Who's That?

It's funny how even if you're not consciously picturing yourself as looking like anything in particular, you can still be slightly startled to catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror after a noticeable change in appearance, such as a new hairstyle.

I was going to say, "it's not as if you're going around all the time with this little mental avatar of yourself with a certain haircut"--but on reflection, I think it might actually be exactly like that.

When you look at yourself and have that half-moment of surprise, that "who is that?" reaction, it's clearly because your image is being contrasted to something, so you must have a kind of background picture of yourself in mind.

And in a world of mirrors and photographs, our mental avatars are based on what we actually look like, more or less, so we can be startled by a comparison. I wonder what it was like in the old days when there were no photographs and mirrors weren't very common or very good. I guess you could pretty much count on always being kind of startled, if you did happen to get a clear image of yourself somehow.

If you don't really know what you look like, do you form a mental picture of yourself that includes an image anyway, or do you not think that much about it? Since I have plenty of mirrors, I perhaps will never know.

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