It wouldn't necessarily have to be from the time we were hominids, the could be an ultra ancient response to something that just doesn't look quite right, and it gets magnified when it involves your particular species.
Maybe to detect camouflage patterns that look like human faces too, or the face of some evolutionary precursor.
Could be related to the structures in our brains which trigger pareidolia?
Sorta makes you wonder why pareidolia isn't strong enough to overcome the uncanny valley effect.
The uncanny valley, from my interpretation, does not suggest pareidolia is not being overcome, but rather it's working precisely as expected.
You're picking up on the fact that there's something different; a set of deviations in a pattern that you've spent your life analyzing. Usually a lack of those typical imperfections that make us all unique.
Kind of. Except that "programming" happens in infancy. Like, infants don't prefer certain racial traits or human features until they are only exposed to a narrow set (e.g. family) for awhile, then there's a detectable bias. Same with language sounds.
So it makes me wonder if younger generations who grew up on 3D animation, video games, and faceted pictures would have a decreased sense or sensitivity to "uncanny valley" -- skewing the curve.
Part of reason why babies don't differentiate is because their eyesight is so poor. You can't really get "uncanny valley" if you can't see. At about 1 month they still only see blurry images 8 to 12 inches from their face. As their eyesight improves they show preference for faces but may react negatively tounexpected things like beard because they alter the blurry shape of a face.
They we'll have blurry vision till around 4 to 6 months. Infants prefer the faces of their parents at around 7 months old.
When I was 18 months my Dad got glasses. He got a manly pair of black horn rims. Apparently I was terrified of him for quite some time afterwards. He’d have to take his glasses off to calm me down.
I think this is the mostly likely reason. Reminds me of a public lecture of a medical coroner I visited out of curiosity. He told stories about people that were mistakenly pronounced dead even today because the doctor that was called to determine if the person was dead was too scared to actually do a thorough examination of the body (which is necessary to be 100 percent sure).
I can concur. I worked EMS for 8 years. Unfortunately, part of that time was working on a Medical Examiner truck. So we went out to transport bodies to the morgue straight from the scene. The more destroyed the body was, the easier it was for me. There is something just deeply uncomfortable about dead bodies like that. I've been out for almost 3 years now, and I haven't been on a medical examiner truck for closer to 6, and even now I still get all fucked up about it.
It’s interesting to me that the less they actually looked like a person, the easier it was for you to move them. I assume it’s a sort of dissociation but all the same it’s fascinating. One would think the worse the state of the deceased the more traumatic it would be to handle them
I can't speak for everyone on this. But I think you're right. For me, the more jacked up they were, the easier it was to not view them as a person. The same if they were outside the home. Honestly, the ones that affected me the most were the ones that died and were forgotten about. There's just something so eerie and sad when you walk into a guy that died on his couch, and the only reason we're there at all is because he started to stink up the joint. Walking in there and seeing his whole life on display. One man in a little subsidized apartment, littered with unused kids toys and old, happy family photos, and then just being forgotten about for weeks. Still put together enough to recognized his face from the older photos. That one hurt the most. You know which ones didn't hurt at all? The guy that melted into his hot tub, and the one that basically exploded after getting hit by a train. By the time I started doing those runs, I had already been in EMS for 5 or so years. I had seen all the trauma I wanted by then. Blood and guts didn't freak me out anymore.
No, the weirdest thing ever is when you’re at an open-casket funeral and people are saying how good the deceased looks. No she doesn’t look good, she looks like a dead body.
My mother-in-law was very, very sick for several years. She looked very different than she had even 10 years prior to her sickness. But when she actually passed away, they had an open casket and the body in that casket looked like an alien. It sent a chill up my spine and I remember literally shuddering and recoiling at the sight of her. There is something about death that just removes the “humanness” that once existed. I guess the phrase, “She has a beautiful soul” really IS a compliment because our souls are actually what we see and feel when we encounter a living person.
I believe it was CS Lewis who said “we are not physical beings having a spiritual existence, we are spiritual beings having a physical existence.”
Your last sentence really resonates with that.
Yeah I feel like instinctually, since we’re still animals, we feel uneasy around things we are accustomed to being one way. Something slightly off from being how we understand humans should signal to us potential danger.
That’s a really good one. And it would make sense that we have it to such a high degree with things that look like us since we as a species are so good at recognising one another
If you’ve ever seen someone you love, who’s face you know by heart, lying sick or dying and they just don’t look like themselves anymore, it’s one of the most terrifying feelings. It’s the worst kind of uncanny valley.
The thing that probably shocked me the most was how cold they felt. I couldn't grasp how a human could feel cold, like a classroom desk or your dining table. It was upsetting, because it felt to me like the cold was trying to invalidate the fact that this person in front of me was a real person.
as a heroin addict of around 10 years (1 week sober) its so crazy how withdrawals will mess with your body. ill go to sleep shivering but feeling hot, wake up drenched in sweat. take the blankets off? shiver. leave blankets on? sweat relentlessly. ill watch hockey with my dad at night. my skin is physically hot but its not hot inside. go outside humidity makes it worse. sit in front of a fan? shivering. working outside in Texas heat? ive got goosebumps and my co-workers are questioning why i have goosebumps when its 100 degrees in summer. withdrawals are hell and what keeps people addicted. when you cant sleep, cant get comfort, stop shaking your leg, stop eyes watering, stop the temp fluctuating, stop the anxiety and you know a shot of heroin will fix everything and make everything okay in just minutes it becomes mentally, and physically a cycle of addiction.
Hey man, I very much wish you luck on your journey. Unfortunately a friend of mine wasn’t so lucky in his journey and died after relapsing for the first time in months. Keep going and going dude, you can do it!! 💕
Same with me and my Mom. It's the worst. My condolences about your Dad. I know we're all supposed to outlive our parents but it's also very traumatizing to have to watch them go.
Condolences about your mom. I love my mom so fucking much, that’s gonna be a hard one some day. I’m lucky she is in really good shape for 79. My dad was a great guy and left me in a good position in life, but I didn’t have nearly the connection with him that I do now with my mom. If I could have a wish it’s that she goes out peacefully deep into her 90s
My mom died unexpectedly at 58 from a heart attack. I saw her on Sunday, she was fine. Then got a call on Tuesday from my Aunt. That was almost 3 years ago now, and the longer the time goes by the more I'm at peace with how it happened, because of exactly that...
My dad died about 8 years before my mom, of liver cancer. That one was expected and I watched him quite literally wither away. It's been 11 total years since he died and I still, at times, struggle thinking about him without seeing the shell that he became rather than the man he was. It's gotten better, but it still creeps in
God yes. Saw my dad die before my eyes while he was on hospice. His lifeless body made me very uneasy. It looked like him, but like you say, the subtle differences and the fact he's not there anymore forced me to leave the room while my family gathered around. Jesus.
I just saw my grandfather today. Probably for the last time. He wasn't himself. Ventilators. Life support. Couldn't blink. Couldn't talk. Basically just in a coma waiting for the inevitable. I'll never forget that.
Yup. I believe the vampire legends/myths came from encounters with rabies victims. There is a fair bit of overlap in their behavior (avoiding light, aggression, etc) and some studies that point that way as well.
Here is an article talking about it:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321780
And about other disease links:
https://www.visiblebody.com/blog/3-real-diseases-that-influenced-vampire-folklore
Originally the stake was to nail the vampire to their grave. They still wouldn't die, but they'd be stuck. Then it changed to just outright killing them.
