The Mirror and the Mind - A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences

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 ap