Children are often subject to many different superstitions, rules and rituals, many of them, in order to prove their courage to friends or girlfriends, play strange games called "let's call a witch from the looking glass."
The ritual is as follows: you need to stand in front of the mirror and repeat the words "Bloody Mary" 13 times. According to legend, after that a woman will appear in the mirror and will scratch your face or even kill you. All over the world, there are various versions of this game, in which the woman's name may be different, or another character promises to appear in the mirror instead. The essence remains unchanged: you need to repeat the name of a certain creature in front of the mirror and it will appear in front of you.
Of course, no ghosts or demons appear. But at the same time, children, and sometimes adults, who decided to repeat this game, run in horror, confident that they saw a distorted or bloody face in the mirror. However, you can see something strange in the mirror without repeating the demonic name. Even for an adult, it is quite possible to be frightened by an obscure figure in the mirror while brushing your teeth in the morning. The mind sometimes plays cruel jokes with us, no matter how rational we think we are, even if then we are completely sure that there was no ghost.
There is a logical explanation for all this. The longer you look in the mirror, the more likely you are to see things that don't really exist. Even if you didn't set yourself up to see the ghostly figure. This is called the Troxler phenomenon. When you look at an object for a long time, there comes a moment when your brain adapts and gets used to immutability. As a result, neurons stop perceiving information, and the visible becomes blurry, distorted until you blink or look away. If you look into your own eyes in the mirror, after a while, your own face will start to seem strange to you. You can check the effect of this effect without a mirror, simply by focusing your sight on some simple picture depicting one object, or even on the object itself.
In 2010, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo conducted an experiment in which people were asked to enter a semi-dark room and look at their reflection in a mirror for 10 minutes. After that they were asked
describe what they saw. Of the 50 subjects, 66 percent said they saw significant deformations of their face in the mirror, and 48 percent said they saw fantastic and monstrous creatures. Someone saw in the mirror a child or an old woman, or the faces of dead people. The ability of a person to see certain forms where they are not present - in the clouds, in the shadows, in the movement of tree branches from the wind, called pareidolia, is enhanced by dim lighting. The brain is forced to "complete" an unclear picture based on its past experience and memories. Caputo says the same effect can occur even when you look a person directly in the eye. A 2013 study by Caputo confirmed that looking into the eyes of someone in the immediate vicinity, many soon began to see "strange faces."
GUSAKOVA IRINA YURIEVNA