Why do brains love faces?

Why do we have so much circuitry in the brain devoted to faces? Why does your electrical plug seem to look like a little face? Did aliens plant a signal for us on Mars, or are we looking at a quirk of our own brains? What is face blindness and what is a super recognizer? What does any of this have to do with looking at a magazine upside down, or why computer algorithms sometimes think a jack-o’-lantern is a person? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into something so fundamental as to be typically invisible.

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More Information:

Kanwisher N, McDermott J, Chun MM. The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception.

Liu J, Li J, Feng L, Li L, Tian J, Lee K. Seeing Jesus in toast: neural and behavioral correlates of face pareidolia. Cortex. 2014 Apr 1;53:60-77.

Mamiya Y, Nishio Y, Watanabe H, Yokoi K, Uchiyama M, Baba T, Iizuka O, Kanno S, Kamimura N, Kazui H, Hashimoto M. The pareidolia test: a simple neuropsychological test measuring visual hallucination-like illusions. PLoS One. 2016 May 12;11(5):e0154713.

Bednarik RG. Rock art and pareidolia. Rock Art Research: The Journal of the Australian Rock Art Research Association (AURA). 2016 Nov;33(2):167-81.

Schalk G, Kapeller C, Guger C, Ogawa H, Hiroshima S, Lafer-Sousa R, Saygin ZM, Kamada K, Kanwisher N. Facephenes and rainbows: Causal evidence for functional and anatomical specificity of face and color processing in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2017 Nov 14;114(46):12285-90.

Ekman P. Universal facial expressions in emotion. Studia Psychologica. 1973 Jan 1;15(2):140-7.

Murray E, Bennetts R, Tree J, Bate S. An update of the Benton facial recognition test. Behavior Research Methods. 2022 Oct;54(5):2318-33.

Think you might be a super-recognizer? Take the Cambridge Face Memory Test or the UNSW Face Test.

When the facial recognition algorithm fails.

The “Face on Mars”

Pareidolia: The Phenomenon of Seeing Faces Everywhere. Library Voices. February 3, 2024 by Rory.

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