Capgras delusion makes people see loved ones as imposters due to disrupted emotional brain circuits.

Social media can strip away human warmth, leaving only surface-level, "imposter" versions of people.

TikTok takes this further, built from the start with no connection to your real social world.

On an ordinary summer morning in 1994, David woke up with a stranger in the house.

When he went into the kitchen for breakfast, there she was, making coffee. She looks up at him calmly as he enters the room, as if nothing is out of the ordinary. "Hello, David," the portly woman in a sunflower dress says calmly. "How does she know my name?" David thinks.

When he studies her face, he's struck by an uncanny observation: she looks exactly like his Mom. She looks like her, talks like her, and acts like her. He doesn't know who this woman is, but one thing is certain—she's not his Mom. She's a realistic look-alike who's impersonating his mother; she's an imposter.

The woman here is, in fact, David's mother. David, or patient D.S., as he was known, suffers from a rare disorder called Capgras delusion. It's a neurological condition typified by a deeply held conviction: the people close to them are not who they say they are. She looks like your mother, but something's missing; she's an imposter pretending to be your mother.

What accounts for this seemingly strange belief? When we examine the underlying neuroscience, we see that these beliefs aren't so irrational; they're the only rational response the brain can draw when presented with a strange set of social circumstances. And when we zoom out, this neuroscience provides a key framework to understand our own social psychology in the digital world.

The Science of Capgras Delusion

Capgras delusion is a mysterious condition. The leading explanation is that it arises with brain damage in the temporal lobe, which separates two streams of social representation. Ordinarily, we represent the people we know in two ways. One is what we know about them: their basic biography, superficial features, what they look like, what they do.

At the same time, we also have a representation of the person's internal model: their personality, beliefs, and their humanity. Who they are and how they make us feel. This is a deeply emotional representation. You don't know someone is trustworthy; you feel it.

Ordinarily, these two representations are so closely linked that we experience them as one. It’s human nature that we experience them as one. When you look at your Mom, you instantly retrieve what you know about her, and simultaneously, you sense the "warm glow" of her essence.

In Capgras delusion, this connection is severed. The emotional representation is damaged or inaccessible. All that remains are the cold, hard facts. When you look at your mother, all you get are the basic features. The warm glow is absent. The only conclusion our brain can draw is that the person you're looking at is an imposter. They look like my Mom, but they don't feel like my Mom.

As the philosopher of mind William Hirstein writes, "Capgras syndrome occurs when the internal portion of the representation is damaged. This produces the impression of someone who looks right on the outside, but seems different on the inside, i.e., an impostor."

The Capgras experience is all what and no who; all facts and no warmth; all of a person's external features, and none of the internal landscape.

From Social Media to TikTok

In Capgras delusion, real people don't feel like real people. And in the digital world, something akin to this strange way of seeing other people may slowly be becoming the norm.

The biggest difference between online and real-world social experiences is that online, people are commodified. To be exported into a digital environment, a person's humanity must be boiled down into a collection of manageable pixels.

But there's a spectrum. Early Facebook built its empire by leveraging your existing social ties. If you wanted to see what your friend Lindsay did over the weekend, you looked up her page.

Sure, everyone is a digital abstraction, but these are people you actually know. When you look at a photo, you retrieve their features, and you feel the humanity.

And then came TikTok. While other platforms had tiptoed outside the bounds of a user's social network, TikTok never ventured there in the first place. It threw the social baby out of the social media bathwater. In throwing out the social fabric, short-form video platforms such as TikTok created something that echoes the specific uncanniness of Capgras delusion.

If you're a TikTok user, think about what the "For You" page actually feels like. You open the app, and you are immediately confronted with a face. A person looking right at you, talking directly to you, as if they know you. They're warm, confessional, intimate. They share opinions, tell stories, give advice, and speak with the easy familiarity of a close friend. Your brain registers all the social cues of someone you should know.

But you don't know them. You've never met them. And in a few seconds, they'll be replaced by another face doing the exact same thing.

This is a social experience that barely exists outside of a neurological condition. In everyday life, when do you encounter a rapid-fire barrage of strangers who seem to know you, who speak with warmth and familiarity, and yet whom you don't know at all? Almost never.

I argue that the experience of TikTok ehcoes that of Capgras delusion, where familiar people feel like strangers. On TikTok, strangers feel like they should be familiar. Both are cases where the two streams of social representation have been pulled apart. You get the surface, all the right features, but the warm glow of genuine knowing is simply not there.

To scroll TikTok is to encounter a world full of people who look and sound real, who feel like they should be yours, but who remain, at their core, strangers.

The article also appears on the human nature blog, NeuroScience Of.

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