June 17, 2024 • 36 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Brains love to look at faces, But why and what
is face blindness? And what is a super recognizer? Why
does your electrical plug sometimes look to you like a
little face? Did aliens plant a signal for us on Mars?
(00:24):
Or are we looking at a quirk of our own brains?
What does any of this have to do with the
neurologist Oliver Sachs and his inability to recognize most of
the people in his life, or looking at a magazine
upside down? Or what the mistakes in computerized face recognition technology?
(00:45):
Tell us Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in
these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe
to understand some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.
(01:12):
Today's episode is about faces. Now, let's say I posed
the question to you, how does the brain recognize faces?
You may reasonably think, why is that even a question?
Recognizing people's faces isn't really that hard, But think about
(01:32):
how similar faces are to one another. They're insanely similar.
You have two eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, everyone's face
looks pretty much the same people's faces are pretty much
very tiny variations on a theme. The only reason you
are able to distinguish faces, literally thousands of faces from
(01:55):
one another, is because your brain devotes an enormous amount
of circuitry to it. It puts so much effort in
that it feels effortless to you. And we have all
this circuitry because face recognition is extremely salient. It's how
we recognize this package of identity from this other. Oh
(02:19):
that's my mother, that's my neighbor, that's my wife. There's
Tom Cruise and his face is similar but different from
Dwayne Johnson, and that's different from Joe Biden. It's massively
important for us as a social species to keep track
of identities. Your brain wants to know who it is
(02:42):
and everything that entails, like is that a friend or
an enemy? What are the risks and opportunities here? And
the answer to that is massively different. If you're looking
at the face of Ted Bundy versus your best pal,
and keep in mind that to a space alien and
these faces would be essentially indistinguishable. Now, when you're trying
(03:04):
to distinguish faces, there are lots of other cues like
hairline and hairstyle and height, and details of their skin
from color to smoothness, and even cues like how they
walk and their clothing choice. And context also plays a
large role. You've probably experienced some time when you saw
(03:28):
somebody you know well, like a neighbor or a colleague,
but it's in an unfamiliar setting and you struggle to
recognize them immediately. Why does that happen Because our brains
use contextual cues when identifying people, So our brains rely
not just on facial features, but also on surrounding context
(03:49):
of all sorts to identify people. But despite all these
other cues that we use, just note that facial recognition
is possible even over zoom, where many of those other
cues are gone. And even if you've got a bunch
of movie stars to put on wigs and change their
hairlines and so on, you'd still be pretty good at
(04:12):
distinguishing them just based on the details of the face itself.
And I think there are at least two ways to
appreciate how hard a challenge face recognition is to the brain.
The first is to understand how difficult it is to
get computers to recognize and distinguish human faces. Now you
(04:36):
might think, aren't we pretty good at this with modern technology. Yes,
but this has been a sixty year slog by very
smart people in the computer science world. Starting in the
nineteen sixties, people realized that face recognition was a really
hard problem, and they've been climbing that hill ever since.
(04:57):
So the way that researchers have gotten face recognition to
work on computers nowadays is by busting the problem up
into different computational stages. So first, you have algorithms just
for detecting a face, like is there a face out there?
Then you have a second step where you segment this
(05:20):
face from the background and figure out how the face
is aligned to tell you about the size of the
face and the illumination on the face and even the
pose of the face. Then you have a third step
where you extract the facial features, like here's the length
of the nose and the distance between the eyes, and
the shape of the mouth and the position of the ears.
(05:42):
All these things you pinpoint and you measure them, and
then in the fourth step, you match those numbers against
a database of faces to see if you can identify
this one. So this is a really complicated algorithm and
it's instructive to see how computer get things wrong. I
saw a great photograph where it's a family sitting on
(06:05):
their porch at Halloween, and the computer has identified each
of their faces and put a little label next to it,
like Henry and John and Sarah, and then it identifies
another face and says unknown person. But that face is
the Jack O lantern, the pumpkin that's sitting there on
the porch. Now, a human observer would never make that
(06:27):
kind of mistake. But this goes to show that it's
a very computationally challenging problem. So some version of this
very complicated algorithm, probably not exactly the same, but equally complex.
This is what your brain is doing under the hood
when you just glanced at some billboard and you think, oh,
(06:49):
that's Paul Giamati. I love that guy. And we'll come
back to what the brain is doing in just a moment,
but I just want to say for now that quite
often we find that the tasks that seem most effortless
to us are the things underpinned by the most brain circuitry.
And I want to look at a second way to
(07:10):
appreciate how hard a challenge face recognition is for the brain.
Just look at a bunch of Golden Retriever faces. If
you were in a situation where you were hanging out
with hundreds or thousands of Golden Retriever dogs, do they
really look that different to you? Or consider horse faces
(07:33):
or squirrel faces or cowfaces. Obviously we can imagine some
faces at the extreme that look a little bit different,
But in general, if I dropped you into the middle
of a giant ranch and you looked at thousands of cows,
you'd say, okay, well, each face has two eyes and
a snout and a mouth, and there's just not that
(07:55):
much difference from one face to another. You wouldn't meet
recognized if one of those cows had been in a
movie like oh, that's that famous cow, or if one
of those cows was wanted by the legal system, like
wait a minute, I recognize that cow from the poster
of the post office. And of course, if one of
(08:17):
these cows was looking at you and a bunch of
other humans, she would feel exactly the same way. There's
not that much difference between human faces. Now side note,
which we'll return to. If you were the rancher, you
could get better at distinguishing cow faces. This is because
of brain plasticity and because distinguishing the cows is salient
(08:40):
to your rancher brain. But for now, what I want
to surface is just how similar faces are before you
get good at them from experience. Faces are unbelievably similar.
