Why is it that you often see people that resemble your friends, relatives,celebrities etc. but you never see anyone that looks like you ?
I’m guessing someone will be along to say, “I’ve seen someone who resembles me!”
But, to the extent that it’s true, my WAG (which is all it is) is that you’re not looking for someone who resembles you. You have the face recognition software in your brain constantly scanning for people you know, and sometimes you encounter people who are close enough in appearance that they set it off: “BEEP BEEP person recognized: is that Cousin Lou?—oops, false alarm.” But your brain knows to begin with that it isn’t you, so it doesn’t bother checking.
That, or simple probability: you have lots of family, friends, and aquaintances, but only one self, so the chances of running into someone who resembles yourself are a lot lower.
I see dead people. Well, almost. On several occasions, when somebody I’ve known has died, I start seeing people who remind me of him. All it means is that I’ve been thinking about him, so his image is on my mind, sort of like a visual template. So I’m more sensitive than usual to anyone who fits that template.
Because you are comparing groups of people to a specific person. It’s like that birthday statistic. If you have 50 people in the room it’s better than even money that two of them share the same birthday, but it’s better than five to one that one of them has the same birthday as you.
If you compare everyone you’ve ever seen with everyone you’ve ever seen, you’re going to find a lot of similarities, but not everyone will have a match.
I’m here. On a few occasions I’ve seen someone who (I think) resembles me. Actually on one occasion I saw a picture of someone at a local store and the only reason I knew it wasn’t me is because he was wearing a shirt I don’t own. Even had the same facial hair.
I’m not very used to looking at myself, and I think my mind’s image of myself doesn’t match reality, so it’s much more likely to see someone who looks like someone else.
Along those lines, I probably should have said that I sometimes see people that look like how I think I look to others.
There was someone a while back that apparently looked like me. I could kinda see it… If I squinted and he wasn’t standing close to me. I know lots of people in this small town from several years living here and he was newer to the area. He was always being called Clay by people and having people run up to him on the street saying “Oh, hey! Clay! I forgot to tell… wait…” Never happened in the reverse, though.
Absolutely. 
July 1995, my wife and I vacationed in Ireland with two other couples. We had stopped at a small seaside resort along the Ring of Kerry (mostly so that our friend Joe, who has a bladder the size of a single baby pea, could go to the WC).
As we waited for Joe, we were watching some teenagers jumping off of a rock into the ocean below. I was standing next to my friend Karen, while the other three of us had walked across the street to get a closer look. As Karen and I stood there, walking up from the resort was a man with his five daughters, following behind him, apparently in chronological order, like the animation at the beginning of “The Partridge Family.”
As he got closer, he and I got a good look at one another…and realized that there was an uncanny resemblance. We kept staring at each other as he walked past with his daughters.
Once he passed, my friend Karen elbowed me. “Mike, that guy could have been you!” “Yeah, I know…and if I’d stayed Catholic, didn’t believe in birth control, and married at 20, that would have been me!”
I met my double. A guy in a bar came up to me and gave me an inappropriate hug/grope. As I was winding my fist back to punch his lights out, he said, “hang on…you’re not going to believe this…” and came back with his girlfriend, who looked exactly like me. It was very unsettling. She was a bit younger than me, but we were virtually mirror images of each other. :eek:
I too saw someone once who looked just like me. She was behind the counter of a department store just past the entrance. As I walked in the store, I did a literal double-take, and realized she did one too. We both just stared at each other for a minute before I walked on. It was really weird, same physical appearance and same hair color and style.