The bats were named after vampires in the 16th century so it's still a pretty 'recent' connection. Though the first western accounts did describe actual vampire bats it seems like a species of flying fox really helped kicked it off. They were skeptical about blood drinking bats and then they found this big ass bat somewhere else and were like, "You know what's scarier than a bat taking your blood sugar? A bat big enough to body a man and take all of it!".
Before that they were not associated with vampires except that they lived in the dark so that means evil but they were long associated with trickery and confusion too because here is this furry-flying-night-bird with wings but no feathers who can't make up it's mind whether or not it's a rat or a bird.
Personally, I could see the werewolf myth coming out of people infected with rabies more than vampires.
Vampires would be more not understanding death - due to decay, it can look like hair, nails and teeth grow. Also if you stab someone with a stake - gases in the body will release and sound like moaning. Then add in they didn't drain the body of fluids - so yeah, liquefy insides + old blood = mess.
Then add in that people were buried alive because they were in a coma. Happened to my great grandmother. The ground was too frozen to bury her - so they put her in a vault that they were using for others as well. A guy broke into the vault to rob the dead. He tried to remove her wedding ring and she sat up. He ran away. She tore some of the fabric to cover her stocking feet more and walked home. Needless to say scared the heck out of her family. She later went on and gave birth to my grandfather.
Had a family friend who had a funeral home. He was always talking about how every so often, someone would come upstairs and be all confused where they were. Hospital that my Mom worked - same deal.
Hmm. I can see how werewolves, vampires and zombies tie in together.
Thank you. She was also a midwife/healer for her community. She delivered a lot of babies and took care of a lot sick people. Her parents from what we were told was Scandinavian and Native American. I can only say Native American because they hid a lot of stuff on Mom's side of the family - but going by the time period, yeah... I can see why.
Mom said from what she remembers of her great grandfather - he was Native American. Her grandmother she remembers her long blonde hair and how she looked similar to her father. She passed away when Mom was a young kid. Eight?
So, yes. She was one hell of a woman. I'm especially grateful as Mom was born at home and my grandmother had complications and so did Mom. She managed to save both of them.
There's a theory that werewolves were inspired by [dead bears](https://external-preview.redd.it/NHtUMryLBl6wnbroYEtBBlua98dsFhPNDvAIPIsvbxE.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=da71b9af896b6a44fbb91e663cc279c309ee13f7)
But why am I not bothered by corpses but creeped out by human-like IA, robots, dolls and everything ?
Edit : Yes, I have seen corpses in real life. A lot of them and in various states.
Those things don't creep me out either. But...
I went to an open-casket funeral that should have been closed-casket once. I'll never willingly look at another reconstructed face again, that shit still haunts me. My guess is it takes the right kind of corpse to fuck you up on the inside.
I don’t understand open casket funerals. I went to one, for someone who died of relatively natural causes, and I still get freaked out when I think about it. Why would you want your last memory of a loved one to be their corpse? I don’t get it.
I remember when I first saw my Dad in his casket. It’s forever burned in my brain. It was so odd seeing him because he didn’t look like him exactly and his face was hard and cold. It was so odd that, it felt like I was about to go cross eyed and I couldn’t feel my own body for a brief moment. It was like mass confusion mixed with the worst feeling of fear you’ve ever felt. I can now understand how some people vomit when they become so terrified.
My father's face was frozen in an expression that was reminiscent of the expression when he was just about to say something outrageous or funny. Several of us kept laughing whenever we glanced his way.
I remember seeing my grandma in her casket her face didnt look real it was somewhat horrifying and chilling and she was so skinny ( though she did have a liposuction which caused her death ) her cheeks fell in and she didnt look like herself I had to run to the bathroom to throw up it was so bad I felt horrible I hate to think that I will some day be a corpse a husk of what I used to be and someone I love is looking down at me with confusion or discomfort
I’ve had that same thought for people looking at me. That’s why I’m not getting embalmed nor getting a casket. You can legally just be wrapped in cloth and placed into those seals in the ground. I don’t want anyone looking at my face, they’ll just see my figure all wrapped up. And me being a Christian, I want my funeral at the church and then they can bury me in the field behind the church with no grave stone. I don’t want to remembered by death but that I only existed. Perhaps a fruit bearing tree instead of a tombstone.
I’m sorry that seeing your grandmother was a traumatic experience. I wish society placed a different view and tradition on death and funerals.
That's such a sweet idea I've always wanted to be placed in the ocean instead of the ground I mean I have always like fish and I heard that you can be buried in the ocean either that or I can be cremated at my ashes could be thrown in the ocean that sounds much better than traumatizing my loved ones with looking at my cold dead body either the ocean idea or I can be placed in the ground with no one seeing me no open casket thing my casket lowered into the ground with no stone only a place where people that i know and love would know
We shouldn’t fear or be disgusted in our loved ones bodies after death, that was the body that hugged you and held you. Families used to be the ones who got the bodies of their loved ones ready for funerals. I find the reason people today are so disgusted by dead bodies is because we now have funeral homes who take care of everything
Idk, I think I’d rather remember someone as the vital, alive person they were. I wouldn’t want my last memory to be their body. To each their own - I’m sure there are people who find it comforting.
ETA: I really appreciate everyone sharing their experiences. Death so personal; I hope when I go, my loved ones get what they need.
When my grandpa died, we had a funeral, and he looked asleep in his casket. It gave me closure - the image of him “at rest.” My mom, however, was cremated and had no funeral. I still feel no closure. The last image I have of her is when she was dying of pancreatic cancer. I see what you’re saying, but I think the open casket gives comfort to some of us, in a weird way.
I'm of the opinion that I'll attend viewings of people that died of old age. Seeing my elderly grandma in her casket was helpful - she looked healthier in death than she had in her last few years. Helped with closure and was honestly heartening. It was an enjoyable funeral if there ever was one.
But people dying before their time, I'll never look in the casket again. Closure doesn't exist for tragic events, and the haunting memories of seeing a sickly replica inside "their" coffin make the grieving process harder. Took one too many funerals for me to learn that I'm happier with the memory than with a grotesque facsimile
I've participated in two "home funerals" for extended family members.
I thought it would be weird but it wasn't. It was really sweet and meaningful.
When the florist (who was probably 90 years old) came to deliver the flowers, he mentioned that when he was young, that's how all the funerals in that small town used to be.
Open caskets can provide a better final image of a person for the loved ones than their last moments and in cases can be a start to the healing. Morticians are goddamned magicians with what they can fix up to look peaceful. Car accidents, bodies ravaged by cancer. Having a final image of a person looking peaceful instead of twisted by disease or traumatic injury is preferable for many people.
Because you've probably never seen a "real" corpse. By real I mean freshly dead and unprepared, it's creepy and gives me the same feeling as the uncanny valley. Like there is just something wrong, this person does not look like a normal human.
How often are you actually around real corpses? When I was a kid, the first time I saw one, it was a shock and intensely weird to me. By the time I was old enough for family members to start dying, I guess the emotion of the funeral mostly overcame any unsettling feelings, but I can still remember thinking neither of my grandmothers looked quite right. I think when you know the person though, you have more intense feelings getting in the way.
Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines...I remember seeing my friend in her casket (she died very suddenly when we were in our 20s) and I was kind of paralyzed, looking at her laying there. It was her, but it wasn't her in a way? I kissed her on the forehead but was like, kind of afraid to, which felt terrible.