And one expression of this difficulty in distinguishing faces comes
from a psychological effe fact called the other race effect,
(09:03):
and this refers to the tendency of people to have
more difficulty recognizing faces that belong to races that are
not their own race. This phenomenon is also known as
the cross race effect or the own race bias, and
it's been widely studied and you see it across all cultures.
Now people sometimes hear this and they take this as
(09:24):
evidence for racism. It's not racism in the sense of
you treating your own group better and other groups more poorly. Instead,
the other race effect simply results from the fact that
your brain gets trained up on the faces around you,
and you are better at recognizing those faces than other faces.
(09:45):
So if you grew up in Cambodia, you will be
excellent and distinguishing Cambodian faces, and maybe not so great
at distinguishing Norwegian faces. If you grew up in Norway,
you're excellent and distinguishing Norwegian f but not so great
at distinguishing Zimbabwean faces. And if you grew up in Zimbabwe,
(10:06):
you're not so good at Intuit Eskimo faces and so on.
So your brain becomes attuned to the type of faces
that you see most often, and this heightened sensitivity makes
us better at distinguishing among those familiar faces. As a
side note, can you mitigate the other race effect? Sure,
(10:27):
it's just about exposure. You can improve the ability to
recognize other race faces through training and exposure. Now, Hollywood
has been on the forefront of this for a long time,
making sure that there's a mixture that we all get
exposed to different sorts of faces, and that's presumably very useful.
It could be noted that Hollywood has tended to be
(10:50):
mostly in love with white faces and black faces, and
that leaves a lot of people out of the mix.
So we the viewing audience don't necessarily get much better
at Cambodian face or Norwegian faces, or Inuit Eskimo faces
or whatever. But it's a start to training our brains
on a broader diet of faces. So the other race
(11:11):
effect underscores how our brains can get tuned to the
social world around us, and it highlights our natural tendency
to recognize familiar faces more easily. Okay, so where are
(11:35):
we so far. It's really hard to distinguish faces unless
your brain has had lots and lots of practice at it.
But again it seems effortless to us now. Even though
we're not always great at distinguishing faces from one another,
unless we've had lots of practice, we are highly programmed
to identify that there is a face there and to
(11:58):
zoom in on it. Why because faces carry so much
information for us, And this is why you sometimes look
at the electrical plug in your wall and you see
a little face, or you see a pattern of burn
marks on a piece of toast and you think, oh,
that looks just like a face, or you look at
the surface of the moon and you think, oh, there's
(12:20):
a man there looking at me. In science, this is
called paradolia. Paradolia refers to our tendency to perceive specific
and often meaningful images in random patterns, and the most
common usage of this word is in the case of
perceiving the pattern of a face in random unrelated objects.
(12:42):
And we've all been there where your brain says, oh,
that looks like a face when you're looking at a
cloud or a rock formation, or some arrangement of fruits
on a table. And I don't know if you've ever
seen this image from the surface of Mars. I'll put
it on the show. But on the bumpy landscape of Mars,
(13:03):
there are some bumps that happen to fall into the
pattern that look like two y's and a nose and
a mouth. And many people go nuts about this image
because they suggest that it's a sculpture of a human
face planted there by aliens. But probably not. This is
merely our brains experiencing garden variety paradolia. We assign patterns
(13:28):
to random inputs, and in particular, we love to see faces. Okay,
but why does this happen to us so commonly. Well,
it's because we are hardwired to see faces everywhere, and
the reason is that faces are crucial for social interaction.
Seeing a face tells us about a person's identity, their
(13:52):
emotional state, whether they're a friend or a foe. This
ability helped our ancestors to survive by recognize is saying oh,
that's a tribe member. Oh, that's a potential threat. In fact,
even newborn babies prefer to look at faces. They look
at face like stimuli more than other stimuli. So take
(14:13):
two little circles and a little square beneath that, and
a little rectangle underneath that, they'll stare at that as
opposed to the same shapes in a different configuration. And
this underscores that brains are primed to focus on faces.
Paridolia is just an extension of this bias to recognize faces.
(14:35):
It's our brain's way of staying vigilant because in the wild,
it is safer to mistakenly see a face where there
isn't one than to miss a real face. So this
hypersensitivity to faces means the difference between life and death
in some situations, like spotting a lurking predator or an
(14:58):
aggressive intruder. By the way, I'll just mention that paradolia
is something that artists have always exploited. They turn random
patterns or abstract shapes into recognizable faces. Just as one example,
one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dhli. He very often
takes advantage of paradolia to create double images that play
(15:20):
with the viewer's perception. You can see this as a
rock formation or as a face. So paradolia highlights how
our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the
world around us, even when there isn't anything immediately recognizable.
And I want to give just one other angle on
paradolia here. If you're a regular listener to this podcast,
(15:44):
you know that I often talk about how the brain's
main job is to build an internal model of the
outside world, and our model influences our perception. So whatever
you specialize in, you'll see lots of that world. We're
all specialists at faces, and we often see those where
(16:05):
there isn't actually one, but it generalizes beyond that. So
for me personally, when I look around the world, I
tend to impose shapes that look like brains. I think, oh,
there's a brain, or there's a midsadgital section, or there's
a cerebellum. My friends who are pilots tend to see
airplane shapes and runways. My collogist friends see mushroom shapes,
(16:28):
my dermatologists friends see melanomas, and so on. Whatever you
specialize in makes you an expert in detecting that in
the world, and you impose that interpretation on lots of things.
It's paridolia writ large. Okay, so back to faces in particular.
Now we're ready to turn to how the brain does
(16:51):
its magic with face recognition. One of the key areas
in our brain that does this is in the temporal lobe.
It's a little region called the fusiform face area or
FFA fusiform face area. Now, we can see in brain
imaging that this area is particularly sensitive to faces. But
(17:12):
what's interesting is it's not just any part of the
face that gets attention from the FFA, it's the holistic
view of the face. So the FFA responds strongly to
the overall configuration of a face rather than individual features.
