officer with his car and um, it turns out he'd been thirty miles away,

but he had been misidentified by this And I think in our episode we talked about this at length, that facial recognition systems are really good at recognizing white men's faces, but other people, it just starts to go down and down until you get to the point where a black woman's faces forty times likelier to come up with a false positive than a light skinned man. And apparently it's just the data that they're trained on. They just said, let's just give them photos of white men and I'm

sure it'll be fine, and it just hasn't been fine. Well, I mean, that's one of the problems with it all. This is just it's just working from a database. So it's not like it can take a face and find someone just somewhere on planet Earth, like you gotta be on a database somehow, right. But I'm saying the AI is trained on photos, and it comes to understand a face is a face based on the photos that it's

trained on. And I guess they didn't select enough, um, people of photos of people of color, photos of women. I don't know why, but it seems like they got really good at white men because they were given more photos of white men. That's that's how I take it. Yeah, No, that's how I took it to So Chuck. If let's say that you are a doppelganger of somebody, somebody famous like Madonna or Johnny Depp or Rizzo. Let's say Rizzo to just to get the kids involved. Um no, Lizzo.

I was like, uh good, I was thinking back to Ratso Rizzo. I think, Um, so, if you're a doppel ganger of Lizzas, what would you do with that talent? Well, uh, you could go hang out on Hollywood Boulevard and your man's Chinese theater makes some money walking around charging five dollars a picture. You could get employed full time with an agency, um to you know, get sent out. If someone wants uh Bill Gates at their party and you are a look alike, then you can go to their

party and make a couple of hundred bucks probably probably. Um. You could also work on movies. Apparently there's lots of jobs for you. Yeah, I mean this one is Um it's less face like when your body doubling someone or photo doubling or standing in kind of in that order, or did I get that wrong? Stand in is least

important that you actually look like someone. But you should be the same size as somebody because they're they're lighting you for camera and stuff like that, like you can't you know, um, the rock can't have a body double or or a standing that looks like me. You know. I don't know if you were one of those like

ripped T shirts all right and get away with it. Uh. But you know, if you do look like a celebrity and you want to get work as a photo double, then that certainly doesn't hurt if you look like them in the face, but it's more body size and skin

tone and stuff like that is more important. But the places where it really kind of comes in handy if you really look like the person in the face and the build and the hair and the mustache and all that is to um serve as like a decoy, a political decoy, because throughout history, the more hated you are, either within your country or internationally or both, the more you need more than probably one political decoys, which is essentially somebody is saying like, yeah, I look like you,

all go do the boring stuff, but also risk my life because somebody might assassinate you at some point. Yeah, And I get the sense in some of these that it's a little less like I look like you would like to do this then Kim Jong Un says, hey, you guys, come with me. You're gonna double me. Now, this is your new job, because he is of course, has been listed as having body doubles, UM to the point where there's been speculation fueled about whether or not

he was sick in the hospital or actually dead. Um. Sodom Hussein had a bunch of decoys. They made a movie called The Devil's Double about a man that was his son's double. Um day, and they made a I meant to see it actually look kind of good, but that was out inn It was called the Double's Double, and Latif yahia Um basically spoke out a lot afterwards that like, I was Udi Hussein's double, and he was a very bad guy, so it was not probably the

best job. Um. Apparently Stalin had at least four doubles. And then this one is amazing to me. There was a British general named Bernard Montgomery and he hired a double by the name of Emmy Clifton James great name. He was Australian, and he posed as Bernard Montgomery and went around I would guess Europe um talking about Allied plans in the hopes that like his his plans would be or that the talks would be overheard by German spies.

And the plans, of course were fake Um and they were meant to serve as a decoy er distraction for the Nazis, and they think that possibly had an influence on the storming of Normandy. That's pretty cool. There's there's a movie in there somewhere, or at least a scene. It's surely easily they could have thrown it in his bonus material in the Operation Mincemeat movie. You know, did you see that? Yeah? Was it good? I liked our episode better, but yes, it was. It was. It was

a fine It was a fine movie. And I need to check that out. I saw one recently. I just want It has nothing to do with anything but Um. It's a five part series in Swedish about the assassination of Um, their prime minister in Olaf Palma, and it is really fascinating because they think that one of the main witnesses was actually the assassin and they kind of recreate how it would have happened and they dive into his life. It's really really good. It's worth watching. I

think that's on Netflix too. By the way, I don't work for Netflix. Um, do you got anything else? I got nothing else that's doppelgangers, then, everybody, I hope you enjoyed this one. I sure did. I know chucked it. And if you want to know more about doppelgangers, you can start searching on the internet and there's a lot of cool posts from social media people meeting their doppelgangers that will just knock your socks off. And since I

said that, of course it's time for listener mail. Uh. This is in response to the Kissing Cousins episod zode from a friend from the Ashkenazi Jewish community. I've got point two percent Ashkenazi and me. Oh yeah, I also have some and Neanderthal too. All right, hey, guys, just listen to the episode Kissing Cousins. I am from an insular Ashkenazi Jewish community. I'm sure you understand this. Being insular makes the gene pool that much smaller. We also

tend to marry younger than the rest of the Western world. Thus, and pretty much every high school in our community we do genetic testing for recessive genes for defects or serious illnesses common in Ashkenazi Jews. We don't get the results to the tests, only an I D number. A big part of our culture is being set up by matchmakers before meeting for the first time. Both families will call the screening center with our I D number and be told of it's safe for them to go ahead with

the matchmaking. It's amazing it is. I met my current partner on my own and we decided we were ready to settle down. It was a little scarier to call and see if we were compatible, but because we had already decided we wanted to be together. Can you imagine that? Yeah? No, I mean, I bet that was pretty nerve racking. Uh. The call was more to see if we need to speak to a geneticist before having children than to see if we should get together for the first time at all.

But thankfully we were good to go. Uh. Separately, I had a close friend whose husband passed away a few years ago. She had the option of marrying her brother in law, remember we talked about that in the episode, which she had no interest in doing. She did to take a pair of his shoes though, and spit on them rather than him, so that part of the old test is kind of still kept in some places. Uh. And of course I'm not speaking for all Oshka Nazi,

choose only what I see in my community. I just thought you might be interested to know how a group is trying to keep tradition while staying safe enough to date with science in the twenty one century. Uh. And this is a lovely sign off here, wishing you the strength to continue for a long time coming nice. And that's from Elkie. Thanks a lot, Elkie. That was a great email. I appreciate that big time. And if you want to be like Elki and send us a super

fascinating email, you can do that too. All you have to do is right to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com, Press send and see what happens, Right, Chuck, that's right. Stuff You should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H