In keeping with Greek lore, Caravaggio, the Italian baroque maestro of the 16th century, made his Narcissus gaze into the pool. It is generally agreed by myth-makers of yore as well as by those decoding their myths that Narcissus — young and sublimely beautiful — having fallen in love with himself, could not quite take his eyes off the image floating on the still water. Modern science has now traced the direction of Narcissus’s gaze. It is possible that the son of Cephissus and Liriope was not quite admiring his countenance; Narcissus may well have been appreciating the size of his head.
In a recent study, 300 volunteers, having completed a psychological test that is designed to be a measure of narcissistic traits, were made to estimate — admire? — their head circumference, heart weight, hand size, lung capacity and the weight of their brains. The results would perhaps have made Narcissus look up from the pool, if only for a second. It was found that men with pronounced narcissistic traits put greater weightage on head circumference and brain weight. The larger the head, the greater, the modern Narcissus insists, is the intellect. Narcissism even has a way of getting past barriers of gender. So women narcissists, the study found, overemphasized their lung capacity; smaller heads, these self-absorbed ladies believe, had potential, making them attractive to mates.
Unfortunately for narcissists, brain size has no bearing on intelligence and mental abilities. The ‘science’ of phrenology, which argued that the size of the skull was an indicator of innate intelligence, had been discredited years ago. In fact, phrenology, it is now believed, mirrored humanity’s cruder prejudices and was an attempt to differentiate among and discriminate against people — especially indigenous societies — to justify offensive notions. It was a noxious union of science and racism. But then empty vessels, idiomatically speaking, are known to raise a frightful din, and politicians, human history shows, need not be the only species helming these carriages of misinformation.
Finding themselves cornered by the cold logic of reason, the narcissists have now struck back with a vengeance. It would be a bit odd to spend time staring into stagnant pools in the modern age. But the same pleasure can perhaps be derived from gazing at — for hours — one’s profile on Facebook or some other popular social media platform. The potential of social media to turn sociable human beings into insular, egocentric entities in a matter of days rivals the magnetic pull of Narcissus’s pool. Indeed, much of modernity’s warts — the loss of empathy, hubris, vulnerability to orchestrated falsehood — can be attributed to the human failure to look up from the screen — the 21st-century version of Narcissus’s pool — and examine, objectively, the world and themselves. This burgeoning loss of objectivity seems to have led to the bloom in unreason. Why else would men still pride themselves on the size of their brains?
