Seeing Faces in Everything
Science tries to answer why we see faces in the oddest things.
Everyone's read stories where someone saw the face of a religious icon in a water stain, or the face of a previous president on a potato chip. Researches believe that because we see so many faces every day, our brain sees faces in places they do not exist.
It is common for many people to see faces in inanimate objects, such as a region of Mars which resembled the shape of Cydonia, as seen from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. People have also seen faces in Rorschach inkblots, the interference patterns of oil on water, and the lunar surface. A woman in Florida, Diana Duyser, even claimed to see the face of the Virgin Mary in the skillet marks of a toasted cheese sandwich. She held on to the famous sandwich for 10 years, before it fetched $28,000 on eBay, thus indicating that others could also see the spiritual image.
Long before this commercial sandwich success, Dr Doris Tsao,a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen, developed a theory that people process faces differently to other objects. She thought that a particular region of the brain may be responsible for this face- processing ability.
Dr Tsao utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to locate the regions of the brain that were stimulated when macaque monkeys were shown various objects such as scrambled patterns, pieces of fruit,various machines – and faces. She found that groups of neurons in three regions of the brain’s temporal lobe were strongly associated with facial recognition.Her conclusive results were published in the journal Science.
Dr Tsao made a remarkable discovery. The facial recognition areas of the brain were stimulated when the observed objects were only roughly face-like, and not real faces at all. That is why the monkeys recognized some non-faces as faces.
Dr Pawan Sinha is a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has devoted a long period of her research to determining exactly what triggers the facial recognition response. It has the potential for use in identifying terrorists or other dangerous criminals. She developed facial recognition software, and put hundreds of varied faces into the program. The computer found relationships that were very significant inmost faces, but also in a few non-faces. Dr Sinha found that these relationships were often very simple, such as the colour of the eyes compared with that of the skin of the forehead, and whether the mouth was darker than the cheeks. She determined that if about 12 of these relationships were used in conjunction, a template could be developed to locate a face.
Dr Sinha’s computer was able to identify particular face seven when the images were at low resolution. It could successfully do so even with blurry face images, with only 12 x 14 pixels’ of information. This means that the computer processed faces holistically, as with entire landscapes, not just one feature at a time; this is the way the human brain also recognises faces. Dr Sinha believes that it is the overall organization of the image that allows us to process faces. However the process is not foolproof. Some faces may not be recognized, while some non-faces may be. This is why a toasted cheese sandwich may resemble the Virgin Mary’s face!
| “Faces are such common things in our experience that people may see faces in non-face objects” |
This ability of our brains to recognize non-faces as faces may be a result of our neural architecture, but Dr Takeo Watanabe, a neuroscientist at Boston University, has another explanation. He believes the very large number of actual faces may be partly responsible for what is called the Nun Bun phenomenon. This is where the brain is bombarded with a stimulus, and then after the bombardment is stopped the brain still continues to perceive the stimulus.
Dr Watanabe tested this hypothesis by asking subjects to sit in front of a computer monitor with faint dots cascading across it. Initially,the participants were not able to determine the direction of the dots’ movements. But after a subsequent series of tests they were able to identify letters superimposed on the dots as they traversed the monitor.
The next step was for the participants to be shown a blank screen and to say what they saw. The responses were remarkable – they said that they still saw the dots moving as in the previous tests.
Dr Watanabe theorizes that subliminal learning may actually interfere with perceptions of reality. Because of the repeated presentation of the dots the subjects had developed an enhanced sensitivity to them, which resulted in them seeing the dots when they were not actually there.
Dr Watanabe says that as faces are such common things in our experience they are like the dots in the experiment. This means that people may see faces in non-face objects. Dr Watanabe believes that this may be a survival strategy, when primitive humans needed to avoid predators, such as the saber-toothed tiger. Dr Sinha agrees that facial recognition, whether inherited or a learned behaviour, may be a critical reason for our evolutionary success story. She points to the high level of information available in a face,not just the person’s identity, but also factors such as their health and mental condition. It is advantageous for us to be able to recognize faces – the consequences of failing to identify faces may be worse than seeing a non-face as a face.
See HeadStrong for facial recognition exercises.
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