A weird Robin-centric fan fiction idea I had. Post-season 2.
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The skull-shaped lamp on my desk is more for an aesthetic than practicality. It fails to illuminate more than a single-foot radius, so the rest of the room is shadowed. My eyes are used to the dimness, but as I pull the large mirror out from under my desk and prop it against the side of my bed, the reflection is too dark for me to make out any of the finer details. My face is recognisable, though it’s impossible to separate the dark irises from the pupils, and the posters behind me are blurs of black, grey and red.
Good. That should hurry things up.
The human brain is a complex and, oftentimes, fussy organ. It seeks out sensory input like plants seek sunlight, but it will also discard out any sensation that’s present long enough to get used to. People aren’t conscious of the feel of the clothes against our skin, or the buzz of the refrigerator, or the blinking lights on their alarm clock, unless something about those repetitive, mundane sensations changes—becomes interesting.
If those sensations never change—never become more than an environmental automatism—the brain will make its own entertainment. This is more likely to happen in states of sensory deprivation. It’s common for blind people to hallucinate swirling colours and flashing lights. The deaf hear murmurs, and footsteps, and music. These are never completely original creations, but instead draw on memories. A unique jumble of thoughts and experiences. Lazy abstractions.
This is also how dreams are formed.
One method of boring your brain is to stare into a mirror. Fixate on one spot on your face, and after a couple of minutes, your features will start to disappear. This phenomenon is known as Troxler’s Fading. Then, the remaining details will shift. Change. Deform. This is Troxler’s Effect.
The endurance of mirror games like Bloody Mary and Candy Man can be credited to this. When I first read about Troxler’s Effect, I’d expected to see facial distortion and shadow beings—this is what most other people reported, so anything else seemed far-fetched.
I hadn’t expected my face to change so entirely.
In the beginning, I could only focus for five-minute stretches before my mind would wander, and my eyes would jerk to some other point in the room. It was enough time to see the shape of my eyes change, the corners sloping downwards in a way that looked decidedly sad.
By the time I made it to the ten-minute mark, those sad eyes had turned blue, my cheeks had slimmed, and my hair was lighter. There was almost nothing left of my own face in the mirror.
I can stare for upwards of an hour at a time, eyes fixed on the ones in the mirror, watching them shift and settle. The details change—blemishes, hairstyle, the hue of the eyebags—but it’s always the same face.
And it’s so familiar.
Realistically, I know my brain can’t create an entirely new face, so of course I’ve seen it before. It has to have come from somewhere. But I can feel it in my guts—this isn’t the face of someone I saw on television, or passed in the street, and then forgot about. I know the boy in the mirror. I know him intimately. I’m sure of this, but no matter how much time I spend staring at him, I can never figure out how. There’s no eureka moment. I watch him until my head hurts and my eyes droop enough to break the spell, but nothing ever clicks.
This hobby has turned into a ritual. Every night, once the rest of my family has gone to bed, I set the mirror up and stare into it until I can’t anymore.
I’ve started to dream of him. He wears a school uniform I don’t recognise and talks with figures that I do. I’ve met these people before—I remember their faces, their smiles, their teeth—but don’t know who they are. I can’t know who they are, this pervasive voice whispers. They aren’t real. Sometimes it’s my own voice, sometimes it’s someone else’s, and other times I can’t tell. They meld together so perfectly I wonder if it really is all me—my own voice, my own smile, my own face—and I’m going mad.
Every time a name is on my tongue or an image begins to fade into a memory—faces growing clearer, and younger—the voice is there to intervene.
This is called the Troxler Effect, and when you do it on people it’s absolutely terrifying sometimes. Especially when you do it to yourself in a mirror. The longer you look, the creepier it gets.
(Comment what happens when you do this. It’s different for everyone.)
Our mind is constantly trying to make sense of the world around us, and sometimes certain combinations of lines and colours result in optical illusions.
If you stare at this image for 10 to 20 seconds, the entire image will fade away until it completely disappears. This optical illusion is known as the Troxler effect (or Troxler fading). The basis of which is, if you focus on one tiny point, and the rest of the scene doesn't move, your eyes sort of becoming desensitised to it, and fade it into the background.
It’s unknown exactly how the effect occurs, and whether it’s the brain or the eyes (or both) that are responsible. What’s clear though, is that after prolonged fixation, unvarying stimuli soon fade from our awareness. The Troxler effect is enhanced if the stimulus is small, of low contrast, or is blurred, as in the image above.
