by Mara Altman
“Certainly my nose is part of me, but am I inside of it or on the other side looking at it?” he said of the face we see in the mirror. “Me is inside, but also outside. Outside inside. Inside outside.”
I needed to rein this guy in. I asked him how I could get a grip and see the true version of myself. “I just want to see what is,” I said.
As he spoke, he tented his left fingers onto his forehead as if his hand were extracting thoughts from his mind. “If you try to see what is,” he said, “then you begin to see that you can’t see what is, because look at the two hundred and fifty-two expressions you can make in the mirror within a minute.”
He raised his left eyebrow. “So which one is you?” he asked provocatively.
He made a good point, but I had a good answer. I told him that, obviously, out of the two hundred and fifty-two faces, I would identify as the most attractive one.
“If the ugly face is false,” he said, “then so is the pretty one.”
It was starting to seem like all these theorists were hell-bent on traumatizing me.
First, Rutledge told me I look like my photos and now Langan was telling me I look like the me—face twisted in anguish and grief—I saw when I spotted my first chin hair.
“Dammit,” I said.
Why couldn’t these people be more supportive?
“You’re running at sixteen frames a second,” Langan said. “If you take out one frame at a time, each image will have a momentary truth to it, but it’s really the flow of it all that makes the difference.”
Ultimately, he was saying that there is no way to see the self, because we each have many selves, all of which are equally true. I could never know what I look like, because there is not just one me.
Clearly, I needed a third opinion.
* * *
This time, I approached the question from a different perspective: I went into the brain.
I found this guy, Julian Keenan, a neuroscientist, who studies consciousness and is also a coauthor of The Face in the Mirror: How We Know Who We Are. He led me to believe that seeing ourselves clearly has a lot less to do with our eyes than it does with our minds.
Once I got ahold of him, I got straight to the point. “Is there a way to see ourselves accurately?”
“No!” Keenan said. He said it so emphatically that I pulled away from the phone. “I mean, you’d have to meditate in a cave for twenty years to lose all the old messages about who you are.”
He also suggested that a traumatic brain injury might do the job (no thanks!) or a large dose of hallucinogens (maybe!).
Keenan went on to explain a psychological phenomenon called top-down processing. A top-down process is when something already exists in our brains—a belief, an attitude, or an expectation—that affects our perceptions of the outside world. People judge a hill as steeper when they are wearing a heavy backpack. The more depressed someone is, the darker they will rate an image. How we see ourselves—our own reflection—is also colored in this way.
“So that image that you see is going to have thirty-four years’ worth of garbage thrown into the backseat,” he said, “and each time you see yourself, you’re hitting the breaks and the garbage is flying into the front seat.”
“Like all the things your cheerleading coach told you?” I asked.
In high school, I was in coed cheerleading, and my coach once told me I’d gained too much weight, that if I gained one more pound I couldn’t do stunts or else I’d break a boy’s neck. I went through several years of looking into the mirror and seeing only fat fat fat.
“Yeah,” he said, “and you’ve been asking questions about your own face forever. Do I look like my mom? Do I look pretty? Do I look better if I trim my eyebrows? Whatever it is, we’ve been focused on this thing for a long time.”
It seemed so odd: How could I look into a reflective surface—something that seemed so tangible and concrete—yet be incapable of seeing my own image? I wanted to be sure I got this right. “So we’re not who we see when we look in the mirror?” I asked.
“No, probably not at all,” Keenan said. “Maybe when you were two and saw yourself, yeah, but after that, no. You’re just bringing too much to the table.”
* * *
As it turns out, Keenan was not bullshitting. There is actually a small body of research proving that we suck at seeing ourselves accurately. When I read the studies, I felt vindicated yet unsettled. Weird shit was definitely happening.
Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, suspected that we are terrible judges of our facial reality, but he didn’t know to what extent. To test his hunch, he snapped the headshots of twenty-seven people and then altered their photos in 10 percent increments to look both more attractive and less attractive. To do this, he morphed the photos with a composite of hot people and then a composite of people suffering from craniofacial syndrome (misshapen faces). He then had the twenty-seven people come back into his lab and select which photo, out of the eleven, was the real one.
Most selected a photo that was more attractive than that of their actual selves. Yes, these people have known their own faces for their entire lives, yet they were incapable of picking themselves out of a lineup.
I called Epley to get a better grasp on this idea. “So we think we are hotter than we actually are?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Epley said, “on average that’s true.”
That would explain why I get so startled and disappointed whenever I see my actual likeness. I was a 6 in the mirror, but an 8 in my head.
I wondered about the people who are already 10s. They can’t get any more attractive. When Gigi Hadid envisions herself, does she see a GIF of a unicorn shooting glitter out its orifices?
Epley explained that this phenomenon happens because of something called positivity bias. “We want to think the best of ourselves,” he said.
