There was something off about me, maybe in my gestures, my facial expressions or eye movements, and certainly in the things I said. Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. For the kids in my kindergarten class, I was the unsettling object. Those five- and six-year-olds were not fooled by the counterfeit human.
