“Am I Seeing Double?” 43 Times People Ran Into Their Identical Twin Stranger

The BBC reports that, based on the research into the probability that two people’s faces would match, conducted by Teghan Lucas from the University of Adelaide, the odds of you coming across your doppelganger are incredibly low.

This is, of course, good news for the criminal justice system, though, as the chances of someone with your face impersonating you aren’t significant.

According to Lucas, the chances of you sharing just 8 dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Back when the world population was ‘just’ 7.4 billion people, this meant that there was a one in 135 chance of a single pair of doppelgangers existing.

That being said, a stranger’s facial features don’t have to be exactly the same as yours to resemble you. Features that are ‘close enough’ can create the illusion of you meeting your unrelated identical twin. What’s more, if you have ‘normal’ as opposed to ‘rare’ features, you’re more likely to bump into someone who looks similar to you.

According to the BBC, when looking at a face and trying to figure out if they’re, for example, your friend, our brain uses an area called the fusiform gyrus to tie all the facial features together.

“If you compare it to finding a country on a map, this is like checking it has a border with France and a coast. This holistic ‘sum of the parts’ perception is thought to make recognising friends a lot more accurate than it would be if their features were assessed in isolation. Crucially, it also fudges the importance of some of the subtler details.”

As per statistician Nick Fieller, who works with The Computer-Aided Facial Recognition Project, most people “concentrate on superficial characteristics such as hair-line, hair style, eyebrows.” However, other research indicates that people focus on the eyes, mouth, and nose, in that order.

“There are only so many genes in the world which specify the shape of the face and millions of people, so it’s bound to happen,” Winrich Freiwald, who studies face perception at Rockefeller University, said about the probability of finding someone else with similar features as you.

Meanwhile, Fieller adds: “For somebody with an ‘average’ face it’s comparatively easy to find good matches.”

The BBC states that the probability of meeting someone with the same features as you if you are a male with short blonde hair, brown eyes, a fleshy nose, a round face, and a full beard is a mere one in around 100,000, or 0.00001020%. This particular individual would have no fewer than 74,000 potential doppelgangers. Though, to be fair, many of these feature prevalence rates are not global. So these numbers are a rough estimate.

“I think most people have somebody who is a facial lookalike unless they have a truly exceptional and unusual face,” Fieller told the BBC.

Friewald has a similar opinion: “I think in the digital age which we are entering, at some point we will know because there will be pictures of almost everyone online.”

However, just because someone looks like you doesn’t automatically mean that they’re a long-lost relative from some forgotten branch of your family tree.

“It is entirely possible for two people with similar facial features to have DNA that is no more similar than that of two random people,” points out geneticist Lavinia Paternoster, from the University of Bristol.

We, like many of you, have actually met complete strangers who looked almost identical to us. Numerous times, in fact! It’s an incredibly bizarre sensation to see a mirror image walking about.

Sometimes, it’s a younger or older version of ourselves. Or someone with a similar face but a different build. Other times, they’re about the same age, build, and fashion sense as us, and they could easily be our twins.

It really puts in perspective the fact that we’re not as unique as we think we are (or that we’d like to be) on this planet.

Which of these photos left the biggest impression on you, dear Pandas?

How many doppelgangers of yourself have you spotted roaming about in the wide world? When was the last time you spotted your look-alike, and did you stop them to say ‘hello’?

Did the experience feel bizarre or confusing at all?

We can’t wait to hear your stories! Share them with us and everyone else in the comments.