Why Mirrors Are Misleading

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.

"In a sense, mirrors are the best 'virtual reality' system that we can build," said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. "The object 'inside' the mirror is virtual, but as far as our eyes are concerned it exists as much as any other object." Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have also studied what people believe about the nature of mirrors and mirror images, and have found nearly everybody, even students of physics and math, to be shockingly off the mark.

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Comments

[wm1066]

As a photographer I have had to explain to alot of people that the reason they don't look right in a photograph is because they see themselves in a mirror every day and for them the photo image doesn't look right because its flipped. The mirrored image is flipped from a photo image, right is left and left is right. So it just doesn't look right. If our faces were perfectly symetrical this wouldn't be a problem.

The book "Phantoms in the Brain" explains the use of mirrors in people who have lost imbs.

[NoSillyName]

Yes, it is truly disconcerting if you look in a mirror into another mirror and see yourself as others see you. The only problem with doing that is that the eyes are looking off to the side.

It seems that this article goes into depth about many other intriguing uses of mirrors.

[NoSillyName]

Can you give us a link where we can read the whole story without having to sign up?

This looks like a very interesting story.