So that allows us to quickly recognize faces and familiar faces,
(17:34):
even if we only get a quick glimpse of them.
When you look at these brain imaging studies, for example,
with fMRI, you find that this fusiform face area responds
more to familiar faces than to unfamiliar faces. And given
what we saw a moment ago with the other race effect,
the FFA is more active when you're viewing faces of
(17:58):
your own race compared to faces of other races. So again,
just like recognizing the distinction between different cows if you're
the rancher, or distinguishing faces that you grew up with
as opposed to other cultures that you rarely see. Your
visual system is specialized to efficiently process faces that you
(18:18):
see a lot more. Now back to this issue about
recognizing the face holistically rather than detail by detail. This
is what underlies the phenomenon that's called the inversion effect,
which is when you see a face that is upside down,
it's really hard to recognize. So try this. Just open
(18:39):
a magazine upside down and flip through the pages and
see if you can recognize the people in it. And
then when you flip it right side up, it's a
whole different experience. And this is because this part of
the brain FFA is super specialized on faces, and it's
always seen faces in a particular way, and it's recognizing
(19:00):
the whole big picture with two eyes above the nose,
above the mouth, and if you throw a ranch in that,
it doesn't function so well. The key thing is that
this inversion effect is much stronger for faces than for
other objects, which highlights this very specialized nature of face processing. Now,
(19:22):
what's wild is that this part of the brain is
trying to see faces everywhere, as we saw in paridolia.
And so if someone puts an electrode into this part
of your brain, then you might look at, let's say,
a soccer ball, and when the electrode turns on and
stimulates this area with electricity, the hexagons of the soccer
ball seem to you to become the eyes and the
(19:46):
mouth of a face. So activity in this part of
the brain is always working over time to detect faces
in the world, and sometimes it does this by imposing
the interpretation onto the canvas of the world. Now, consistent
with what I mentioned before, the FFA isn't specialized just
(20:06):
for faces. It also plays a role in recognizing other
things that we're highly familiar with, like cars for car enthusiasts,
or birds for bird watchers. So that tells us slightly
more generally that this part of the brain specializes in
recognizing very detailed things that are relevant and that we
(20:28):
have a lot of experience seeing. So back to faces,
the FFA, it's not just that it's sensitive to faces.
It's actually critical if you want to see a face.
If you get damaged to the FFA or to its connections,
then you become unable to recognize faces. And will return
to that in a moment, but first I just want
(20:49):
to make one more thing clear. Like almost everything in
the brain, it's not just one area that's involved. Face
recognition uses a broader, specialized network. Beyond the FFA, you
have other areas involved, like the occipital face area and
the superior temporal sulcus. Don't worry about the details, but
(21:09):
the thing I want to surface here is that some
areas are more focused on the detailed features of the
face and others are sensitive to facial expressions and movements.
And the key is that together these areas form a
larger network that allows us to recognize faces and interpret
their expressions well. Your brain's also doing a lot of
(21:32):
work to gauge a person's emotions and then navigating social
interactions by carefully watching the reactions of someone's facial expressions.
We humans are super specialists at this because our well
being generally depends on our ability to recognize and understand
(21:53):
the people around us. And just to give you a
sense of how all these networks interact, there are studies
showing that you're interpretation of facial expressions is influenced by
the broader context. So just as an example, in one study,
you're shown faces with neutral expressions, but you're given different
(22:13):
contextual information about the person. So if you're told the
person is happy, you perceive the neutral face as slightly smiling,
and if you're told this person is sad, you perceive
that same face as slightly frowning. So, in other words,
your brain combines the facial information with the context of
(22:33):
the larger situation whenever you're interpreting emotions and for that matter, intentions.
So putting together the giant networks in the brain involved
in identifying and interpreting faces, the thing that becomes clear
is that we are massively finely tuned to process faces
in a way that benefits are social interactions and are survival. Now,
(22:58):
if you've been listening to other episodes of this podcast,
you'll know that I'm obsessed by the differences in the
internal life from person to person, from head to head.
And one place this really comes up is with individual
variability in face recognition. So, while most people are fairly
good at recognizing faces, there's a shocking amount of variation
(23:23):
in this ability. Some people are exceptionally good at it,
and other people struggle. And this brings us to the
concepts of super recognizers on the one hand, and face
blindness on the other hand. So let's start with the
super recognizers. These are people who have an extraordinary ability
(23:43):
to recognize faces. They can remember and identify faces even
after just brief encounters or after long periods of time.
Super recognizers are terrific at picking out their acquaintances and
really large crowds, and they sometimes end up getting employed
in security or law enforcement to identify perpetrators. Like they'll
(24:05):
be hired to watch the video of let's say a
subway entrance and you'll see thousands of people flowing in
and out, and they'll just stare at the feed for
hours or days, and then they'll say, oh, there's the guy. Now.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have what's
known as face blindness, and this is known as prosopagnosia.
This word comes from the Greek pro sopon meaning face,
(24:28):
and agnosia meaning lack of knowledge. So people with prosopagnosia
have a very hard time recognizing faces, even faces of
close family and friends. Now, by the way, this isn't
all or none. The condition ranges from mild to severe,
like difficulty recognizing familiar faces to an inability to distinguish
(24:52):
any faces at all. And at that far end of
the spectrum, just imagine not being able to recognize your
own spouse or child if you see them out of context.
And this is the reality for many people with prosopagnosia. Now,
how does prosopagnosia happen? Usually you're born with it. This
(25:13):
is called congenital prosopagnosia, just meaning it's present from birth.
In rarer cases, you can have acquired prosopagnosia, which just
means that you get it because of a brain injury
later in life, like a stroke or a traumatic brain injury.
