Why Do We See Mirrors as 'Flipped'?

Mirrors don’t flip your image, you turn it around. Imagine holding up a piece of paper with writing on it to a mirror. The writing doesn’t look backward, it just looks like you turned the paper upside down and held it up.

A mirror works like a window: light bounces off your face, hits the mirror, and goes back out to your eyes. It doesn’t twist or turn your image, it reflects it directly. So when you see your reflection, it's not flipped left-to-right, it’s just mirrored as is.

We think our mirror image is flipped because we're used to turning paper over when reading it. The mirror doesn’t do that; we do!