Studies show that people think they are funnier than they are. They misjudge their ability to be a leader. They also tend to believe flattering information but deny anything derogatory. In this study, Epley found that the higher self-esteem the person had, the more likely that person would select an enhanced photo as her own. It was the top-down process that Keenan had mentioned. Our self-esteem—the idea of ourselves that exists in our head—colors how we see ourselves.
“That means people who have really bad self-esteem might think that they are less attractive?”
“Yes, and that’s why psychotherapists are in business,” Epley said.
“Do you know why our brains do this to us?” I asked. To me, it seemed like a clear-as-day survival mechanism—up there with blinking and breathing. If we want to have a good time, we’ve got to go out on the town believing that we are mate-worthy. We have to strut our stuff, even if we don’t have stuff.
But Epley wouldn’t have any of it. “I think it’s probably just a happy accident,” he said. “People are very quick to find meaning or functionality or purpose or intention in something when you don’t really need it.”
In a different study, David White, a face-perception researcher at the University of New South Wales, also found that people are terrible at knowing what they look like. He pulled online images of people and then asked those people to select the image that looked most like them. It turned out that the images they chose were quite shoddily matched to their current appearance. In fact, images that had been selected by absolute strangers bore more resemblance to their current appearance than the ones they themselves had chosen.
“It’s quite surprising,” White said, “we look at our own face a lot—more than any other face—yet we seem to be quite poor at picking it out.”
That explains why Bethany in accounting uses a profile photo on her Facebook account that looks like it could be her third cousin twice removed. If you want an accurate profile photo on social media, White suggested, ask a rando from the street to pick the shot.
To understand why we are so challenged and inept
at this seemingly simple task, he said, more research needs to be done, but he had some theories. Along with positivity bias, he believes we look at our own face differently from how we look at other faces. “We look at other people’s faces in a holistic context—we see their whole face and all the expressions that go along with it,” he said. “But when we look at our own face, we’re not really interested in those social signals, but more for grooming purposes.”
In other words, we can’t see our face for the moles, pimples, pores, and smudged eyeliner.
Another possibility is that we have memories of our face, decades of different representations, which White believes muddle our ability to view ourselves clearly. “If you’ve been writing something for days, you become blind to the grammatical errors and typos,” he said, giving an analogy. “Your familiarity with the text impedes you from seeing it properly.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t like an essay—you can’t put your face in a drawer for a few weeks and come back to it fresh-eyed.
* * *
Was there a lesson here? When I asked Epley if there was a takeaway, I thought he was going to say something like “Be the girl boss you feel like you are in your head,” or maybe “Don’t worry what the mirror says, I just Google-image-searched you and you’re plenty slamming.”
But for him, this study was a small piece to a much larger puzzle; it wasn’t just evidence that we misperceive our appearance, but of how our human minds constantly screw up. “We are not as accurate as we think we are,” he said. “Even with something like knowing what you look like—for God’s sake you ought to be able to identify yourself in a mirror—but even that judgment is distorted.”
He said that humans need to have more humility. “We are wrong more often than you might guess.”
“That’s the message?” I said. “Really?” I’d expected it to be a tad bit more inspiring.
“Yes,” Epley said. “Take a more humble approach to interacting with other people or even thinking about yourself—recognize you’re often wrong.”
“I didn’t see that coming,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
* * *
Three days after speaking with Epley, I found myself on a two-hour bus ride up to Rosendale, New York (a town known for its cement), to do what everyone said wasn’t possible: get a glimpse of my true self.
John Walter, the man I was going to meet, had invented a device that, he said, would enable me to see myself exactly as I am. Considering that I’d just learned that our brains are terrible at that kind of maneuvering, this was an intriguing turn.
As the bus rolled down the highway, I had my thoughtful face on, which regrettably at times has been misconstrued as constipated, while I wondered what would be revealed.
Was I going to see Matza Ball Breaker staring back at me?
When we spoke briefly before the visit, John had said, “There is a real problem mirrors are causing everyone, but they just don’t realize it yet.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re trying to figure yourself out,” he said of the reflection we investigate in the mirror each morning, “but through the wrong person.”
The bus dropped me at a desolate parking lot. John was waiting there in his green Ford pickup truck. The fifty-seven-year-old’s bright-orange T-shirt contrasted with his reserved demeanor. He was thin with a manicured goatee, mussed hair, and fingers callused and stained with grease. He seemed capable yet sensitive—my guess was that he’d be the type who, during a zombie apocalypse, would forsake violence and instead build a ten-foot wall and start a community garden.
“If you’re open-minded, you’re going to see it,” he told me as we drove toward his workshop. “You’ll see what I’m talking about.” He was talking about his invention, the True Mirror, and those who through it experience self-revelation. “If you’re closed-minded and susceptible to societal bullshit,” he said, “if you’re the conforming type, you’re not going to like it. No way.”