And in these acquired cases, people notice the sudden change
(25:33):
in their ability to recognize faces, which is obviously distressing
and isolating. But what's fascinating is that people born with
this usually don't realize they have it because they've never
known anything different, and so they just get along by
using other cues like people's voices or their clothing or
the way they walk, and this is how they recognize people.
(25:56):
One example of a person who had prosopagnosia was the
neurologist Oliver Sacks, and he wrote an article in The
New Yorker in twenty ten on this. He talked about
his personal lifelong struggle with face blindness, but he never
realized there was something unusual about this until his middle age.
He'd always just been really bad with recognizing faces, but
(26:16):
that was just the way it was. But he went
to visit an older brother in Australia and they got
to talking and he realized that his brother had the
same problems with faces that he did, and it dawned
on him that this was something beyond normal variation, and
that they both had this trait of face blindness, and
he guessed that there was probably some distinctive genetic basis
(26:39):
to it. And very informally, I've noticed among people that
I know that those with prosopagnosia often don't enjoy movies
as much as other people, because in order to follow
a plot, especially if it's switching between an A story
and a B story and a C story, in order
to follow that plot, you really need to get it
(27:00):
when this actor comes into the scene who you haven't
seen for fifteen minutes and who's now wearing different clothes,
but this is just a continuation of his plot, and
everyone else in the audience recognizes him and immediately remembers
what was going on with him in the last act.
But just try to imagine how difficult it makes things
to follow along if you don't immediately recognize the person.
(27:23):
And by the way, if you don't have prosopagnosia, you
might be thinking what would that be like? How could
you not recognize a person? A common analogy is to
think about what it's like to walk through a forest
and just imagine if you had to remember and distinguish
every tree that you see. Imagine you had to have
(27:43):
a name for every tree, and you were quizzed on
it later. That sounds impossible to most of us, but
this is what daily life is like for the person
with face blindness. There wandering through a forest of people,
all of whom look essentially indistinguish. Now, I just want
to note beyond issues of following movie plots, prosopagnosia can
(28:05):
have pretty significant social effects like anxiety and embarrassment and
frustration because of and inability to recognize other people, And
for children with face blindness, social development can be tough
because you need to recognize your peers and your teacher,
and occasionally kids will get misdiagnosed with other learning or
(28:27):
behavioral disorders, which complicates things for them and an adults,
face blindness can lead to social isolation or in difficulties
in forming and maintaining relationships. So super recognizers and people
with prosopagnosia they represent extreme ends of the face recognition spectrum.
(28:48):
Most people fall somewhere in between, but with varying degrees
of ability and understanding the spectrum in face recognition. This
is how we can get insight into the differences between
people's realities. Okay, now I just want to say lest
(29:15):
you think that these issues about recognizing faces just show
up in podcasts, In fact, they show up in courtrooms
all the time, most notably in the very stormy world
of eyewitness identification. If you check out my episode nineteen,
I talked all about the difficulties of eyewitness identification, which
is generally very difficult because of fundamental flaws in memory.
(29:39):
But there are other challenges to this as well, and
the main one of interest here is when people are
asked to reproduce faces, as in who did you see
at the scene of the crime. So what police did
for centuries was to have a trained artist who sketches
what you describe. But of course it's really hard to
describe a face, and so by the late nineteen fifties,
(30:01):
the Los Angeles Police Department introduced a new way of
doing this where you line up individual strips for the eyes,
the eyebrows, the nose, the mouths, and so on. So
instead of me asking you, hey, can you describe that
guy's face? Instead, you now get a bunch of possible
eyes and possible noses and mouths and ears and chins,
(30:24):
and you try to reconstruct it that way. And this
ended up spreading from Los Angeles to Scotland Yard by
the nineteen sixties, and they had some successes, and eventually
this became a computerized system where people can piece this
together on a computer, and so this was considered a
real success about how you can use things beyond just
(30:45):
unreliable verbal descriptions to identify perpetrators. But when researchers subjected
this to more careful study, it turned out that this
approach of piecing faces together this is pretty imperfect, and
the fundamental problem is that the composite is built from
pieces and parts, like the guy's eyes look like that,
(31:05):
and his mouth looks like that, his nose like that,
and so on. But that's not the way the human
visual system works. It recognizes faces based on the whole picture,
the gestalt, where the whole is perceived as more than
the sum of the parts. And so it turns out
that reconstructing a face from pieces and parts is not
(31:27):
really so easy. I'll also mention another face recognition issue
which shows up in courts all the time, and that's
the other race effect which I mentioned earlier. People are
more likely to misidentify individuals of other races, for example,
a Hispanic person identifying a Japanese person and so on.
This is not racism, it's just neuroscience. Your brain comes
(31:51):
to represent what you see around you, and so in
many ways, the legal system has to chew on the
issue of how brain recognized faces and wear brains don't
do it so well. Okay, So moving beyond courts into
the broader society, we're now entering a brave new world
of face recognition technology. There was a big moment in
(32:15):
twenty eighteen in China where new face recognition technology picked
out a person that the authorities wanted out of a
crowd of sixty thousand people at a concert, and apparently
when they came up and grabbed the guy, he was
infinitely surprised because he assumed that being in a giant
crowd made him safe, that no one would ever be
(32:37):
able to spot him, and he was of course right
that no one could, but the computer did. Now, this
was an example where face recognition technology performed at a
superhuman level, but note that the technology often messes up
and also does something that's very human paradolia. We always
see algorithms mistakenly idea identifying faces where there aren't any,
(33:02):
which mimics the same tendencies that we have as humans.
For example, remember the jack O lantern that I mentioned
earlier that the Facebook algorithm mistakenly identified as a human face.
Computers tend to impose patterns as much as we do.