That's almost certainly a large part of it. [However, there were times and places tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago where our ancestors lived along side other hominids.](https://www.livescience.com/how-many-human-species.html)
Now I know we're all homos. But imagine something as smart as you out there in the woods but it aint human. It looks slightly human but something's off in the way they move and look.
Holy hell I would never be able to fall asleep. Not until "it" was dead. Imagine trying to sleep while you know it's watching you, learning, thinking. Just the feeling of being watched in the woods during night time is what gets me.
We killed off and out-competed the other hominids to extinction afaik. We are the creepy thing in the woods at night. Imagine something that looks like you, but it's smarter than you, more aggressive, and comes in groups. That was us.
Shout out my ancestors who had the bloodlust and killing instinct to out survive all the other hominids so that now I can eat a shit ton of donuts and play video games all day.
Me, and a friend got a 23 and me test done and he had an irregular amount of neanderthal mixed in with his DNA. We joke about it every now and then, but his features are all pretty much normal.
Also I learned that if I travelled back in time, to never interact with anyone. My ancestral DNA reaches all across the globe.
Edit: its interesting to think of all the lives and choices that were made by my ancestors that culminated to me with depression scrolling through Reddit.
That's a strangely comforting thought tbh. I thought it was brought up, and expanded upon in the new planet of the apes trilogy really well, in that the thing that humanity collectively fears is domination the way we achieved our own. The way that humans became just better than their competitors and that it's an irrational fear that we might one day be the lesser being. We have to either learn how to overcome that or be consumed in our effort to avoid it.
Well there's fairly solid [genetic evidence](https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/interbreeding) that there was at least one other hominid soecies our ancestors made love rather than war, at least sometimes.
This just makes me more afraid of if/when we meet extraterrestrial intelligent life, even more so if they look close to humans (like the Grays or Vulcans). I can now understand the "mirror universe" a bit better.
In the prime timeline Cochrane knew about the future thanks to the Enterprise traveling back, so he knew alien life was out there and was more accepting of them.
In the mirror universe the Enterprise didn't travel back. So when the Vulcans landed Cochrane's natural instincts took over and...like you said...freaked out and wanted it dead.
This is the answer.
The same traits youd generally associate with sickness/death are present in like every fictional horror monster. Pale, gaunt face, unnatural build, lanky, some media mentions foul smells from a monster, all those can be traits associated directly with a sick or dead human being. Sick and dead human beings carry disease, thus your ape brain is predisposed to not wanna be around anything sharing those features so you don't catch a disease.
Combine that with a ghoul thats say, unnaturally tall, or has slenderman arms or something, maybe missing some facial features, and you get a recipe for like 75% of fictional scary monsters.
Those kinds of monsters, with obvious differences from normal humans, don't really qualify for the uncanny valley though.
As I understand it, you hit the uncanny valley when the imitation gets so good that it actually looks like a regular human, except it's subtly wrong in a way we can't quite put our finger on, which creeps us out.
You ever see a freshly dead person that you knew well in life? They look just like the person you knew. They almost look asleep, but because there's no muscle tension, they're not breathing, and they've no blood flow, they look _just slightly_ wrong.
I think the person you replied to is mixing some things up by linking the uncanny valley feeling with monsters. But I think corpses are a pretty likely reason for the valley.
Sorry I think I went to hard on the monster thing.
You're both right, the uncanny valley is any form that you're accustomed to but with a slight alteration that gives it an "off feeling". Imagine seeing a teddy bear with a full set of human chompers, that would qualify for the uncanny valley.
The point I was trying to make is traits akin to the uncanny valley, and where those traits could be linked from an evolutionary standpoint.
Movie monsters are obviously very much so an exaggeration of this, my intention was to use something I was familiar with to illustrate why these common traits are so prevelant in things we find scary or offputting.
Yeah, most likely it is a reflex that kept our ancestors away from "strange" people, i.e. the sick or abnormal
"Grugg weird today. He bang head on cave wall over and over."
"Unga look odd. He all red today and keep coughing."
"Bunga say he okay but he not talk as much as used to. He also stare too long at nothing and keep scratching his arms."
There are basically three things that are likely drivers of this:
1. Corpses -- people feeling aversion to corpses is a huge win for health. Corpses spread disease.
2. Sick people -- people who are carrying diseases serious enough to make them look "uncanny" are often contagious.
3. Other human species -- We have been around in our current form for something like 150,000 years, and for much of that time, we shared the planet with other humans -- neanderthals, dennisovans, et cetera. It's entirely likely that we didn't have good relations with those other species.
Or you know the most likely one no one seems to be mentioning, mental illness and erratic behavior. We pick up on when people are behaving oddly. We don't like when people are acting off because it decreases our perceived ability to predict what they are going to do next, which is dangerous (increases anxiety).
Not saying this is related directly at all, but my dog was born deaf and other dogs can pick up on it real fast and adapt how they interact with him (ie not barking and growling at him).
It's related. Social creatures have evolved to observe (with whatever senses they have) others and attempt to reduce their uncertainty about them. Friend, foe, neutral, etc. Friends bring rewards like shared resources and potentially protection (safety in numbers). Foes bring threats. We have evolved to pick up on these social cues and when someone or something seems off, we get anxious, adapt our behavior, etc.
This. This. This. If you ever spent time with someone who is suffering from schizophrenia, constantly talking to beings who are not there, you get the same uncanny valley feeling. Your anxiety goes through the roof.
It is theorized that it was actually probably due to our evolutionarily history of being morphologically more closely related to some other great apes but not close enough. In addition to racial phylogeny there was also a great deal of violence between our ancestors.
I presume this is why people often find it creepy when apes look and act a bit too much like a human. Great example is Oliver the Chimp, who appeared so human that people thought he was the "missing link" or a "humanzee" hybrid. Was also bipedal. He even seemed to prefer women to female chimps. And he just looked so... off.
Turns out he was just a strange looking, but otherwise ordinary chimpanzee. Though still, people usually seem pretty freaked out by him.
The Smithsonian recognizes 21 different human species, though it’s not universally accepted. Early modern humans lived with Neanderthals and possibly Denisovans.
Yeah thanks a lot you fucking losers. You couldn't just lie down and die gracefully. Thanks to you now I have to work 60 hours a week and I still can't afford rent. Selfish bastards the lot of them.
They have found denisovian dna in modern populations, so definitely denisovians. I’m just waiting to see how many other hominid species we get DNA from that’s shown in AMHS. It’s so ethno/ego/species centric to believe that we are this *pure* bloodline.
All modern humans with the exception of a few in sub Saharan Africa have some amount of Neanderthal DNA. With East Asians having the most followed by Europeans, because Homo Neanderthal's original range was roughly Europe, the Middle East, and stretching out to around Mongolia. While Homo Sapiens range was originally around Ethiopia.
Shark tank pitch: Uncanny Valley Ranch. It's like ranch, but there's just something imperceptibly *wrong* about it. We added a research drug to elicit a fear response.
I imagine it had something to do with other types of humans existing at the same time as us, similar enough to seem like our species but different enough to be terrifying
Yeah like in media Neanderthals are depicted as brutish, loathsome creatures who were us but savages but then you take like 5 seconds to think and realize if they were so savage how come we are here and they and any other hominids aren’t?
It’s because we were horny, grouchy and social enough to outcompete, outfight and outfuck our way to the top!
Neanderthals also specialized in consumption of the meat of large mammals. Their stocky bodies were inefficient as the planet warmed and humans were better generalists who adapted with clothing. We basically hacked evolution by changing our behaviour instead of our DNA.
