Thereafter the mirror, previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. The mirror test was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the idea that language sets humans apart. Investigating the ways mirrors could lead to both identification and misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments ultimately failed to determine human specificity. Mirrors served as the possible means for answering the question: What makes us human? In The Mirror and the Mind, Katja Guenther traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test, exploring how researchers from a range of disciplines-psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental and animal psychology, cybernetics, anthropology, and neuroscience-came to read the peculiar behaviors elicited by mirrors. There is a saying that "The truth will set you free" and it is trueįor once you accept your mortality, then instead of spendingĪll your days in denial and fighting to maintain the past, you can finally start living for the future.Since the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects-humans, infants, animals, and robots-in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of self-recognition. We can be certain it will, for life is but a series of actions and reactions, that we continue to do until the day we die. Need to hang on until we get through it and the next change comes. Is both good and bad in the world and when bad arrives we Have the power of choice on how we REact to those actionsĪnd there is where our salvation lies. We can not change what actions may come, but we will always To maintain their youth, but that doesn't change the insideĪnd they too eventually die, just as everyone else does. Just as an addict will never admit they haveĪ problem, so to many are vain and seek plastic surgery to try Perspective is needed to finally see what is really there and not We see differently through tear-filled eyes and often a change of Will forever be like the small fish, constantly waiting to be consumed by the terrible larger one. We are and until we see the true nature of who we are, then we We can deny we are aging but it doesn't change the fact that The mirrors at the circus in the fun house. Lake is changing and can alter what is reflected in it, much like The standard mirror can only reflect what is there, whereas a Just4u - To me the terrible fish would be denial and the lake the I am getting old now myself and understand the ending more. I was born in the year she died, and feel I have loved her poems since I was born! They speak more to me all the time. And I hear in the end a great fear of old age and death. What the mirror reflects is not the simple beauty the woman wants to see but a complex set of other images, more mysterious and more expressive of anxiety, sadness, and loss. The mirror interacts with this mature face in a more complex way, and the image of the woman's back, her agitation, her dependency on the mirror, all express anxiety and disappointment. The lake has a deep, dark, and complex inner world beneath its reflective surface, and is a far more complex and alive entity than a simple mirror. The mirror on the wall is a simple, literally flat image. I see a progression from youth, which has the naive idea of simple truth, to the more mature woman, who has seen faces and darkness come and go. I agree very much with the comment that the poem expresses disappointment.
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