And I just want to say that even though we're
often worried about new technologies and its face recognition abilities,
(33:24):
what's also going to grow out of this are increasingly
sophisticated assist of devices. You have AI driven tools that
are going to offer real time face recognition support which
is going to allow you to recognize your friend when
you see him totally out of context. But more importantly,
this has the potential to enhance the quality of life
(33:47):
for people with prosopagnosia. So let's wrap up. Face recognition
is a remarkably computationally intensive thing that we do, and
even though it seems effortless, we have these massive, specialized
neural networks that underpin our ability to do this. This
ability highlights the very special role that faces play in
(34:10):
our social lives and in our interactions, and it's so
important that we all experience things like paradolia, where we
impose an interpretation of faces on other patterns all around us,
and this underscores our brain's need to make sense of
the world, to impose order on chaos, and to connect
(34:32):
what we see with what we know. And finally, we
saw that skill in face recognition varies widely from person
to person. We can measure this from brain imaging in
people's performances, and we find a spectrum from super recognizers
to those who are face blind. And understanding how different
(34:53):
reality can be on the inside is critical for living
in a society and understanding one another as it stands now,
most people on the planet are unaware of this spectrum.
They've never heard of something like prosapagnosia, and as a result,
they don't recognize it in themselves or in a loved one.
So this is one of the things we gain from
(35:15):
a deeper understanding of the brain, a broader empathy that
allows societies to interact more richly. So the next time
you see a newborn baby, lock onto its mother's face
and track the face and study it, just remember that
you're not just seeing something cute, you are catching insight
(35:39):
into deep circuitry of the inner cosmos. Go to Eagleman
dot com slash podcast for more information and to find
further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at egleman
dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and
subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for video of each
(36:00):
episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
and this is Inner Cosmos.
Brains love to look at faces, But why and what
is face blindness? And what is a super recognizer? Why
does your electrical plug sometimes look to you like a
little face? Did aliens plant a signal for us on Mars?
(00:24):
Or are we looking at a quirk of our own brains?
What does any of this have to do with the
neurologist Oliver Sachs and his inability to recognize most of
the people in his life, or looking at a magazine
upside down? Or what the mistakes in computerized face recognition technology?
(00:45):
Tell us Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in
these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe
to understand some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.
(01:12):
Today's episode is about faces. Now, let's say I posed
the question to you, how does the brain recognize faces?
You may reasonably think, why is that even a question?
Recognizing people's faces isn't really that hard, But think about
(01:32):
how similar faces are to one another. They're insanely similar.
You have two eyes, nose, mouth, chin, ears, everyone's face
looks pretty much the same people's faces are pretty much
very tiny variations on a theme. The only reason you
are able to distinguish faces, literally thousands of faces from
(01:55):
one another, is because your brain devotes an enormous amount
of circuitry to it. It puts so much effort in
that it feels effortless to you. And we have all
this circuitry because face recognition is extremely salient. It's how
we recognize this package of identity from this other. Oh
(02:19):
that's my mother, that's my neighbor, that's my wife. There's
Tom Cruise and his face is similar but different from
Dwayne Johnson, and that's different from Joe Biden. It's massively
important for us as a social species to keep track
of identities. Your brain wants to know who it is
(02:42):
and everything that entails, like is that a friend or
an enemy? What are the risks and opportunities here? And
the answer to that is massively different. If you're looking
at the face of Ted Bundy versus your best pal,
and keep in mind that to a space alien and
these faces would be essentially indistinguishable. Now, when you're trying
(03:04):
to distinguish faces, there are lots of other cues like
hairline and hairstyle and height, and details of their skin
from color to smoothness, and even cues like how they
walk and their clothing choice. And context also plays a
large role. You've probably experienced some time when you saw
(03:28):
somebody you know well, like a neighbor or a colleague,
but it's in an unfamiliar setting and you struggle to
recognize them immediately. Why does that happen Because our brains
use contextual cues when identifying people, So our brains rely
not just on facial features, but also on surrounding context
(03:49):
of all sorts to identify people. But despite all these
other cues that we use, just note that facial recognition
is possible even over zoom, where many of those other
cues are gone. And even if you've got a bunch
of movie stars to put on wigs and change their
hairlines and so on, you'd still be pretty good at
(04:12):
distinguishing them just based on the details of the face itself.
And I think there are at least two ways to
appreciate how hard a challenge face recognition is to the brain.
The first is to understand how difficult it is to
get computers to recognize and distinguish human faces. Now you
(04:36):
might think, aren't we pretty good at this with modern technology. Yes,
but this has been a sixty year slog by very
smart people in the computer science world. Starting in the
nineteen sixties, people realized that face recognition was a really
hard problem, and they've been climbing that hill ever since.
(04:57):
So the way that researchers have gotten face recognition to
work on computers nowadays is by busting the problem up
into different computational stages. So first, you have algorithms just
for detecting a face, like is there a face out there?
Then you have a second step where you segment this
(05:20):
face from the background and figure out how the face
is aligned to tell you about the size of the
face and the illumination on the face and even the
pose of the face. Then you have a third step
where you extract the facial features, like here's the length
of the nose and the distance between the eyes, and
the shape of the mouth and the position of the ears.
(05:42):
All these things you pinpoint and you measure them, and
then in the fourth step, you match those numbers against
a database of faces to see if you can identify
this one. So this is a really complicated algorithm and
it's instructive to see how computer get things wrong. I
saw a great photograph where it's a family sitting on
(06:05):
their porch at Halloween, and the computer has identified each
of their faces and put a little label next to it,
like Henry and John and Sarah, and then it identifies
another face and says unknown person. But that face is
the Jack O lantern, the pumpkin that's sitting there on
the porch. Now, a human observer would never make that
(06:27):
kind of mistake. But this goes to show that it's
a very computationally challenging problem. So some version of this
very complicated algorithm, probably not exactly the same, but equally complex.
