Mirror misidentification is one of the dissociation disorders where individuals do not feel connected to reality. Their sense of self and identity within the world is distorted. Sometimes people even believe that they are dead and that the world around them and all their experience are an illusion. This death delusion, known as Cotard’s syndrome,3 is rare but I got an insight into the condition from a colleague whose own father had Cotard’s syndrome and described it as like living in an artificial world where nothing was real. Experiencing the here and now as real is part of being consciously aware of your present surroundings, but disconnection disorders such as Cotard’s remind us that we need a healthy brain to keep us in touch with reality. Sometimes we can all experience a disconnection or depersonalization in which we feel a sense of unreality and detachment from our self. Symptoms include dreamlike states, loss of empathy and a sense of disconnection with our bodies.4 It can seem like we are actors in a play or that we are watching the world from behind glass. It is surprisingly common. Estimates vary but up to three out of four of us have felt like this at some time in our lives, especially after a stressful life event. Over half the combat troops returning from tours of duty are thought to experience depersonalization. Clearly, if brain disorders and stressful life events can distort the personal experience of self such that an individual does not feel that they are really themselves anymore, then these episodes reveal the fragility of the self in the first place.
Even mirror misidentification may not be all that rare. Many of us have had that fleeting experience when the face we observe in the mirror does not seem to be our own – especially when we have been under the influence of various recreational drugs that can distort reality. You can even induce mirror misidentification with hypnosis.5 But you don’t have to be wasted or in an altered state of consciousness to experience a temporary disconnection between your sense of self and your own reflection. Try this out. Turn the room lights down or better still, light a candle. Now have a good look at your self in a mirror. Stare into the eyes that are reflected back at you. Scrutinize the features of your face. After a minute or two you will experience a strange sensation. You will start to experience depersonalization. Within a minute of staring, most people start to see their face distort to the extent that it no longer looks like their own but rather that of a stranger.6 Whatever the self is that we experience when looking in the mirror, it is one that is easily disrupted when we look at it more closely.
What do babies or, for that matter, animals make of their own reflections when they see them for the first time? Following an observation by Charles Darwin that an orang-utan did not seem to recognize itself in a mirror at the London zoo, psychologist Gordon Gallup7 developed a way of measuring self-recognition in animals by placing a small dab of odourless red rouge makeup on their foreheads while they were asleep and then seeing how they responded when they saw themselves in a mirror. If the animal noticed that something about its appearance was not quite right, Gallup argued it had a self concept – an idea of who they were.
Gallup found that many animals, including some adult apes, could recognize themselves since they tried to remove the makeup, but that other animals failed. Numerous other studies have shown that the animals that pass the mirror test are those that live in social groups. It is surprising then that human infants do not typically recognize themselves in the mirror test until well into their second year.8 They simply treat the baby in the mirror as another baby. In effect, very young infants are experiencing mirror misidentification when they see the other baby in the mirror. Some would argue that without this self-recognition in the mirror, they have not yet constructed their own sense of their self.9
Figure 6: Somewhere around eighteen months, human infants pass the rouge test
Why We Lose Our Self in Reflection
Why can’t we remember what it was like to be a baby? Why can’t we remember our infant self? What’s the earliest memory you have? If you are like most people, it will be sometime around your third to fourth birthday and really patchy. There are always the odd few (and, indeed, they are odd) who say they can remember being born – passing down the birth canal and being slapped on the bottom by the midwife. Most have no memory of self before their second birthday and, even then, the memories from around that time are fragmented and unconnected.10 It’s not that you have forgotten what it was like to be an infant – you simply were not ‘you’ at that age because there was no constructed self, and so you cannot make sense of early experiences in the context of the person to whom these events happened. You can look at photographs and recognize your self, but you cannot get back inside the toddler you once were. Why is this?
Has the passage of time worn out the trace of your memory, like a photograph fading? This seems unlikely. An articulate twelve-year-old is equally oblivious to their own infant memories, as a forty-year-old who can remember events when they were twelve, almost thirty years later.11 The lack of memory cannot be because too much time has passed. Is it the case that babies do not form memories in the first place? Without the ability to form memories, your sense of self would be utterly shattered. This loss happened to Clive Wearing, an eminent musicologist at Cambridge University, who was struck down with Herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985. Herpes simplex is the same infection that produces cold sores, but for Clive it had infiltrated the protective tissue that protects the brain, which caused it to swell and crush the delicate structures of the hippocampus – a region where the neural circuits encode memories. Even though he survived the encephalitis, Clive was left with severe amnesia and is now unable to remember from one moment to the next. In her 2005 memoir, Forever Today, Deborah Wearing describes her husband Clive’s tormented existence:
It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before … ‘I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,’ he would say. ‘It’s like being dead.’12
Probably the most harrowing aspect of Clive’s condition is that he still remembers fragments of his previous life and knows exactly who Deborah is – each time he sees her, he runs tearfully into her arms like the reunion of long-lost lovers when in reality she may have only left the room minutes earlier. Without the ability to store new memories, Clive is permanently trapped in the here and now. He maintains a diary in an attempt to keep track of existence but this makes for painful reading: ‘2.00 p.m. – I am awake for the very first time. 2.14 p.m. – I am now conscious. 2.19 p.m. – have just woken for the first time.’ Each previous entry is crossed out as he asserts that he has only just become conscious. Deborah describes how one day she found Clive holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if practising a magic trick.13 Each time he removed his hand he was amazed by the appearance of the chocolate. Without the ability to form new memories, everything that is out of sight is out of mind for Clive Wearing.
The child psychologist Jean Piaget believed that infants begin life just like Clive – unable to remember anything that cannot be immediately perceived. He thought that infants lacked the capacity to form enduring memories of the world around them.14 However, we now know that Piaget’s vision is not entirely accurate because infants can form memories. Babies learn in the womb and that requires forming a memory in the neural networks of our brain. Hundreds of experiments conducted on young infants over the past thirty years require them to possess memory that can be surprisingly enduring. For example, three-month-olds who learn to kick their legs to activate a mobile that is tied to their foot by a ribbon will remember that experience one month later.15 If you bring them back into the lab they start kicking much faster compared to infants who never had the initial training. So it can’t be true that young infants do not have any memories. Whatever memories they may possess, however, do not become part of the self story that most of us rehearse and recall when we are much older and asked to reminisce.