I have had my fair share of dental work, which I blame on a defect in my gene pool. My father had dentures by the time he was 13 years old. My mom passed with a mouth filled with real teeth, but every tooth was decorated with at least one silver filling. My mouth has spoiled several family vacations and thwarted many attempts to save money. Like many, I put off some dental work during the Covid crises, and when I returned, my dentist had an impressive new gadget. It was a small camera that he moved around in my mouth, stitching thousands of photos together to form a three-dimensional digital model. Once completed he could rotate the digital model to any angle he wished and zoom in when needed. What was shocking was that instead of making a physical mold for my new crown, he simply sent the fabricator the digital model showing the void in my mouth. It is hard to believe that the scan was accurate enough to fabricate something that requires such precision.
What disturbed me on a personal level was the ability to so accurately visualize and understand the space in my mouth.
I was used to having my dentist display X-rays and interpret the fuzzy blobs for me. However, these images needed no explanation. It is difficult to understand what you can’t see, and at this moment I realized I had been blind, catching limited glimpses of my teeth in the mirror and using my tongue like a walking cane to probe and gather information about the inside of my mouth. I did not realize it until that moment, but I had formed a complex mental model of the space in my mouth, a model that was now being challenged. There it was, more accurate and detailed than I ever imagined. It was both exhilarating and frightening. Frightening because I could no longer conjure up a more flattering mental picture by filling in the missing information with my residual self-image. No, this was real, in some ways too real. It was the mouth of an aging man with a defective gene pool. The problem with seeing is that you can never un-see. You are compelled to separate the real from the unreal. Now I must ponder how many other complex but inaccurate impressions I have developed over the years.