Posted on 07/21/2008 11:31:21 PM PDT by neverdem
For the bubbleheaded young Narcissus of myth, the mirror spun a fatal fantasy, and the beautiful boy chose to die by the side of a reflecting pond rather than leave his “beloved” behind. For the aging narcissist of Shakespeare’s 62nd sonnet, the mirror delivered a much-needed whack to his vanity, the sight of a face “beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity” underscoring the limits of self-love.
Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back,...
--snip--
To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information from the external world. They are using mirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what is other, how it judges distances and trajectories of objects, and how it reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a two-dimensional snapshot taken by the retina’s flat sheet of receptor cells. They are applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis...
--snip--
The link between self-awareness and elaborate sociality may help explain why the few nonhuman species that have been found to recognize themselves in a mirror are those with sophisticated social lives. Our gregarious great ape cousins — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas — along with dolphins and Asian elephants, have passed the famed mirror self-recognition test, which means they will, when given a mirror, scrutinize marks that had been applied to their faces or bodies...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The way I look in the mirror and the way I look in my dreams are very different. Apparently my self-image is far slimmer than I am now... ;-)
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I suppose it could also work in reverse. Some cultures always covered mirrors when there'd been a death in the family.
Ugh. Who writes this crap.
In my mind I am in my early 30's. The mirror says "get real!"
"Ugh. Who writes this crap."
IIRC, they found what they call mirror neurons in humans and primates.
From Cells That Read Minds which you can find on that link:
"Other animals - monkeys, probably apes and possibly elephants, dolphins and dogs - have rudimentary mirror neurons, several mirror neuron experts said. But humans, with their huge working memory, carry out far more sophisticated imitations."
Birds are also thought to have them.
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