Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see.

Tag : Metal Glass

Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating ofmetal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia:ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. Withtheir capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon themand so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces ofdreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake. Mirrors revealtruths you may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and ahouse to call their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing butlies.
To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity ofmirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions aboutperception and cognition in humans and other neuronally giftedspecies, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tidesof sensory information from the external world. They are usingmirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what isother, how it judges distances and trajectories of objects, and howit reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outsideworld from what is essentially a two-dimensional snapshot taken bythe retina's flat sheet of receptor cells. They are applyingmirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients' limbsor other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself.Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders likephantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.
"In a sense, mirrors are the best 'virtual reality' system that wecan build," said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool."The object 'inside' the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyesare concerned it exists as much as any other object." Dr. Bertaminiand his colleagues have also studied what people believe about thenature of mirrors and mirror images, and have found nearlyeverybody, even students of physics and math, to be shockingly offthe mark.
Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affecthuman behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjectstested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, tobe more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared withcontrol groups performing the same exercises in nonmirroredsettings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, Neil Macrae, Galen Bodenhausen and Alan Milne foundthat people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likelyto judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example,sex, race or religion.