It takes just a teeny bit of damage or malfunction in the brain for us to lose our ability to distinguish between faces. In other words, our ability to recognize faces is highly sophisticated, or, in other words, we look more alike than we might like to think.
Photos purporting to show ‘twins’ rely heavily on similarity of expression, age, hair, facial hair, clothing, weight, etc. I thought the celebs look-alike thing was meant as a joke to mock the men’s steely brooding gazes and the women’s, um, ‘do me’ pouts, and not as ‘evidence of reincarnation'? (Unless you’re willing to believe Jack Black is Figaro reincarnated.) There’s little similarity in the facial features of MM and Britney Spears, for example, but that’s a moot point for an argument in any case, as both had extensive plastic surgery (as has Nicolas Cage and Keanu Reeves). Keanu Reeves’ features are nothing like those of his look-alike, so I don’t get that one at all.
As to mannerisms - my father-in-law, who died many years ago, had a particular expression that’s a little hard to explain, but he’d close his mouth, become quiet and still, and just survey the room. It was very distinctively ‘him’. A few years ago I noticed one of his great-grandchildren with exactly the same expression. Another woman who'd married into the family and who’d known him also commented on it, so it wasn’t just me. Wow!…was he back!?...probably not...more great-children have now shown up, and several of them do exactly the same expression. Genetics. Weird stuff.