This is what your brain is doing under the hood
when you just glanced at some billboard and you think, oh,
(06:49):
that's Paul Giamati. I love that guy. And we'll come
back to what the brain is doing in just a moment,
but I just want to say for now that quite
often we find that the tasks that seem most effortless
to us are the things underpinned by the most brain circuitry.
And I want to look at a second way to
(07:10):
appreciate how hard a challenge face recognition is for the brain.
Just look at a bunch of Golden Retriever faces. If
you were in a situation where you were hanging out
with hundreds or thousands of Golden Retriever dogs, do they
really look that different to you? Or consider horse faces
(07:33):
or squirrel faces or cowfaces. Obviously we can imagine some
faces at the extreme that look a little bit different,
But in general, if I dropped you into the middle
of a giant ranch and you looked at thousands of cows,
you'd say, okay, well, each face has two eyes and
a snout and a mouth, and there's just not that
(07:55):
much difference from one face to another. You wouldn't meet
recognized if one of those cows had been in a
movie like oh, that's that famous cow, or if one
of those cows was wanted by the legal system, like
wait a minute, I recognize that cow from the poster
of the post office. And of course, if one of
(08:17):
these cows was looking at you and a bunch of
other humans, she would feel exactly the same way. There's
not that much difference between human faces. Now side note,
which we'll return to. If you were the rancher, you
could get better at distinguishing cow faces. This is because
of brain plasticity and because distinguishing the cows is salient
(08:40):
to your rancher brain. But for now, what I want
to surface is just how similar faces are before you
get good at them from experience. Faces are unbelievably similar.
And one expression of this difficulty in distinguishing faces comes
from a psychological effe fact called the other race effect,
(09:03):
and this refers to the tendency of people to have
more difficulty recognizing faces that belong to races that are
not their own race. This phenomenon is also known as
the cross race effect or the own race bias, and
it's been widely studied and you see it across all cultures.
Now people sometimes hear this and they take this as
(09:24):
evidence for racism. It's not racism in the sense of
you treating your own group better and other groups more poorly. Instead,
the other race effect simply results from the fact that
your brain gets trained up on the faces around you,
and you are better at recognizing those faces than other faces.
(09:45):
So if you grew up in Cambodia, you will be
excellent and distinguishing Cambodian faces, and maybe not so great
at distinguishing Norwegian faces. If you grew up in Norway,
you're excellent and distinguishing Norwegian f but not so great
at distinguishing Zimbabwean faces. And if you grew up in Zimbabwe,
(10:06):
you're not so good at Intuit Eskimo faces and so on.
So your brain becomes attuned to the type of faces
that you see most often, and this heightened sensitivity makes
us better at distinguishing among those familiar faces. As a
side note, can you mitigate the other race effect? Sure,
(10:27):
it's just about exposure. You can improve the ability to
recognize other race faces through training and exposure. Now, Hollywood
has been on the forefront of this for a long time,
making sure that there's a mixture that we all get
exposed to different sorts of faces, and that's presumably very useful.
It could be noted that Hollywood has tended to be
(10:50):
mostly in love with white faces and black faces, and
that leaves a lot of people out of the mix.
So we the viewing audience don't necessarily get much better
at Cambodian face or Norwegian faces, or Inuit Eskimo faces
or whatever. But it's a start to training our brains
on a broader diet of faces. So the other race
(11:11):
effect underscores how our brains can get tuned to the
social world around us, and it highlights our natural tendency
to recognize familiar faces more easily. Okay, so where are
(11:35):
we so far. It's really hard to distinguish faces unless
your brain has had lots and lots of practice at it.
But again it seems effortless to us now. Even though
we're not always great at distinguishing faces from one another,
unless we've had lots of practice, we are highly programmed
to identify that there is a face there and to
(11:58):
zoom in on it. Why because faces carry so much
information for us, And this is why you sometimes look
at the electrical plug in your wall and you see
a little face, or you see a pattern of burn
marks on a piece of toast and you think, oh,
that looks just like a face, or you look at
the surface of the moon and you think, oh, there's
(12:20):
a man there looking at me. In science, this is
called paradolia. Paradolia refers to our tendency to perceive specific
and often meaningful images in random patterns, and the most
common usage of this word is in the case of
perceiving the pattern of a face in random unrelated objects.
(12:42):
And we've all been there where your brain says, oh,
that looks like a face when you're looking at a
cloud or a rock formation, or some arrangement of fruits
on a table. And I don't know if you've ever
seen this image from the surface of Mars. I'll put
it on the show. But on the bumpy landscape of Mars,
(13:03):
there are some bumps that happen to fall into the
pattern that look like two y's and a nose and
a mouth. And many people go nuts about this image
because they suggest that it's a sculpture of a human
face planted there by aliens. But probably not. This is
merely our brains experiencing garden variety paradolia. We assign patterns
(13:28):
to random inputs, and in particular, we love to see faces. Okay,
but why does this happen to us so commonly. Well,
it's because we are hardwired to see faces everywhere, and
the reason is that faces are crucial for social interaction.
Seeing a face tells us about a person's identity, their
(13:52):
emotional state, whether they're a friend or a foe. This
ability helped our ancestors to survive by recognize is saying oh,
that's a tribe member. Oh, that's a potential threat. In fact,
even newborn babies prefer to look at faces. They look
at face like stimuli more than other stimuli. So take
(14:13):
two little circles and a little square beneath that, and
a little rectangle underneath that, they'll stare at that as
opposed to the same shapes in a different configuration. And
this underscores that brains are primed to focus on faces.
Paridolia is just an extension of this bias to recognize faces.