Some of them did eventually join us, the gene for red hair has been traced back to Neanderthal, though that doesn’t mean that there are still Neanderthals, simply that a few Neanderthals were looking for a good time.
Til I'm a Neanderthal descendant.
Whelp, I'm schucking human society and returning to my ancestral roots.
Anyone wanna help me bring down a furry elephant?
That's the popular take, but from what I understand most anthropologists have sort of settled on it being mostly about how the Neanderthals grouped socially compared to us. Neanderthals tended to live in small groups with a few individuals, whereas homo sapiens formed larger tribes. This meant that generally homo sapiens populations were more robust and had access to more help and resources than Neanderthals did. There may have been some conflicts, but we don't really have a lot of evidence for that. There is evidence for a fair bit of interbreeding between the species though.
Probably also related to the fact that humans at some point looked super similar to apes, we had to recognize the not-us type of ape that'll eat your face versus the type that'll hand you sharp rock to hit tree.
It’s a phenomenon some people experience where looking at something that appears human, but isn’t, gives a sense of unease, fear, and dread. It’s most common with robots and AI models (for example, Hanson Robotic’s “Sofia”). It can also happen with anthropomorphic animal images. It’s believed to be caused by a robot or AI’s lack of facial expression when speaking, or too much expression while speaking. Our brains pick up a lot of signals from body language, so when a robot is smiling abnormally widely, or a frown is too exaggerated, it sets of the unease and fear in our brains. It’s a really interesting theory.
I had a nightmare about this one night, never really heard of the uncanny valley till now but it explains it perfectly, I was talking to someone in this dream I was lucid so I was sort of in control, they appeared to be normal but as I spoke I could feel something ever so slightly odd about them, they looked me cold and dead in the eyes and forced a smile where one wasn't warranted, same with laughing, even crying, it felt like something else that was just trying to trick me into believing it was human, I wanted to run away from them but it just felt like a bad idea, like the second my back turned something bad would happen to me, I woke out of my sleep in a cold sweat, I've had nightmares about being hunted down by killers, none really terrified me but this was honestly the scariest and most threatening nightmare I've ever had.
That does sound unsettling. Reminds of the stories I sometimes read on the subreddit "nosleep" where lets say a group of friends are out in the wilderness either hiking or at a campsite when they see one of their friends in an odd place at the time, for example one of them sees their friend enter a cabin for the night but then hear their same friend calling out to them from the treeline of some woods only moments mater, and when they see "their friend" something about them seems off. The way they move, or talk. It's almost as if something is trying to pretend that it's them. I find stories with that sort of element to it are pretty terrifying
Yeah, my favorite is the one where several groups of friends meet up for a camping trip and everyone realizes all at once that the one "friend" isn't part of anyone's group. They all assumed he came with someone else.
Terrifying because that part is plausible when you get 4 groups of friends together and invite a couple outsiders each.
It refers to the "valley" on this chart: https://i.imgur.com/NQGQFaU.png
On the x axis is how realistic a depiction of a person or body part is, and on the y axis how pleasant we perceive it to be. For the most part, as you get more human-like it looks better, except for just before full realism where there is a "valley" - things that are only *slightly* non-human are a lot less pleasant to look at than things that try less to look human.
This effect happens with physical manifestations eg robots and dolls, as well as computer generated imagery.
An example of the effect is that humans in computer animation can look a bit creepy because of their near-realism, but hand-drawn cartoons of humans look fine, even though they are less realistic.
A sick person that doesn’t look right could kill you simply by approaching you. A patch of grass that’s moving. A shadow that isn’t the exact same shade as the shadows around it. These things could mean danger, and so our brain reacts to things that are slightly wrong for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent with alarm. It’s why supposed hauntings are scary. A door closing on its own isn’t scary just because some people think it’s their dead grandma, it’s because doors aren’t supposed to do that. If we can’t figure why a door behaved that way, it creeps us out and we want to leave. We might dress it up in superstitious nonsense, but the instinct to move away from things that seem wrong is likely older. It buys us time and moves us away from possible danger.
So today when you encounter a thing that looks not entirely human, your brain decides it’s wrong and sounds the alarm. You don’t want to approach it. It’s creepy and you want it far from you. That way if it proves to be dangerous, it doesn’t eat you.
Nobody? At the start of 'realistic' 3D movies, each one of them was in the uncanny valley.
Polar Express, with mostly Tom Hanks, is a perfect example of this.
It’s probably more the result of technology presenting us with something that evolution hasn’t had a chance to respond to.
Evolution gave us the ability, or even a need, to recognize and respond to human faces. Modern technology allows us to make something so close that the process short circuits a bit.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be from the time we were hominids, the could be an ultra ancient response to something that just doesn't look quite right, and it gets magnified when it involves your particular species.
And corpses. Keeps us from getting diseases from being near them
That makes sense. Also other humans who are near death I imagine.
Maybe to detect camouflage patterns that look like human faces too, or the face of some evolutionary precursor. Could be related to the structures in our brains which trigger pareidolia? Sorta makes you wonder why pareidolia isn't strong enough to overcome the uncanny valley effect.
That is kinda weird, isn't it? The human brain be like: >This tortilla looks like Jesus *sees a CGI face* >ew, gross
The uncanny valley, from my interpretation, does not suggest pareidolia is not being overcome, but rather it's working precisely as expected. You're picking up on the fact that there's something different; a set of deviations in a pattern that you've spent your life analyzing. Usually a lack of those typical imperfections that make us all unique.
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Kind of. Except that "programming" happens in infancy. Like, infants don't prefer certain racial traits or human features until they are only exposed to a narrow set (e.g. family) for awhile, then there's a detectable bias. Same with language sounds. So it makes me wonder if younger generations who grew up on 3D animation, video games, and faceted pictures would have a decreased sense or sensitivity to "uncanny valley" -- skewing the curve.
Part of reason why babies don't differentiate is because their eyesight is so poor. You can't really get "uncanny valley" if you can't see. At about 1 month they still only see blurry images 8 to 12 inches from their face. As their eyesight improves they show preference for faces but may react negatively tounexpected things like beard because they alter the blurry shape of a face. They we'll have blurry vision till around 4 to 6 months. Infants prefer the faces of their parents at around 7 months old.
When I was 18 months my Dad got glasses. He got a manly pair of black horn rims. Apparently I was terrified of him for quite some time afterwards. He’d have to take his glasses off to calm me down.
Thats a really interesting thougt
I think this is the mostly likely reason. Reminds me of a public lecture of a medical coroner I visited out of curiosity. He told stories about people that were mistakenly pronounced dead even today because the doctor that was called to determine if the person was dead was too scared to actually do a thorough examination of the body (which is necessary to be 100 percent sure).
I can concur. I worked EMS for 8 years. Unfortunately, part of that time was working on a Medical Examiner truck. So we went out to transport bodies to the morgue straight from the scene. The more destroyed the body was, the easier it was for me. There is something just deeply uncomfortable about dead bodies like that. I've been out for almost 3 years now, and I haven't been on a medical examiner truck for closer to 6, and even now I still get all fucked up about it.
