Through the looking-glass

There's more to mirrors than meets the eye.

When we talk about the great inventions of civilizations, the wheel and the printing press tend to get pretty high billing. The idea to silver glass so that it gives a perfect reflection seems to get forgotten. But in my mind it's just as important.

There's something inherently magical about mirrors, I'm fascinated by them, and not just for vanity reasons. When I was a small child, probably like many other kids, I used to wonder if maybe the boy in the mirror was just as real as I was. Maybe I was just a reflection of him.

My gran had a wardrobe with two glass doors that hinged in the middle. I used to enjoy angling them close together and peering into the gap. A thousand eyes peered back, fading into bottle-green oblivion.

Also, I remember shining a torch through a mirror, and watching the beam hit the ceiling beyond the mirror as if it were just a pane of glass between two rooms. At the same time, the mirror-boy was shining his torch beam through on to my ceiling.

Of course it wasn't really like that. I fully understand how the beam was being reflected creating the optical illusion, but it felt that way.

Mirrors have always appeared in fairytales and folklore. Vampires are revealed by their lack of reflection. Snow White was betrayed to the Queen by her tell-tale mirror. And, or course, breaking a mirror is seven years back luck.

Arthur C. Clarke says that any sufficiently advanced techology is indisguishable from magic. A mirror, as a piece of techology, is simple enough that we all know, on a rational level, how it works. But on a evolutionary timescale mirrors haven't been around that long, and our monkey brains haven't evolved to treat mirrors as mundane elements of our environment. In short, we each have to learn that mirrors aren't magic.

The ability that mirrors have to "trick" our minds is being put to good use. Many amputees suffer what's called "phantom pain" in limbs that are no longer there. In some cases it seems that this is caused by the portion of the brain that "knows" where your limbs are positioned being at odds with what the eyes can see.

Researchers have found that by using a mirror-box that reflects the amputee's remaining limb into the place where the missing limb should be, it "fools" the brain into thinking the limb is still there, and the pain is reduced. It's even been found to work with other kinds of pain too.

Finally, the best kind of mirror magic is tranny-related. I still can't quite put into words the feeling I get when, after finishing getting made-up and dressed, I look in the mirror for the first time.

I look in, Becky looks out. The boy looks in, the girl looks out. Reality flip-flops rapidly between two states, then something clicks. Becky looks in and I look out. She's me and I'm her.

It really is magic.