Double Cousins

The first time I ever remember experiencing a doppelganger was my Freshman year of high school. Like most public school children, I had grown up with a group of peers from primary school on and like all such kids from a small town, you get to know them pretty well by their unique appearances. This familiarity isn't as strong as family, but when you spend every day in a classroom with the same batch of children for a decade, you get to know them. One girl among this group happened to live only a few blocks away from me and we had played at the playground together many times as well as sharing the same class and teacher. We weren't best friends but I knew her well enough.

As I walked down the hallway of our high school, going to my locker that first fraught week of my new secondary school career, I saw this same girl from the side and I waved and spoke to her, happy to see a familiar person. She turned and looked at me with the blank expression that only a complete stranger can give. As my brain scanned this girl's features I began to see that something wasn't right. Her hair, her skin tone, her height and even her stature all closely resembled the person I knew. The features were slightly different, but the part of my brain that recognizes people was hung up on a few startling differences. Had I maybe remembered her wrong? After all, we weren't little kids anymore and people change between age five and age 15. One of the smaller kids from my childhood grew to six feet and one-hundred seventy pounds the day after his thirteenth birthday. 

Her reaction wasn't that of someone I had known since kindergarten. This person was wearing glasses and unusual clothes and her voice was most certainly not that of my school friend. This disrupted my thoughts enough to prevent me from realizing that I was supposed to be embarrassed and so I quickly blushed and mumbled “wrong person” and went to my locker.

Under other circumstances, especially as an adult, I might have taken time and waited to be sure. However, this unfamiliar girl had such a pronounced similarity to my childhood classmate that for much of my high school career I had to be careful so I didn't embarrass myself again. My brain kept seeing the girl I knew in a girl I didn't really know at all. 

I felt a bit better when, after a particularly spirited performance (my former school chum was a gifted singer and actor) the local newspaper used the other girl's school photo in a writeup about a musical my elementary friend had been in. This proved that I wasn't the only one who found the similarities uncanny.

Years later, as I scooted my chair into position in a chemistry class at the local community college, I looked up to see my maternal uncle rifling through his papers by the front desk. My uncle was in his late seventies at the time, fully grey-headed (with what hair remained to him) and living in Pennsylvania. The professor was my uncle as he had been when I was a boy; mid-forties, greying at the temples and bespectacled. It was uncanny. So much so that I actually considered dropping the class. This was my mother's brother as he had been. His name, his clothing preferences were not the same, but it was so like him that it made me uncomfortable. It seemed to fill my mind with memories of my youth and cast me as a young boy rather than the young husband, father and homeowner I actually was.

This wasn't just seeing someone who looked familiar, either. This person's features, gestures, mannerisms set off all the facial recognition functions in my brain which are incredibly powerful. It was intensely unsettling. I needed the class so I kept attending and eventually became inured to the similarities but I had to eventually tell this man how much he reminded me of my uncle. To which, of course, he replied with the same reaction everyone who is told they are a doppelganger has; a blank stare.

We've all been there. Someone approaches us, asks us if we went to this or that high school or if we know “so-and-so” and then we are told that we look just like someone they know. Invariably they say the resemblance is astounding. It's uncomfortable. Especially because regardless of how similar we appear to this person, we know very well that we are not the person to whom they refer. It can be flustering, even frustrating. It seems to take away our agency. We know who we are and aren't, so why does this happen?

Human facial recognition is an incredible trick. We are visual primates and we use our eyes for many things we don't stop to think about regularly. We are given to memorizing the facial features, hands and physical shapes of the people we are related to or know well. We begin this almost as soon as we are able to see clearly as babies. When a baby stares at you and frowns a bit, she is memorizing your face. Those memories go into a very deep part of her brain that allows her to know fundamentally—in this case, with as much certainty as our senses can muster—her mommy, daddy, grandparents, pets, older siblings, babysitter, everyone close and of importance in her tiny life. And it isn't just facial features. She will memorize our voices, our scents, our tendencies and mannerisms. Her little mind catalogs all of these differences and quantifies them as evidence for a conceptual “person” that they then associate with a name. This is how a small child can so master her family's members and why we melt when she first says “Mama”. She will go on to create a kind of mental Rolodex, keeping a list of hundreds of people based on their physical appearances and names. When she has an experience with that person, she will associate that memory as part of the information already gathered.

We internalize those memories and they become part of how our relationships with family and friends develop, weaving a web of facial memories and stories and events into a massive skein of interconnected experiences. Part of her identity will form by the things she learns and the emotions she feels as she grows; the rest will be formed by facial impressions and memories of the people most important to her in her little life. They will eventually bind together to define who she is as a person.

To explain just how important these mental functions are, we have to look at the story of a man who could no longer remember faces. Injured in a terrible work accident, this man's brain was damaged so that no one was familiar to him anymore—even himself. Called acquired prosopagnosia, the man retained no ability to remember the specifics about the faces of his family, friends or coworkers. Horrifying as that sounds, some people have developmental prosopagnosia, which just happens and grows worse with very little explanation. Either variant is crippling and, like the man mentioned above, sufferers have to learn to depend on a host of aids to help them. 

Imagine not recognizing the person in the mirror or your spouse or children. That's fodder for a good horror story. Sometimes called face blindness, prosopagnosia is fairly rare. Nevertheless, it can shatter a person's sense of security, and people with the disability often feel as though they are being followed or that their families have been replaced by strangers.

