Being in an elevator is a system. The dirty carpet, inhuman metal walls and silent people contribute to this single experience. Mentioning the awkward silence in that very elevator to the strangers makes the system reflexive.

This post is a list of such reflexive systems.

1. Being in an elevator with others and commenting on the awkward tension.

2. Using a mirror to look into your own eyes.



3. This passage from The Society of Neuroscience’s free primer on the brain:

This same model proposes that, when we read a word, the information is transmitted from the primary visual cortex to the angular gyrus where the message is somehow matched with the sounds of the words when spoken. The auditory form of the word is then processed for comprehension in Wernicke’s area as if the word had been heard.

4. This less subtle passage from The Mind’s I:


For another example, imagine someone reading a book in which a descriptive noun phrase of, say, three dozen words in the first sentence of a paragraph portrays an unnamed person of initially indeterminate sex who is performing an everyday activity. The reader of that book, on reading the given phrase, obediently manufactures in his or her mind’s eye a simple, rather vague mental image of a person involved in some mundane activity. In the next few sentences, as more detail is added to the description, the reader’s mental image of the whole scenario comes into a little sharper focus. Then at a certain moment, after the description has gotten quite specific, something suddenly clicks, and the reader gets an eerie sense that he or she is the very person being described! “How stupid of me not to recognize earlier that I was reading bout myself!” the reader muses, feeling a little sheepish, but also quite tickled.

You can probably imagine such a thing happening, but to help you imagine it more clearly, just suppose that the book involved was The Mind’s I. There now — doesn’t your mental image of the whole scenario come into a little sharper focus? Doesn’t it all suddenly ‘click’? What page did you imagine the reader as reading? What paragraph? What thoughts might have crossed the reader’s mind? If the reader were a real person, what might he or she be doing right now?

5. Talking about the science of flirting while flirting.

6. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a lot on reflexive systems. In fact, he uses this phrase in his book Metamagical Themas.

7. It.Self, a well designed online ‘book’ covering ‘Self-Referential Structures’ in music, science, language, literature, film, media, art and design.

8. Another idea of Douglas Hofstadter’s, found in his book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,

In the human brain, there is gullibility. How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some “gullibility center” in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation.

9. Shakespeare wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” but on The Simpsons this was said, “Brevity is … wit.”

10. The cover art for Go 2, XTC’s second album.

11. This comic

12. Perhaps the most famous example of self-reference:



13.



Have any others?

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