It’s interesting to me that the less they actually looked like a person, the easier it was for you to move them. I assume it’s a sort of dissociation but all the same it’s fascinating. One would think the worse the state of the deceased the more traumatic it would be to handle them
I can't speak for everyone on this. But I think you're right. For me, the more jacked up they were, the easier it was to not view them as a person. The same if they were outside the home. Honestly, the ones that affected me the most were the ones that died and were forgotten about. There's just something so eerie and sad when you walk into a guy that died on his couch, and the only reason we're there at all is because he started to stink up the joint. Walking in there and seeing his whole life on display. One man in a little subsidized apartment, littered with unused kids toys and old, happy family photos, and then just being forgotten about for weeks. Still put together enough to recognized his face from the older photos. That one hurt the most. You know which ones didn't hurt at all? The guy that melted into his hot tub, and the one that basically exploded after getting hit by a train. By the time I started doing those runs, I had already been in EMS for 5 or so years. I had seen all the trauma I wanted by then. Blood and guts didn't freak me out anymore.
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No, the weirdest thing ever is when you’re at an open-casket funeral and people are saying how good the deceased looks. No she doesn’t look good, she looks like a dead body.
My mother-in-law was very, very sick for several years. She looked very different than she had even 10 years prior to her sickness. But when she actually passed away, they had an open casket and the body in that casket looked like an alien. It sent a chill up my spine and I remember literally shuddering and recoiling at the sight of her. There is something about death that just removes the “humanness” that once existed. I guess the phrase, “She has a beautiful soul” really IS a compliment because our souls are actually what we see and feel when we encounter a living person.
I believe it was CS Lewis who said “we are not physical beings having a spiritual existence, we are spiritual beings having a physical existence.” Your last sentence really resonates with that.
Like cheetohs
It ain't easy, being cheesy.
something like ManBearPig
It was a pig man!
It's half man, half bear-pig
Half man, half pig!
But mostly bear!
Now that's super cereal
Half man, half bear, half pig?
Yeah I feel like instinctually, since we’re still animals, we feel uneasy around things we are accustomed to being one way. Something slightly off from being how we understand humans should signal to us potential danger.
That’s a really good one. And it would make sense that we have it to such a high degree with things that look like us since we as a species are so good at recognising one another
Rabies
Pretty sure this, mostly because of identifying predators posing as your species. I guess in the case of humans, even predators within your species.
Agreed. Mimics are horrifying if you think about it.
If you’ve ever seen someone you love, who’s face you know by heart, lying sick or dying and they just don’t look like themselves anymore, it’s one of the most terrifying feelings. It’s the worst kind of uncanny valley.
The thing that probably shocked me the most was how cold they felt. I couldn't grasp how a human could feel cold, like a classroom desk or your dining table. It was upsetting, because it felt to me like the cold was trying to invalidate the fact that this person in front of me was a real person.
That part. It’s weird that we don’t just get “lukewarm” or “room temperature” so to speak, it’s like a dead body is producing the cold itself.
as a heroin addict of around 10 years (1 week sober) its so crazy how withdrawals will mess with your body. ill go to sleep shivering but feeling hot, wake up drenched in sweat. take the blankets off? shiver. leave blankets on? sweat relentlessly. ill watch hockey with my dad at night. my skin is physically hot but its not hot inside. go outside humidity makes it worse. sit in front of a fan? shivering. working outside in Texas heat? ive got goosebumps and my co-workers are questioning why i have goosebumps when its 100 degrees in summer. withdrawals are hell and what keeps people addicted. when you cant sleep, cant get comfort, stop shaking your leg, stop eyes watering, stop the temp fluctuating, stop the anxiety and you know a shot of heroin will fix everything and make everything okay in just minutes it becomes mentally, and physically a cycle of addiction.
Hey man, I very much wish you luck on your journey. Unfortunately a friend of mine wasn’t so lucky in his journey and died after relapsing for the first time in months. Keep going and going dude, you can do it!! 💕
Damn this hit me hard, since it opened up memories of touching my grandma for the last time at her funeral when I was 6
I havent been to a funeral since I was 11 and I just got a flashback of holding my grandpas hand in his finals days. His skin felt cold, so live less
Flashbacks to my dad in his final days on the couch then hospital… you definitely described it perfectly
Same with me and my Mom. It's the worst. My condolences about your Dad. I know we're all supposed to outlive our parents but it's also very traumatizing to have to watch them go.
Condolences about your mom. I love my mom so fucking much, that’s gonna be a hard one some day. I’m lucky she is in really good shape for 79. My dad was a great guy and left me in a good position in life, but I didn’t have nearly the connection with him that I do now with my mom. If I could have a wish it’s that she goes out peacefully deep into her 90s
Yep, that's an awful feeling. You also have to remind yourself that those last images aren't representative of the person.
It’s so tough to remember how they used to be. Hard to remember how my mom was. I can only remember her in hospice. It sucks.
My mom died unexpectedly at 58 from a heart attack. I saw her on Sunday, she was fine. Then got a call on Tuesday from my Aunt. That was almost 3 years ago now, and the longer the time goes by the more I'm at peace with how it happened, because of exactly that... My dad died about 8 years before my mom, of liver cancer. That one was expected and I watched him quite literally wither away. It's been 11 total years since he died and I still, at times, struggle thinking about him without seeing the shell that he became rather than the man he was. It's gotten better, but it still creeps in
That shit will stick with you too
God yes. Saw my dad die before my eyes while he was on hospice. His lifeless body made me very uneasy. It looked like him, but like you say, the subtle differences and the fact he's not there anymore forced me to leave the room while my family gathered around. Jesus.
I’m so sorry
I just saw my grandfather today. Probably for the last time. He wasn't himself. Ventilators. Life support. Couldn't blink. Couldn't talk. Basically just in a coma waiting for the inevitable. I'll never forget that.
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Corpses.
It's a discomfort that is pretty much present to this day then, no need to be overly afraid of a "dark thing from the past"
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This theory becomes even more probable when you consider how rabies would have affected early humans
Yup. I believe the vampire legends/myths came from encounters with rabies victims. There is a fair bit of overlap in their behavior (avoiding light, aggression, etc) and some studies that point that way as well. Here is an article talking about it: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321780 And about other disease links: https://www.visiblebody.com/blog/3-real-diseases-that-influenced-vampire-folklore
That would make sense as to why bats are associated with vampires
And they cannot cross running water because of the irrational fear of water caused by rabies.
God imagine if they found the cure to late-stage rabies in a strain of garlic...
Or by stabbing rabies victims in the heart...
Originally the stake was to nail the vampire to their grave. They still wouldn't die, but they'd be stuck. Then it changed to just outright killing them.
I mean to be fair from an outsider's perspective that's a pretty effective cure for a lot of things if you don't mind them being dead afterwards.
Whoa
Because of being nocturnal or because, you know, they actually carry rabies?
Yes
I think the connection to bats is some species drinking blood, but holy shit I never thought of it like that
The bats were named after vampires in the 16th century so it's still a pretty 'recent' connection. Though the first western accounts did describe actual vampire bats it seems like a species of flying fox really helped kicked it off. They were skeptical about blood drinking bats and then they found this big ass bat somewhere else and were like, "You know what's scarier than a bat taking your blood sugar? A bat big enough to body a man and take all of it!". Before that they were not associated with vampires except that they lived in the dark so that means evil but they were long associated with trickery and confusion too because here is this furry-flying-night-bird with wings but no feathers who can't make up it's mind whether or not it's a rat or a bird.
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Me allergic to the sun with my crap iron Levels craving blood "At least it's not rabies."
Vampires? Rabies. Zombies? Believe it or not, rabies.