Trinkets hung around his rearview mirror—a moonstone encased in silver and two nails bent into the shape of a heart—gifts from those at Burning Man who’d managed to “see it.”
As the trinkets swayed back and forth, I convinced myself that not all would be lost if this visit came to naught, because at least if the Jeopardy! answer “This site supplied the cement for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal” ever came up, I’d now know that the question is, “What is Rosendale?”
* * *
After twenty minutes, we pulled up to John’s workshop, a greenhouse-shaped structure made out of steel, which was situated under the bows of giant trees and a cricket’s hop from a small stagnant pond.
He is a computer programmer three days of the week and works on this—his passion project—in all his spare time. He gave me a tour of the premises; it was dark inside and filled with a jumble of supplies: papers, bolts, screwdrivers, saws, cardboard boxes, file cabinets, and small rectangular mirror cutouts stacked side by side.
John grew up in New York City and never liked how he looked. He was unpopular and self-conscious, but when he was twenty-two and high—so high—he went into a bathroom. He stared at his reflection and grew upset. He thought he looked fake and ingratiating. Then he spotted himself, by accident, where a mirror met the medicine cabinet mirror: It was his true reflection. He smiled—smiled so goddamn big. It changed how he saw everything, but mostly how he saw himself. He has spent the last thirty years developing a device that could re-create that moment for others.
The True Mirror, his invention, is made up of two mirrors set diagonally into a box so that they meet at a right angle in the middle. This angle creates a true reflection, meaning you see yourself exactly as you would if you approached yourself on the street. Your left eye stares straight into your right eye. If you lift up your hand, the hand on the opposite side of your reflection lifts. It is a novel way to see oneself, but John thinks there’s something much deeper to the experience.
“Check this out,” he said, waving me over. As soon as he began talking about the True Mirror, the tightness in his face I’d seen earlier subsided into a full-blown smile—like the pride of a dumpster diver when she finds an untouched burrito.
On top of his workbench, John had unrolled a large canvas poster of Bruce Willis. His face, showing a pleasant smirk, had been deconstructed into parts—an eye here, half of a mouth there.
“Do you see the right side?” he asked, covering the left side of Willis’s face. “You see the smile there?”
I saw what he was talking about; Willis looked moderately delighted. “Then you flip it,” he said, showing me the flipped version, which was printed below and what Willis himself would see if he were looking at his own reflection. “That same smile now looks like he’s being sarcastic with you. It’s snarky.”
John was demonstrating how when we see ourselves in the “backwards mirror”—that’s what he calls a traditional mirror—we might be interpreting our own facial expressions inaccurately. There is not yet any scientific evidence to back up his claims—“I’ve tried to get scientists interested in studying this, but they won’t come around”—but John swears by his own experiential research. And for what it’s worth, it was compelling.
“When you flip those little micro-expressions so that they are on the wrong side and the eyes, whatever is in them, are on the wrong side,” he explained, as he rolled Bruce Willis back up, “your interpretation is going to differ from what’s really happening.”
He slid the poster onto a dusty shelf. “Do you see?” he said. “We’ve been fed faulty information about ourselves for our whole lives!” He attempted to press the import of this upon me even more. “Your face stops working in the backwards mirror,” he said. “The feedback loop doesn’t work. You stop what you’re doing and just stare!”
I think he was referring to the dead look in our eyes—the hunter’s determined glare—that occurs when we are about to stalk and unearth a blackhead.
I knew that look well.
He put his hand on his hip and took stock of the room. “A lot of the issues people have, especially women, is because all they see is a face; they don’t see the bright happy self that’s going through the world that other people see.”
In the True Mirror, he believes, not only do we see the components that make up our appearance, but more important, we see what makes those parts come alive. “It’s that sparkle that comes through,” he said.
* * *
John was done with his spiel, but I wasn’t ready to see myself yet. I felt concerned. What if I’d been waiting all this time to see the real me and it turns out, like the research, that the fake me is better?
Once you see the real you, can you ever reclaim your ignorance?
Besides, I had reason to be worried. One of John’s biggest challenges in growing his business—and the reason he still has a day job—is that most people loathe his mirror.
“Fifty percent of people absolutely can’t stand it,” he admitted. “All they see is where their faces are asymmetrical and they stop there.” He said it’s gotten so bad that he’s had people panic and yell, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“I can go blue in the face trying to get them to see it,” he said, “but if they are looking at themselves with a freaked-out face, it’s only going to get worse.”
Merely 10 to 20 percent of people who gaze into the True Mirror like what they see, while the remaining 30 percent are apathetic. That creates an extreme uphill battle for John’s one-man company. He toils in his workshop twenty hours a week and after twenty years of the True Mirror being on the market, he makes only about twenty-two sales each month. He’d told me earlier that even his parents are scornful and puzzled by his mirror obsession.
