👤 **面孔的局限性与他人的重要性**：在现代影像技术出现之前，人类获取自身面孔的途径极为有限，如倒影、光滑的冰面等。因此，面孔在很大程度上是由他人（通过眼神交流和对自身反应的观察）来塑造和认知的，这构成了早期人类认识自我的主要方式，如同终其一生的“我是谁”的游戏。

🔊 **声音感知与自我认知的类比**：文章通过类比听自己录音时的陌生感，来帮助读者理解早期人类可能存在的自我认知体验。我们通过骨传导听到的声音与通过空气传播的声音不同，这种差异可能与祖先在照镜子或看水洼时产生的“这是我吗？”的惊奇感相似，挑战了我们对“自我”的固有认知。

💡 **身份的灵活性与自我设限**：文章将自我身份比喻为一个可以扩展边界的“袋子”，可以包含物品、社群成员，甚至观念和信仰。认识到古代人类无法确切认识自己的面孔，可以帮助我们反思当前身份认同的固化，鼓励我们在坚持某些信念或事业时，保持一种更灵活、不那么执着的态度，避免不必要的痛苦。

🌳 **借鉴历史，保持开放心态**：通过回顾人类认知自我的历史演变，文章提示我们，即使是那些我们认为与自我密不可分的事物，也可能随着时间和环境而改变。这种历史视角有助于我们在面对强烈的个人认同感时，学会适时抽离，以更开放的心态接纳变化，不因固守身份而产生过度的焦虑或痛苦。

Published on November 6, 2025 10:43 AM GMT

When you are born, nobody knows your face. And in particular, you don’t know your face.

As you grow up, you become familiar with your face, observing how it slowly changes, with its pimples coming and going. This ability hinges on the peculiar fact that you have access to images of yourself, mainly from mirrors and photos.

But these are both relatively recent inventions. The first daguerreotype portrait was taken in 1839, and the earliest traces of manufactured mirrors were polished obsidian found in modern-day Turkey, dated to 6000 BCE. So, ten thousand years ago, your options for seeing yourself were:

A still lake or rain puddleLooking into someone’s eyeA naturally shiny stoneA smooth sheet of ice

And… that’s pretty much it. Your face used to be how other people knew you. It must have been common to live your entire life without knowing what you looked like.

But the primary way you would get to know yourself was through the reactions of your peers around you. It is like playing the game “Who am I?” (“Devine tête” in French), with the character you are trying to guess being your face, and the game lasting for all your life.

To get a sense of what it feels like to see your face in such a world, we can look at the effect of listening to a recording of yourself. People in your life are intimately familiar with the sound of your voice, but you are familiar with another voice. This is the sound of your voice when it reaches your ears through your head instead of through the air.

We all have had this cringe experience: is this what I sound like? Our sense of self gets challenged, this weirdly foreign voice is supposed to be me? This might be the feeling shared by one of our ancestors ten thousand years ago, casually going for a walk to pick berries after the rain and stopping in shock, looking down at a puddle.

Today, our face feels like a universal way to say, “this is me.” It shows how flexible our sense of self is. It is like a bag whose boundary can expand to include objects through ownership, people from our tribe, or ideologies and beliefs.

Knowing our ancestors didn’t know their faces can help us keep our identity small. It can allow us to take a step back when we hold on strongly to a cause that feels so close to our hearts, so close to who we are. Does letting this go feel worse than forgetting your face?