(14:35):
It's our brain's way of staying vigilant because in the wild,
it is safer to mistakenly see a face where there
isn't one than to miss a real face. So this
hypersensitivity to faces means the difference between life and death
in some situations, like spotting a lurking predator or an
(14:58):
aggressive intruder. By the way, I'll just mention that paradolia
is something that artists have always exploited. They turn random
patterns or abstract shapes into recognizable faces. Just as one example,
one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dhli. He very often
takes advantage of paradolia to create double images that play
(15:20):
with the viewer's perception. You can see this as a
rock formation or as a face. So paradolia highlights how
our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the
world around us, even when there isn't anything immediately recognizable.
And I want to give just one other angle on
paradolia here. If you're a regular listener to this podcast,
(15:44):
you know that I often talk about how the brain's
main job is to build an internal model of the
outside world, and our model influences our perception. So whatever
you specialize in, you'll see lots of that world. We're
all specialists at faces, and we often see those where
(16:05):
there isn't actually one, but it generalizes beyond that. So
for me personally, when I look around the world, I
tend to impose shapes that look like brains. I think, oh,
there's a brain, or there's a midsadgital section, or there's
a cerebellum. My friends who are pilots tend to see
airplane shapes and runways. My collogist friends see mushroom shapes,
(16:28):
my dermatologists friends see melanomas, and so on. Whatever you
specialize in makes you an expert in detecting that in
the world, and you impose that interpretation on lots of things.
It's paridolia writ large. Okay, so back to faces in particular.
Now we're ready to turn to how the brain does
(16:51):
its magic with face recognition. One of the key areas
in our brain that does this is in the temporal lobe.
It's a little region called the fusiform face area or
FFA fusiform face area. Now, we can see in brain
imaging that this area is particularly sensitive to faces. But
(17:12):
what's interesting is it's not just any part of the
face that gets attention from the FFA, it's the holistic
view of the face. So the FFA responds strongly to
the overall configuration of a face rather than individual features.
So that allows us to quickly recognize faces and familiar faces,
(17:34):
even if we only get a quick glimpse of them.
When you look at these brain imaging studies, for example,
with fMRI, you find that this fusiform face area responds
more to familiar faces than to unfamiliar faces. And given
what we saw a moment ago with the other race effect,
the FFA is more active when you're viewing faces of
(17:58):
your own race compared to faces of other races. So again,
just like recognizing the distinction between different cows if you're
the rancher, or distinguishing faces that you grew up with
as opposed to other cultures that you rarely see. Your
visual system is specialized to efficiently process faces that you
(18:18):
see a lot more. Now back to this issue about
recognizing the face holistically rather than detail by detail. This
is what underlies the phenomenon that's called the inversion effect,
which is when you see a face that is upside down,
it's really hard to recognize. So try this. Just open
(18:39):
a magazine upside down and flip through the pages and
see if you can recognize the people in it. And
then when you flip it right side up, it's a
whole different experience. And this is because this part of
the brain FFA is super specialized on faces, and it's
always seen faces in a particular way, and it's recognizing
(19:00):
the whole big picture with two eyes above the nose,
above the mouth, and if you throw a ranch in that,
it doesn't function so well. The key thing is that
this inversion effect is much stronger for faces than for
other objects, which highlights this very specialized nature of face processing. Now,
(19:22):
what's wild is that this part of the brain is
trying to see faces everywhere, as we saw in paridolia.
And so if someone puts an electrode into this part
of your brain, then you might look at, let's say,
a soccer ball, and when the electrode turns on and
stimulates this area with electricity, the hexagons of the soccer
ball seem to you to become the eyes and the
(19:46):
mouth of a face. So activity in this part of
the brain is always working over time to detect faces
in the world, and sometimes it does this by imposing
the interpretation onto the canvas of the world. Now, consistent
with what I mentioned before, the FFA isn't specialized just
(20:06):
for faces. It also plays a role in recognizing other
things that we're highly familiar with, like cars for car enthusiasts,
or birds for bird watchers. So that tells us slightly
more generally that this part of the brain specializes in
recognizing very detailed things that are relevant and that we
(20:28):
have a lot of experience seeing. So back to faces,
the FFA, it's not just that it's sensitive to faces.
It's actually critical if you want to see a face.
If you get damaged to the FFA or to its connections,
then you become unable to recognize faces. And will return
to that in a moment, but first I just want
(20:49):
to make one more thing clear. Like almost everything in
the brain, it's not just one area that's involved. Face
recognition uses a broader, specialized network. Beyond the FFA, you
have other areas involved, like the occipital face area and
the superior temporal sulcus. Don't worry about the details, but
(21:09):
the thing I want to surface here is that some
areas are more focused on the detailed features of the
face and others are sensitive to facial expressions and movements.
And the key is that together these areas form a
larger network that allows us to recognize faces and interpret
their expressions well. Your brain's also doing a lot of
(21:32):
work to gauge a person's emotions and then navigating social
interactions by carefully watching the reactions of someone's facial expressions.
We humans are super specialists at this because our well
being generally depends on our ability to recognize and understand
(21:53):
the people around us. And just to give you a
sense of how all these networks interact, there are studies
showing that you're interpretation of facial expressions is influenced by
the broader context. So just as an example, in one study,
you're shown faces with neutral expressions, but you're given different
(22:13):
contextual information about the person. So if you're told the
person is happy, you perceive the neutral face as slightly smiling,
and if you're told this person is sad, you perceive
that same face as slightly frowning. So, in other words,
your brain combines the facial information with the context of
(22:33):
the larger situation whenever you're interpreting emotions and for that matter, intentions.
So putting together the giant networks in the brain involved
in identifying and interpreting faces, the thing that becomes clear
is that we are massively finely tuned to process faces
in a way that benefits are social interactions and are survival. Now,
(22:58):
if you've been listening to other episodes of this podcast,
you'll know that I'm obsessed by the differences in the
internal life from person to person, from head to head.
