How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to
explore questions of self-awareness 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. 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. Investigating the
ways mirrors could lead to both identification and
misidentification, Guenther looks at how such experiments
ultimately failed to determine human specificity. The mirror test
was thrust into the limelight when Charles Darwin challenged the
idea that language sets humans apart. Thereafter the mirror,
previously a recurrent if marginal scientific tool, became dominant
in attempts to demarcate humans from other animals. But because
researchers could not rely on language to determine what their
nonspeaking subjects were experiencing, they had to come up with
significant innovations, including notation strategies, testing
protocols, and the linking of scientific theories across
disciplines. From the robotic tortoises of Grey Walter and the mark
test of Beulah Amsterdam and Gordon Gallup, to anorexia research
and mirror neurons, the mirror test offers a window into the
emergence of such fields as biology, psychology, psychiatry, animal
studies, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The Mirror and the
Mind offers an intriguing history of experiments in self-awareness
and the advancements of the human sciences across more than a
century.
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