Have you ever tried staring at your own reflection for a few minutes? An experiment by Giovanni Caputo, a psychologist at the University of Urbino, showed that it can be quite a disturbing experience.
The mirror has always had considerable esoteric appeal in many cultures, such as being considered a portal between two worlds or an object possessed by entities, but this phenomenon is entirely natural and concerns one of the most fascinating aspects of our world: the human mind.
Caputo wanted to demonstrate that looking intensely at one’s face for a prolonged period of time can lead to a state of strong psychic alteration. This is because our mind is ” set up ” to immediately recognize human faces (probably due to an atavistic defensive factor), just think of the paridolia that makes us see mainly faces in clouds or vegetation. But if this ability is overestimated, our perception of this image is “short-circuited”.
Furthermore, the brain’s visual interpretation system is not made for prolonged monotonous stimuli, therefore, once a certain threshold is exceeded, it will tend to rework reality, creating new images.
Caputo recruited fifty volunteers, who were told, not to bias the expected results, that this was a meditative and introspective experience. Participants were asked to position themselves about forty centimeters from the mirror, with a dim lamp placed behind them as the only source of illumination.
The results were impressive: after just a few minutes, participants reported seeing their faces distorted and taking on unnatural, even evil, expressions. After a little more time, real hallucinations began, with the appearance of animals, deceased relatives and even fantastic creatures. The average holding time under these conditions was about ten minutes before agitation took over.