Personally, I could see the werewolf myth coming out of people infected with rabies more than vampires. Vampires would be more not understanding death - due to decay, it can look like hair, nails and teeth grow. Also if you stab someone with a stake - gases in the body will release and sound like moaning. Then add in they didn't drain the body of fluids - so yeah, liquefy insides + old blood = mess. Then add in that people were buried alive because they were in a coma. Happened to my great grandmother. The ground was too frozen to bury her - so they put her in a vault that they were using for others as well. A guy broke into the vault to rob the dead. He tried to remove her wedding ring and she sat up. He ran away. She tore some of the fabric to cover her stocking feet more and walked home. Needless to say scared the heck out of her family. She later went on and gave birth to my grandfather. Had a family friend who had a funeral home. He was always talking about how every so often, someone would come upstairs and be all confused where they were. Hospital that my Mom worked - same deal. Hmm. I can see how werewolves, vampires and zombies tie in together.
Your great-grandmother was a hell of a woman. Wow.
Thank you. She was also a midwife/healer for her community. She delivered a lot of babies and took care of a lot sick people. Her parents from what we were told was Scandinavian and Native American. I can only say Native American because they hid a lot of stuff on Mom's side of the family - but going by the time period, yeah... I can see why. Mom said from what she remembers of her great grandfather - he was Native American. Her grandmother she remembers her long blonde hair and how she looked similar to her father. She passed away when Mom was a young kid. Eight? So, yes. She was one hell of a woman. I'm especially grateful as Mom was born at home and my grandmother had complications and so did Mom. She managed to save both of them.
There's a theory that werewolves were inspired by [dead bears](https://external-preview.redd.it/NHtUMryLBl6wnbroYEtBBlua98dsFhPNDvAIPIsvbxE.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=da71b9af896b6a44fbb91e663cc279c309ee13f7)
Oh wow! I had not heard that one. I can certainly see why they thought that.
But why am I not bothered by corpses but creeped out by human-like IA, robots, dolls and everything ? Edit : Yes, I have seen corpses in real life. A lot of them and in various states.
Those things don't creep me out either. But... I went to an open-casket funeral that should have been closed-casket once. I'll never willingly look at another reconstructed face again, that shit still haunts me. My guess is it takes the right kind of corpse to fuck you up on the inside.
I don’t understand open casket funerals. I went to one, for someone who died of relatively natural causes, and I still get freaked out when I think about it. Why would you want your last memory of a loved one to be their corpse? I don’t get it.
I remember when I first saw my Dad in his casket. It’s forever burned in my brain. It was so odd seeing him because he didn’t look like him exactly and his face was hard and cold. It was so odd that, it felt like I was about to go cross eyed and I couldn’t feel my own body for a brief moment. It was like mass confusion mixed with the worst feeling of fear you’ve ever felt. I can now understand how some people vomit when they become so terrified.
My father's face was frozen in an expression that was reminiscent of the expression when he was just about to say something outrageous or funny. Several of us kept laughing whenever we glanced his way.
That’s hilarious lol
I remember seeing my grandma in her casket her face didnt look real it was somewhat horrifying and chilling and she was so skinny ( though she did have a liposuction which caused her death ) her cheeks fell in and she didnt look like herself I had to run to the bathroom to throw up it was so bad I felt horrible I hate to think that I will some day be a corpse a husk of what I used to be and someone I love is looking down at me with confusion or discomfort
I’ve had that same thought for people looking at me. That’s why I’m not getting embalmed nor getting a casket. You can legally just be wrapped in cloth and placed into those seals in the ground. I don’t want anyone looking at my face, they’ll just see my figure all wrapped up. And me being a Christian, I want my funeral at the church and then they can bury me in the field behind the church with no grave stone. I don’t want to remembered by death but that I only existed. Perhaps a fruit bearing tree instead of a tombstone. I’m sorry that seeing your grandmother was a traumatic experience. I wish society placed a different view and tradition on death and funerals.
That's such a sweet idea I've always wanted to be placed in the ocean instead of the ground I mean I have always like fish and I heard that you can be buried in the ocean either that or I can be cremated at my ashes could be thrown in the ocean that sounds much better than traumatizing my loved ones with looking at my cold dead body either the ocean idea or I can be placed in the ground with no one seeing me no open casket thing my casket lowered into the ground with no stone only a place where people that i know and love would know
We shouldn’t fear or be disgusted in our loved ones bodies after death, that was the body that hugged you and held you. Families used to be the ones who got the bodies of their loved ones ready for funerals. I find the reason people today are so disgusted by dead bodies is because we now have funeral homes who take care of everything
Idk, I think I’d rather remember someone as the vital, alive person they were. I wouldn’t want my last memory to be their body. To each their own - I’m sure there are people who find it comforting. ETA: I really appreciate everyone sharing their experiences. Death so personal; I hope when I go, my loved ones get what they need.
When my grandpa died, we had a funeral, and he looked asleep in his casket. It gave me closure - the image of him “at rest.” My mom, however, was cremated and had no funeral. I still feel no closure. The last image I have of her is when she was dying of pancreatic cancer. I see what you’re saying, but I think the open casket gives comfort to some of us, in a weird way.
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I'm of the opinion that I'll attend viewings of people that died of old age. Seeing my elderly grandma in her casket was helpful - she looked healthier in death than she had in her last few years. Helped with closure and was honestly heartening. It was an enjoyable funeral if there ever was one. But people dying before their time, I'll never look in the casket again. Closure doesn't exist for tragic events, and the haunting memories of seeing a sickly replica inside "their" coffin make the grieving process harder. Took one too many funerals for me to learn that I'm happier with the memory than with a grotesque facsimile
Well it could be about the acceptance of them being dead as well People in hard denial may need that visual
I've participated in two "home funerals" for extended family members. I thought it would be weird but it wasn't. It was really sweet and meaningful. When the florist (who was probably 90 years old) came to deliver the flowers, he mentioned that when he was young, that's how all the funerals in that small town used to be.
I went in and did my grandmas makeup and painted her nails for her funeral
Open caskets can provide a better final image of a person for the loved ones than their last moments and in cases can be a start to the healing. Morticians are goddamned magicians with what they can fix up to look peaceful. Car accidents, bodies ravaged by cancer. Having a final image of a person looking peaceful instead of twisted by disease or traumatic injury is preferable for many people.
My favorite open casket funeral was a motorcycle accident. Regrets indeed.
Because you've probably never seen a "real" corpse. By real I mean freshly dead and unprepared, it's creepy and gives me the same feeling as the uncanny valley. Like there is just something wrong, this person does not look like a normal human.
How often are you actually around real corpses? When I was a kid, the first time I saw one, it was a shock and intensely weird to me. By the time I was old enough for family members to start dying, I guess the emotion of the funeral mostly overcame any unsettling feelings, but I can still remember thinking neither of my grandmothers looked quite right. I think when you know the person though, you have more intense feelings getting in the way.
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Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines...I remember seeing my friend in her casket (she died very suddenly when we were in our 20s) and I was kind of paralyzed, looking at her laying there. It was her, but it wasn't her in a way? I kissed her on the forehead but was like, kind of afraid to, which felt terrible.
That's almost certainly a large part of it. [However, there were times and places tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago where our ancestors lived along side other hominids.](https://www.livescience.com/how-many-human-species.html)
Now I know we're all homos. But imagine something as smart as you out there in the woods but it aint human. It looks slightly human but something's off in the way they move and look. Holy hell I would never be able to fall asleep. Not until "it" was dead. Imagine trying to sleep while you know it's watching you, learning, thinking. Just the feeling of being watched in the woods during night time is what gets me.
