I 23(f) have lost two close friends in horrific circumstances over the last few years. Can anyone explain to me why bodies,
particularly faces, looks so different after death – is it because they’ve been embalmed, or is it the human brain not being able to process what they’re seeing infront of them? Apologies if this is too gruesome for this sub, i think this might be me grieving and just trying to find some way to understand why.
In: Biology
It can be attributed to a phenomenon called “uncanny valley”.
When we see cute unrealistic humans, animals or robots in a cartoon we like them, they’re obviously not real but they’re cute, to our brains they feel like cute human babies for which people have natural instinct of taking care of. Let’s assume that kind of “thing” is level 1 on “spectrum”, imagine characters like dogs from cartoon Blue.
They can be little less unrealistic but still out there, think of characters from The Simpsons, they’re humans but all are yellow, have weird shapes etc, “level 2”
We can get a little more realistic, think The Last Airbender, lvl 3
etc…
We can go to level 4, 5, 6, eventually arrive at a realistic looking game like Red Dead Redemption 2. Problem comes when something looks almost like human, so similar you can’t tell it’s not actual human at the first glance, but something feels off, that gap between “characters from peak of realistic looking video games” to “actual human” is what we call uncanny valley. Embalming, unhealthy looking skin or the makeup, body positioned in an odd way (some corpses have their jaw broken to be closed in a casket, it can look odd) all combined with stiffness of the corpse, causes the uneasiness which makes their look feel off.
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