The possible inability to recognize the faces of loved ones puts into stark relief just how important our senses are for helping us to see and know people who matter to us. Because they are such sensitive mechanisms, those same senses may contribute to us seeing doppelgangers, especially when we connect enough facial or physical markers to make our brains believe that we are seeing someone we know in someone we don't.

In my very public-facing job, I see countless people every day. I know many of them because they use the library every day. Unfamiliar people are people I have never seen before or do not remember seeing. After a week of work, I may see a thousand or more people and my cognitive mechanisms can become overburdened with all the different faces. We separate faces into categories based on importance and create a backlog of people we may remember and some who look familiar to us, but that may be only because they resemble someone and not because they actually are that person.

When I am approached and told I look exactly like someone's cousin, it can help to remember that there are thousands of people in my community, hundreds of thousands in my county. This mistake is expected. Our brains can get overwhelmed with all the many people around us. 

In one awkward situation in which I was the mistaken person, a man told me I looked just like his ex-wife's dead brother. He showed me a church directory photo on his phone. The man in that picture had no beard, was bald, obese, apparently had an affinity for pastel shirts and had blue eyes. But otherwise he bore not even a slight resemblance. Photos don't represent the full person, of course but as I gazed at the long lost Cecil “Bubba” Maness or whomever, I did not see me. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock or Winston Churchill or Henry VIII, but not me. It was very uncomfortable, especially as the man tried unsuccessfully to convince me that I was the “spitting image” of this person.

There are a few likely reasons for seeing doppelgangers. First, despite how many people there are in the world, there are a limited number of genetic variations and some family features are strong. Ultimately, if we go back far enough, we're all related. That means that there are strange and wonderful genetic permutations across all the possible variables wherein a long lost ancestor of mine may have crossed a genetic path with another ancestor and strongish genes that passed to me also showed up in some other distant cousin.

Cousin is a keyword, too. In a study done in the mid-1980s, genealogists and anthropologists got together and examined family histories going back quite a ways and they discovered that just about everyone around you can be anything from a 15th cousin to a 50th cousin. Usually, but not always, people are on average our 16th or eighteenth cousins. That's everyone within our community. That means that even 500 miles from where I was born, there are people in my town, county and state who may share with me a common ancestor.

According to one blogger on the topic, “If you consider [that] a generation is

usually 30 years,10 generations

back will take you back 300

years and give you 2,046

ancestors. If you take it back to

20 generations—or 600 years—you'd have 2,097,150 ancestors.” The Bares have been in America for about 300 years (that we know) which is more than two-thousand possible ancestors, all or most of whom produced heirs. That's just my father's father's side of the family. When we factor in my mother's family and all the different branches, this is an almost incomprehensible conglomeration of genetic traits in a vast sea of offspring.

Under the burden of arresting figures like this, it is fairly easy to assume that the girl I thought was my childhood classmate was actually a closer cousin with real genetic similarities to my actual friend. What I experienced, minus the blush-inducing embarrassment, may have been a strain of DNA that produced features that my brain recognized as being essentially the same.

Another possibility is that our face-recognition is so tuned to see familiar traits, to keep us in close-knit units where we can see who is our kin and stay with them, our brains see these markers and we don't fully understand the significance. This powerful wetware in our skulls can see family likenesses even when it is far distant.

My wife recently met her second cousin on her mother's side and this man has all the facial features we associate with her mother and late uncle's family. We spend more than a few minutes discussing these traits.

The church directory photo of the  bald-headed, blue-eyed fat man that “looked like me” may have been a cousin—even quite a close cousin. My grandmother's younger sister's grandchildren are my second cousins. Although we are related, we bear no physical similarities. They are raven-headed and olive-skinned; their mother's Native American heritage shows forth in their features quite strongly. However, all of us share ancestry with my grandmother's grandfather, a man who, like me, was tall, thinner with long legs and a peculiar cowlick. With his handlebar mustache and squinted, almost beady eyes, I very much look like him as an old man in a sepia picture taken in the 1930s.

Even more astounding is a blown up picture of my grandfather's father, Milton, that my good aunt sent me. She says—and I certainly see it—this man with a broom mustache is me in a straw hat. It is so startling that I have caught myself staring at his photo wondering what else we had in common. These men are direct ancestors, much like my good aunt, with whom I share musical and cerebral similarities; even our sharp-tongues. 

Inside the family this is to be expected and not wondered at. Just a few generations ago, though, one of my great-grandfather's great grandfathers may have sired a family tree that gave birth, eventually, to a man who, despite outward dissimilarities, nevertheless caught the observant family-finding machinery’s notice. Perhaps that man and I are 16th cousins.

Whatever the actual connection, the lesson I take from this is two-fold. First, there is no accounting for blood. There are Bares out there stalking around that I have never met who have my heart condition or my affinity for puns. We may even have similar widow's peaks or scoliosis that makes our feet turn out or a penchant for being slightly pedantic when it comes to literature or philosophy. That fills me with some hope that our small branch of the tree is not the only one.

More importantly, though, I think of the case I have often made before: we're not only all in this together, but we are all family. I'm not thrilled about being related to some of the people out there, but it does give me pause when I reflect that they, like me, are actual people with feelings, dreams, thoughts and fears; people who love and are loved despite their flaws or foibles, just like me.

Humanity is one big family. And as a family, we are part of the overarching web of nature; not separate from it or superior to it. That's a very heartening thought. So the next time I see someone who is, as they say where I grew up, the spitting image of someone else, I'll try to remember that we may be distant cousins, meaning family and family is precious.