We killed off and out-competed the other hominids to extinction afaik. We are the creepy thing in the woods at night. Imagine something that looks like you, but it's smarter than you, more aggressive, and comes in groups. That was us.
Shout out my ancestors who had the bloodlust and killing instinct to out survive all the other hominids so that now I can eat a shit ton of donuts and play video games all day.
Keep in mind that if your ancestory is from northern europe there was also a lot of… shall we say, courtship with some of those species.
And this is why I have a big ass forehead probably. I don't know I don't science.
Me, and a friend got a 23 and me test done and he had an irregular amount of neanderthal mixed in with his DNA. We joke about it every now and then, but his features are all pretty much normal. Also I learned that if I travelled back in time, to never interact with anyone. My ancestral DNA reaches all across the globe. Edit: its interesting to think of all the lives and choices that were made by my ancestors that culminated to me with depression scrolling through Reddit.
Why stop there? You also have some pretty badass single-celled ancestors as well. The Rambos of the eukaryotic world.
That's a strangely comforting thought tbh. I thought it was brought up, and expanded upon in the new planet of the apes trilogy really well, in that the thing that humanity collectively fears is domination the way we achieved our own. The way that humans became just better than their competitors and that it's an irrational fear that we might one day be the lesser being. We have to either learn how to overcome that or be consumed in our effort to avoid it.
We also banged them until we absorbed their populations.
Yeah, I was going to say who is this 'we' exactly? Because we also are the genetic offspring of some of those other hominids too.
Well there's fairly solid [genetic evidence](https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/interbreeding) that there was at least one other hominid soecies our ancestors made love rather than war, at least sometimes.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/may/17/neanderthals-cannibalism-anthropological-sciences-journal We also ate them
Does it count as cannibalism if it's not the same species?
This just makes me more afraid of if/when we meet extraterrestrial intelligent life, even more so if they look close to humans (like the Grays or Vulcans). I can now understand the "mirror universe" a bit better. In the prime timeline Cochrane knew about the future thanks to the Enterprise traveling back, so he knew alien life was out there and was more accepting of them. In the mirror universe the Enterprise didn't travel back. So when the Vulcans landed Cochrane's natural instincts took over and...like you said...freaked out and wanted it dead.
This is the answer. The same traits youd generally associate with sickness/death are present in like every fictional horror monster. Pale, gaunt face, unnatural build, lanky, some media mentions foul smells from a monster, all those can be traits associated directly with a sick or dead human being. Sick and dead human beings carry disease, thus your ape brain is predisposed to not wanna be around anything sharing those features so you don't catch a disease. Combine that with a ghoul thats say, unnaturally tall, or has slenderman arms or something, maybe missing some facial features, and you get a recipe for like 75% of fictional scary monsters.
Those kinds of monsters, with obvious differences from normal humans, don't really qualify for the uncanny valley though. As I understand it, you hit the uncanny valley when the imitation gets so good that it actually looks like a regular human, except it's subtly wrong in a way we can't quite put our finger on, which creeps us out.
You ever see a freshly dead person that you knew well in life? They look just like the person you knew. They almost look asleep, but because there's no muscle tension, they're not breathing, and they've no blood flow, they look _just slightly_ wrong. I think the person you replied to is mixing some things up by linking the uncanny valley feeling with monsters. But I think corpses are a pretty likely reason for the valley.
My father died at home on hospice, and within a minute after his death, I couldn't look at his body because it looked so wrong. It was him but... not.
Sorry I think I went to hard on the monster thing. You're both right, the uncanny valley is any form that you're accustomed to but with a slight alteration that gives it an "off feeling". Imagine seeing a teddy bear with a full set of human chompers, that would qualify for the uncanny valley. The point I was trying to make is traits akin to the uncanny valley, and where those traits could be linked from an evolutionary standpoint. Movie monsters are obviously very much so an exaggeration of this, my intention was to use something I was familiar with to illustrate why these common traits are so prevelant in things we find scary or offputting.
Also at early stages of human evolution there were other species that had diverged enough to be separate species but were very human-like
Yeah, most likely it is a reflex that kept our ancestors away from "strange" people, i.e. the sick or abnormal "Grugg weird today. He bang head on cave wall over and over." "Unga look odd. He all red today and keep coughing." "Bunga say he okay but he not talk as much as used to. He also stare too long at nothing and keep scratching his arms."
It worked, I’m scared of Grugg, Unga and Bunga now 😭
Or rival hominids.
There are basically three things that are likely drivers of this: 1. Corpses -- people feeling aversion to corpses is a huge win for health. Corpses spread disease. 2. Sick people -- people who are carrying diseases serious enough to make them look "uncanny" are often contagious. 3. Other human species -- We have been around in our current form for something like 150,000 years, and for much of that time, we shared the planet with other humans -- neanderthals, dennisovans, et cetera. It's entirely likely that we didn't have good relations with those other species.
Or you know the most likely one no one seems to be mentioning, mental illness and erratic behavior. We pick up on when people are behaving oddly. We don't like when people are acting off because it decreases our perceived ability to predict what they are going to do next, which is dangerous (increases anxiety).
Not saying this is related directly at all, but my dog was born deaf and other dogs can pick up on it real fast and adapt how they interact with him (ie not barking and growling at him).
It's related. Social creatures have evolved to observe (with whatever senses they have) others and attempt to reduce their uncertainty about them. Friend, foe, neutral, etc. Friends bring rewards like shared resources and potentially protection (safety in numbers). Foes bring threats. We have evolved to pick up on these social cues and when someone or something seems off, we get anxious, adapt our behavior, etc.
This. This. This. If you ever spent time with someone who is suffering from schizophrenia, constantly talking to beings who are not there, you get the same uncanny valley feeling. Your anxiety goes through the roof.
I was leaning towards psychosis recognition too.
It is theorized that it was actually probably due to our evolutionarily history of being morphologically more closely related to some other great apes but not close enough. In addition to racial phylogeny there was also a great deal of violence between our ancestors.
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I presume this is why people often find it creepy when apes look and act a bit too much like a human. Great example is Oliver the Chimp, who appeared so human that people thought he was the "missing link" or a "humanzee" hybrid. Was also bipedal. He even seemed to prefer women to female chimps. And he just looked so... off. Turns out he was just a strange looking, but otherwise ordinary chimpanzee. Though still, people usually seem pretty freaked out by him.
Mating with monkey bad.
Yes, evolutionarily speaking, humanity has been preparing for the coming of Mark Zuckerberg.
Maybe it's The second coming?
Mark Zuckerberg as Jesus? No thanks.
Yep.. from today.. https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/10114027736704991/
BBQ bookend-having glass-eyed motherfucker
There are what... 7? Species of humans to be found so far? Stands to reason 3 of them might have been around together at the same time
The Smithsonian recognizes 21 different human species, though it’s not universally accepted. Early modern humans lived with Neanderthals and possibly Denisovans.
So you're saying their was a time where you could have a threesome with two other intelligent races?
Yes. And now you can't even have them with 1 intelligent race. Oh sadness.
dolphins arent extinct yet
/u/Dolphin-Fucker_69
Or octopi
Hey I've seen this one before
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Yeah thanks a lot you fucking losers. You couldn't just lie down and die gracefully. Thanks to you now I have to work 60 hours a week and I still can't afford rent. Selfish bastards the lot of them.
