Uncanny Valley and Bodies Revealed

I've had a lot of parents worried about how their children will react to the corpses in Bodies Revealed.  And a lot of adults were creeped out by the idea of what they were looking at.  But in the 5 months that I've been facilitating Bodies Revealed, I've only had a small handful of visitors freak out and have to leave.  

So in this society where death is so hidden from the average person, and most of my visitors had probably never seen a corpse that hadn't been embalmed and prepared, why didn't they freak out? (Well ok, these bodies were embalmed and prepared too, but they definitely don't look like they are sleeping).

I think it has a lot to do with the concept of the uncanny valley that is usually discussed in animation and robotics.  Basically humans will anthropomorphize almost anything and except a lot of very non-human faces and read them easily.  But if a face starts to look TOO real we will suddenly and unconciously become a very harsh critic of what we are seeing.

So as an example think of a very exaggerated feature animation like Japanese Anime or an emotion chart:

The crazy eyes don't strike us as creepy, and we have very little trouble reading the emotions in the exaggeration. 

Yet overly realistic baby dolls, robots, masks or animation can just seem odd or somehow threatening:

We've been primed by evolution to reject signs of disease and read others emotions.  So when the emotions don't read correctly, all of our warning bells go off that this person is dangerous, or lying or otherwise just wrong.  This is the same kind of feeling a lot of people get with clowns, mimes, and heavily overdone make-up.  We can see the face underneath, but the emotions and contrast are all wrong.

If we were to see just the skin on the body, we would probably all be freaking out.  Bodies not moving is a classic evolutionary get out of town warning.  He's dead, whatever killed him is probably nearby.  But by changing the appearance of the body and especially the face by removing the skin and presenting muscle and bone there is enough unreality to create distance.  And then if you make another step out to the circulatory system, we can really appreciate the intricacy without tripping up our inner sense of creepiness.  And we have thus distanced ourselves from the humanity of the donors to study and appreciate the amazing structures of the body.

So Bodies Revealed did it right, keeping enough features to remind us of the humanity of the donors, but changing enough of the facial features to leave us out of the uncanny valley discomfort zone.  It's a good reminder that studying sciences and psychology across disciplines can provide lessons in unexpected places.