STRANGE FACES AND DARK PLACES
The room is dark. I can barely see my own face in the mirror which is dimly lit by the faint flicker of the lamp behind me. I stare into my own eyes – the very notion of time is gone; minutes and hours have become but meaningless words. I am entranced, yet a feeling of doubt remains, scurried away at the back of my mind.
After a while of gazing, my face appears to be… melting. Soon after, a slight smirk emerges on my face – one that I’m sure I didn’t initiate. My eyeballs seem to turn black and, despite what you might think, I’m the opposite of terrified. It’s working!
I think of positive, happy things, and my face turns to that of a seemingly peaceful middle-aged woman, one that I do not recognize. Then, just to try it out, I think of the Devil, the concept of Hell – soon after, my eyes turn a fiery red, my face contorting into extraordinarily disturbing shapes and taking on features stereotypical of hell spawn.
What I’ve just described is not the blurb for a new horror film, nor is it the synopsis of a cheesy urban legend. It’s all pure psychology – the so-called ‘strange-face-in-the-mirror’ illusion (and my first-hand experience with it).
First brought to the attention of the academic community in 2010 by Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, the science behind this phenomenon is quite interesting. The system for face identification present in humans is rather overactive – which also explains why you can see ‘faces’ in clouds and trees, as the brain is always scanning for faces. According to Caputo’s suggestion, the illusion might be caused by “low-level fluctuations in the stability of edges, shading, and outlines affecting the perceived definition of the face”, which gets over-interpreted as ‘someone else’ by the face recognition system.
Having had my interest piqued by this phenomenon, I set out to try and actually perform this experiment for myself and see if my results would match Caputo’s. With the help of my Psychology teacher and Caputo himself (via e-mail), I managed to set everything up, eventually securing a group of fourteen volunteers who would undergo the MGT (Mirror-Gazing Test) in a classroom, right here at Xaverian.
They did not know the true aim of the experiment, as they were only told that this was an experiment on ‘perception’ – I did not want to create any demand characteristics. Before the actual gazing session, participants had to fill out a quick questionnaire – this questionnaire consisted mainly of red herrings, except for the following open-ended questions:
- Do you believe in the supernatural?
- Have you ever been prescribed any visual aids, such as glasses or contact lenses?
- Do you consider yourself religious, spiritual, neither, or both?
The room was dimly lit, but not pitch black either – everything was measured twice and ready to go. After ensuring that my set-up was appropriate, I started the sessions. To cut to the chase, most of my participants did not report any ‘extreme’ illusions – that is, apart from participant ‘AZ’.
This participant – whose name will be kept private, for obvious reasons – had her face transform into that of “an old man”, with “crooked teeth”, “weird lips” and “a massive scar” running down the length of his (its?) face. She then reported that the face appeared to “mouth words” at her – for the record, I was sat perpendicular to her and she did not move at all during the ten minutes that the session was on for. She also experienced the common effects of her eyes changing colour, some morphing of her own face, and a feeling of “otherness”.
AZ reported that she was neither spiritual nor religious, did not believe in the supernatural, and was never prescribed any kind of visual aids. This went against Caputo’s predictions, as he found that it was mostly religious people with a strong belief in the paranormal that experience the illusion with such intensity, with very few outliers to this trend.
If you want to try out this illusion for yourself, it’s fairly easy to do so. Get a small candle or two and go into a room with a mirror, for example, your bathroom. Turn the lights off, put those candles somewhere behind you, light them… are your bells ringing yet?
If not, well done – you didn’t have to go through an (unfounded) phobia of mirrors for years! Jokes aside, this illusion perfectly explains urban legends such as Bloody Mary, and all the other rituals and divinations that always seem to involve mirrors in dark places – the other items present in these rituals (such as salt) serve only to induce you into that ‘spooked out’, hyper-alert state of mind.
Nevertheless, the aptly named ‘strange-face-in-the-mirror’ illusion (and especially AZ’s case) is a testament to the power of the human brain and its tremendous ability to influence the way in which we see things – including those that we think we know best, such as our own faces.