TLDR: Staring at yourself versus into the eyes of others creates strange experiences for our minds. Is this happening with your work too?
Weird one today.
Have you ever stared into a mirror at your own face for an extended amount of time?
A while ago while pledging a fraternity, we were told to, and the effect was wild.
You start to experience an acute dissociation, a sort of otherness, and you can even start to hallucinate images of relatives or animals.
Sounds strange right?
I don’t know why I was thinking about this experience more than a decade later, but I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on it yesterday, and it turns out I’m not crazy.
Well, at least not in the context of this experience.
In fact, many have researched it:
To trigger the illusion you need to stare at your own reflection in a dimly lit room. The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front.
The participant just has to gaze at his or her reflected face within the mirror and usually “after less than a minute, the observer began to perceive the strange-face illusion”.
The set-up was tried out on 50 people, and the effects they describe are quite striking:
At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f ) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).
It turns out there are a few things that may be going on:
First, neural adaptation.
Neurons can slow down or even stop their responses to unchanging stimulation. It happens when you stare at any scene or object for an extended period of time.
Second, dissociation.
Dissociation is an acute form of derealisation and depersonalisation, or DPRD for short. Derealisation is the sensation of feeling as if you are in a dream; life may be perceived as hazy or foggy, and familiar people and places may seem unreal and lifeless. Depersonalisation is the feeling of being out of body or distant from others. Keep reading here.
And, as an example, the Troxler Effect.
Named after Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, a Swiss physician who discovered the phenomenon more than 200 years ago. He noticed that when he made himself stare at a central point of an image, objects in his peripheral vision started to disappear within seconds (see below). This could be caused by neural adaptation and lead to the dissociative state that allows your brain to experience an illusion or hallucinate.
What I was curious about though, is how to explain the difference of impact when starting at yourself versus someone else.
There are numerous studies, and maybe the most famous one in pop culture being the 36 questions to fall in love that is followed by four minutes of uninterrupted staring into someone else’s eyes, that suggest essentially the opposite effect compared to staring at yourself.
These studies profile the experience as one in which you experience intense closeness, compassion, and even a measurable underlying neurological synchrony with the other person.
Comparing the two, it’s as if your mind rejects isolation and embraces the opposite.
You have to wonder if sometimes we (figuratively) stare at something for too long and what impact that might have.
Do we adapt and dissociate, or do we connect and embrace?
Intuition tells me that staring at hard problems for too long limits your ability to find solutions. Like the disappearing image above, you fail to see the surrounding variables that may help you make sense of it.
Conversely, being in a flow state might be similar to staring into someone else’s eyes—a connectedness rather than otherness.
I suppose the question is, what is it about the subject of our attention that produces such differing experiences?
Let me know if you have the answers.
See you Monday.
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