Seeing double: Do we all have a doppelgänger?
Applicance of Science: Seeing double: do we all have a doppelgänger?
Identical twins may be familiar with seeing their image reflected back at them from another person’s face, but for the rest of us, we assume this will never happen. There are however many reports of people coming face to face with a total stranger who looks just like them. They’re looking at their doppelgänger; Does everyone have one and what has science got to say about it?
The word doppelgänger comes from the German for double-walker and refers to a biological, non-related, lookalike. It is said that we all have a doppelgänger out there somewhere and with nearly 8 billion people on the planet maybe that is quite a likelihood; or maybe it is just down to how our brains process faces.
When we look at a face we tend to scan the eyes first, then the mouth, then the nose. Our brains have a specific set of neurons used for facial recognition. Each feature our brain registers on a face will fire off a specific set of these neurons, the combination of these making a distinct pattern or map called a facial schema. So our brains interpret faces more as a series of patterns, rather than an whole image; assessing the overall geometry of the face while ignoring some of the finer details.
What we perceive as a doppelgänger is really just down to an overall degree of the sameness we see between two faces. If the neural pattern sparked by the main features observed on these faces is similar then we see them as alike.
Humans have evolved to have more diversity of facial features than any other animals, and while these features are dictated by our genes, our genetic diversity is actually quite low. Adding to this is the fact that certain facial characteristics are more common than others (around 70 percent of the global population have brown eyes), so it is not unreasonable to expect that similar facial characteristics to our own will randomly appear in other people too.
The reports of doppelgänger encounters are mounting, probably because humans have more of a digital footprint than ever before, especially when it comes to our faces. From the man that discovered he lived in the same village as his exact lookalike, to the woman finding not one but two doppelgängers as part of a social experiment, a research team at the University of Bristol decided to investigate.
They recruited a number of pairs of lookalikes and put them, or rather their faces, to the test. When they looked at a number of specific features they found they had a very high percentage of similarity, equal to that of identical twins. Their genetic code showed no close relationship.
On the other side of the globe, a team at the University of Adelaide analysed eight key facial features among nearly 4,000 faces. Measuring the shape and position of each feature as well as exact distances between these features, they found that the chance of two people being an exact match, with respect to all eight features, is about one in a trillion. Which makes it mathematically possible but hugely improbable.
So does that mean that Doppelgängers don’t exist after all? Not exactly. Their studies were based on exact measurements. It may just mean that a forensic anthropologist, specialising in facial recognition, can distinguish the differences between you and a doppelgänger, but your own mother may still do a double-take.
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