Guy Reams (00:01.774)
This is day 286, the existential crisis of the looking glass. When looking into a mirror, unless there are imperfections in the surface or issues with lighting, the mirror will reflect back exactly what it sees. However, every time you look into the mirror and see a reflection coming back at you, there is a moment of existential crisis. This is because your human brain has been perfectly designed over thousands of years of evolution.
be an absolute expert in quickly judging value in what you see. Should you run? Should you fight? Should you be attracted? Should you be afraid? Should you be interested? All of this is processed in a matter of moments, and you derive conclusions extremely quickly. Through this effort, you ultimately only see what your brain wants you to see. Thus, we have an existential crisis.
Your brain does not passively reflect reality, it actively filters, interprets, and sometimes distorts what you see based on perception, attention, memory, and even your emotions. Your eyes send raw visual data to your brain, but only a portion of it is consciously processed. This gets pretty technical, but there is a fascinating research in this area.
The visual cortex is quite advanced and can process basic shapes, colors, and even spatial relationships. There's a special part of your brain that specializes in recognizing faces, including your own. You will ultimately engage in selective attention, which means your brain focuses on certain features, such as a blemish, your hair, your facial expression, while it will completely ignore others.
What you notice is determined by what is relevant to you in that moment. If you feel fat, you are correct. You will see the fat. If you think you are unhealthy, you will notice those signs. If you are feeling insecure, you are most likely to zoom in on those perceived flaws. There's an important consideration and something to be highly aware of. You do not see what is there. You see what your brain expects or believe that is there.
Guy Reams (02:22.636)
In effect, you process things from the top down. The top being your memory, your expectations, and your prior knowledge. This means your mental image of yourself can bias what you actually see. You may reinforce a self-image that is not fully accurate, either positively or negatively. Consider this. The mirror image is not what others see when they look at you. From a simple perspective, what you see in the mirror is reversed.
This mirror reversal can alter your perception of facial symmetry and proportion. I read a story in a psychology journal that noted, people prefer their mirror image more than their actual photographed image because they are more familiar with it. When they see a photo of themselves, they immediately react negatively. Others, however, prefer your real image because that is what they always see.
This proves a significant point, which is that you never actually see reality. You see what your brain decides to interpret. Note that a young child under the age of one will not be able to recognize themselves. They have not developed self-recognition because this is complex. The combination of multiple areas of the brain has to work in unison to be able to see, detect, and recognize your own image.
This complexity reinforces just how biased we are and how we see ourselves and everything else around us. On top of all of this, other areas of the brain affect how you emotionally interpret your appearance when looking in the mirror. On a good day, you may see yourself as more attractive. On a bad day, your focus may be drawn to perceived imperfections. This is called effective bias.
Your emotional state skews your visual and cognitive interpretation of the mirror image. In addition, when you look at yourself, you tend to spotlight certain things. You overestimate how much others notice specific features that you focus on. So why do I bring this up? For one thing, stop believing every conclusion you reach when looking in the mirror. However, in a more poignant observation, what you see is not always reality.
Guy Reams (04:38.978)
The way you perceive things is not the way that they are. It is important to take a second or third look at things before making decisions, because often you are being swayed by one or more of these interpretations the same way you are when looking at yourself in the mirror. If looking at ourselves through the looking glass is so highly subjective and impacted by our current emotions or our bias, then how much more influenced are we when reading or watching the news?
or simply just looking at faces in a crowd. I'm sitting in an office building overlooking a beach community right now. What do I see? I see happy families walking to the beach together, laughing and having fun. Another person might see this couple on a bench over here across the street having an argument. Another might see the painting contractor that is loading his gear up after finishing his job. The ultimate point, I suppose, is that we see what we want to see.
This realization that our perception is so heavily filtered by emotion, memory, and expectation, offers us a kind of quiet reassurance. If what we see in the mirror is shaped by what we believe, then perhaps things are not as bad as they appear in our most anxious or self-critical moments. The blemish we obsess over, the flaw we cannot ignore, the problem we think is insurmountable, these may be all exaggerations born, well, from within.
By understanding this, we can learn to pause, to question, to reframe. We can remember that what we see is not the full truth, only a version of the truth. Sometimes, stepping back from the mirror, whether literal or metaphorical, is all it takes to recognize that life is not as bleak or broken as it might first appear.