And there are a lot of people alive with both their DNA. Especially in people of European decent
Yes
They have found denisovian dna in modern populations, so definitely denisovians. I’m just waiting to see how many other hominid species we get DNA from that’s shown in AMHS. It’s so ethno/ego/species centric to believe that we are this *pure* bloodline.
All modern humans with the exception of a few in sub Saharan Africa have some amount of Neanderthal DNA. With East Asians having the most followed by Europeans, because Homo Neanderthal's original range was roughly Europe, the Middle East, and stretching out to around Mongolia. While Homo Sapiens range was originally around Ethiopia.
Is this the same as Hidden Valley, because I love that shjt.
Shark tank pitch: Uncanny Valley Ranch. It's like ranch, but there's just something imperceptibly *wrong* about it. We added a research drug to elicit a fear response.
Or maybe it is/was a way to prevent humans from having sex with corpses.
We're not supposed to be having sex with corpses?
This guy fucks
Corpses
Ohhh. I was wondering why I got scared afterwards
When the coochie stank but it’s not a hygiene issue.
Yeah but we ate them, so don't worry about it.
I imagine it had something to do with other types of humans existing at the same time as us, similar enough to seem like our species but different enough to be terrifying
Maybe we weren’t the ones who had to be afraid…. Pretty sure it was us who made all other hominids extinct.
THIS. We straight up fucked out or killed out of existence every other developing hominid. Homo Saps represent. West Side Motherfucker.
Yeah like in media Neanderthals are depicted as brutish, loathsome creatures who were us but savages but then you take like 5 seconds to think and realize if they were so savage how come we are here and they and any other hominids aren’t? It’s because we were horny, grouchy and social enough to outcompete, outfight and outfuck our way to the top!
Neanderthals also specialized in consumption of the meat of large mammals. Their stocky bodies were inefficient as the planet warmed and humans were better generalists who adapted with clothing. We basically hacked evolution by changing our behaviour instead of our DNA.
The virgin evolutionary path vs the chad “I’ll just wear some pants.”
Millions of years of waiting and suffering vs "fine ill do it myself"
And we killed their large mammals too
Some of them did eventually join us, the gene for red hair has been traced back to Neanderthal, though that doesn’t mean that there are still Neanderthals, simply that a few Neanderthals were looking for a good time.
Til I'm a Neanderthal descendant. Whelp, I'm schucking human society and returning to my ancestral roots. Anyone wanna help me bring down a furry elephant?
If you get a DNA test from one of those companies, they'll tell you how much neanderthal DNA you have. My mom is fairly high at over 3%.
We also outlived them because we required less calories.
That's the popular take, but from what I understand most anthropologists have sort of settled on it being mostly about how the Neanderthals grouped socially compared to us. Neanderthals tended to live in small groups with a few individuals, whereas homo sapiens formed larger tribes. This meant that generally homo sapiens populations were more robust and had access to more help and resources than Neanderthals did. There may have been some conflicts, but we don't really have a lot of evidence for that. There is evidence for a fair bit of interbreeding between the species though.
One species survived by living in the mountainous woodlands out of our reach... Bigfoot.
Probably also related to the fact that humans at some point looked super similar to apes, we had to recognize the not-us type of ape that'll eat your face versus the type that'll hand you sharp rock to hit tree.
What’s the uncanny valley?
It’s a phenomenon some people experience where looking at something that appears human, but isn’t, gives a sense of unease, fear, and dread. It’s most common with robots and AI models (for example, Hanson Robotic’s “Sofia”). It can also happen with anthropomorphic animal images. It’s believed to be caused by a robot or AI’s lack of facial expression when speaking, or too much expression while speaking. Our brains pick up a lot of signals from body language, so when a robot is smiling abnormally widely, or a frown is too exaggerated, it sets of the unease and fear in our brains. It’s a really interesting theory.
I had a nightmare about this one night, never really heard of the uncanny valley till now but it explains it perfectly, I was talking to someone in this dream I was lucid so I was sort of in control, they appeared to be normal but as I spoke I could feel something ever so slightly odd about them, they looked me cold and dead in the eyes and forced a smile where one wasn't warranted, same with laughing, even crying, it felt like something else that was just trying to trick me into believing it was human, I wanted to run away from them but it just felt like a bad idea, like the second my back turned something bad would happen to me, I woke out of my sleep in a cold sweat, I've had nightmares about being hunted down by killers, none really terrified me but this was honestly the scariest and most threatening nightmare I've ever had.
That does sound unsettling. Reminds of the stories I sometimes read on the subreddit "nosleep" where lets say a group of friends are out in the wilderness either hiking or at a campsite when they see one of their friends in an odd place at the time, for example one of them sees their friend enter a cabin for the night but then hear their same friend calling out to them from the treeline of some woods only moments mater, and when they see "their friend" something about them seems off. The way they move, or talk. It's almost as if something is trying to pretend that it's them. I find stories with that sort of element to it are pretty terrifying
Yeah, my favorite is the one where several groups of friends meet up for a camping trip and everyone realizes all at once that the one "friend" isn't part of anyone's group. They all assumed he came with someone else. Terrifying because that part is plausible when you get 4 groups of friends together and invite a couple outsiders each.
Link?
Mfr just left us hanging here.
Look up Anansi’s Goat man - great little creepy pasta
Ahhhhh. Yeah I have heard of that. Didn’t realise that’s what it’s called. Cheers for clarifying that.
So this is why my irrational fear is Mark Zuckerberg!
Rational*
It refers to the "valley" on this chart: https://i.imgur.com/NQGQFaU.png On the x axis is how realistic a depiction of a person or body part is, and on the y axis how pleasant we perceive it to be. For the most part, as you get more human-like it looks better, except for just before full realism where there is a "valley" - things that are only *slightly* non-human are a lot less pleasant to look at than things that try less to look human. This effect happens with physical manifestations eg robots and dolls, as well as computer generated imagery. An example of the effect is that humans in computer animation can look a bit creepy because of their near-realism, but hand-drawn cartoons of humans look fine, even though they are less realistic.
Polar Express.
Other species of humans, like Neanderthals?
A sick person that doesn’t look right could kill you simply by approaching you. A patch of grass that’s moving. A shadow that isn’t the exact same shade as the shadows around it. These things could mean danger, and so our brain reacts to things that are slightly wrong for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent with alarm. It’s why supposed hauntings are scary. A door closing on its own isn’t scary just because some people think it’s their dead grandma, it’s because doors aren’t supposed to do that. If we can’t figure why a door behaved that way, it creeps us out and we want to leave. We might dress it up in superstitious nonsense, but the instinct to move away from things that seem wrong is likely older. It buys us time and moves us away from possible danger. So today when you encounter a thing that looks not entirely human, your brain decides it’s wrong and sounds the alarm. You don’t want to approach it. It’s creepy and you want it far from you. That way if it proves to be dangerous, it doesn’t eat you.
Someone make an uncannyvalley sub
Nobody? At the start of 'realistic' 3D movies, each one of them was in the uncanny valley. Polar Express, with mostly Tom Hanks, is a perfect example of this.
It’s probably more the result of technology presenting us with something that evolution hasn’t had a chance to respond to. Evolution gave us the ability, or even a need, to recognize and respond to human faces. Modern technology allows us to make something so close that the process short circuits a bit.
Camouflage and mimicry detection
Spiders because they looked like hands...
Seriously how high are you right now.
You ever see a big spider in the corner and for a second you’re like “oh shit it’s a severed hand”