And one place this really comes up is with individual
variability in face recognition. So, while most people are fairly
good at recognizing faces, there's a shocking amount of variation
(23:23):
in this ability. Some people are exceptionally good at it,
and other people struggle. And this brings us to the
concepts of super recognizers on the one hand, and face
blindness on the other hand. So let's start with the
super recognizers. These are people who have an extraordinary ability
(23:43):
to recognize faces. They can remember and identify faces even
after just brief encounters or after long periods of time.
Super recognizers are terrific at picking out their acquaintances and
really large crowds, and they sometimes end up getting employed
in security or law enforcement to identify perpetrators. Like they'll
(24:05):
be hired to watch the video of let's say a
subway entrance and you'll see thousands of people flowing in
and out, and they'll just stare at the feed for
hours or days, and then they'll say, oh, there's the guy. Now.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have what's
known as face blindness, and this is known as prosopagnosia.
This word comes from the Greek pro sopon meaning face,
(24:28):
and agnosia meaning lack of knowledge. So people with prosopagnosia
have a very hard time recognizing faces, even faces of
close family and friends. Now, by the way, this isn't
all or none. The condition ranges from mild to severe,
like difficulty recognizing familiar faces to an inability to distinguish
(24:52):
any faces at all. And at that far end of
the spectrum, just imagine not being able to recognize your
own spouse or child if you see them out of context.
And this is the reality for many people with prosopagnosia. Now,
how does prosopagnosia happen? Usually you're born with it. This
(25:13):
is called congenital prosopagnosia, just meaning it's present from birth.
In rarer cases, you can have acquired prosopagnosia, which just
means that you get it because of a brain injury
later in life, like a stroke or a traumatic brain injury.
And in these acquired cases, people notice the sudden change
(25:33):
in their ability to recognize faces, which is obviously distressing
and isolating. But what's fascinating is that people born with
this usually don't realize they have it because they've never
known anything different, and so they just get along by
using other cues like people's voices or their clothing or
the way they walk, and this is how they recognize people.
(25:56):
One example of a person who had prosopagnosia was the
neurologist Oliver Sacks, and he wrote an article in The
New Yorker in twenty ten on this. He talked about
his personal lifelong struggle with face blindness, but he never
realized there was something unusual about this until his middle age.
He'd always just been really bad with recognizing faces, but
(26:16):
that was just the way it was. But he went
to visit an older brother in Australia and they got
to talking and he realized that his brother had the
same problems with faces that he did, and it dawned
on him that this was something beyond normal variation, and
that they both had this trait of face blindness, and
he guessed that there was probably some distinctive genetic basis
(26:39):
to it. And very informally, I've noticed among people that
I know that those with prosopagnosia often don't enjoy movies
as much as other people, because in order to follow
a plot, especially if it's switching between an A story
and a B story and a C story, in order
to follow that plot, you really need to get it
(27:00):
when this actor comes into the scene who you haven't
seen for fifteen minutes and who's now wearing different clothes,
but this is just a continuation of his plot, and
everyone else in the audience recognizes him and immediately remembers
what was going on with him in the last act.
But just try to imagine how difficult it makes things
to follow along if you don't immediately recognize the person.
(27:23):
And by the way, if you don't have prosopagnosia, you
might be thinking what would that be like? How could
you not recognize a person? A common analogy is to
think about what it's like to walk through a forest
and just imagine if you had to remember and distinguish
every tree that you see. Imagine you had to have
(27:43):
a name for every tree, and you were quizzed on
it later. That sounds impossible to most of us, but
this is what daily life is like for the person
with face blindness. There wandering through a forest of people,
all of whom look essentially indistinguish. Now, I just want
to note beyond issues of following movie plots, prosopagnosia can
(28:05):
have pretty significant social effects like anxiety and embarrassment and
frustration because of and inability to recognize other people, And
for children with face blindness, social development can be tough
because you need to recognize your peers and your teacher,
and occasionally kids will get misdiagnosed with other learning or
(28:27):
behavioral disorders, which complicates things for them and an adults,
face blindness can lead to social isolation or in difficulties
in forming and maintaining relationships. So super recognizers and people
with prosopagnosia they represent extreme ends of the face recognition spectrum.
(28:48):
Most people fall somewhere in between, but with varying degrees
of ability and understanding the spectrum in face recognition. This
is how we can get insight into the differences between
people's realities. Okay, now I just want to say lest
(29:15):
you think that these issues about recognizing faces just show
up in podcasts, In fact, they show up in courtrooms
all the time, most notably in the very stormy world
of eyewitness identification. If you check out my episode nineteen,
I talked all about the difficulties of eyewitness identification, which
is generally very difficult because of fundamental flaws in memory.
(29:39):
But there are other challenges to this as well, and
the main one of interest here is when people are
asked to reproduce faces, as in who did you see
at the scene of the crime. So what police did
for centuries was to have a trained artist who sketches
what you describe. But of course it's really hard to
describe a face, and so by the late nineteen fifties,
(30:01):
the Los Angeles Police Department introduced a new way of
doing this where you line up individual strips for the eyes,
the eyebrows, the nose, the mouths, and so on. So
instead of me asking you, hey, can you describe that
guy's face? Instead, you now get a bunch of possible
eyes and possible noses and mouths and ears and chins,
(30:24):
and you try to reconstruct it that way. And this
ended up spreading from Los Angeles to Scotland Yard by
the nineteen sixties, and they had some successes, and eventually
this became a computerized system where people can piece this
together on a computer, and so this was considered a
real success about how you can use things beyond just
(30:45):
unreliable verbal descriptions to identify perpetrators. But when researchers subjected
this to more careful study, it turned out that this
approach of piecing faces together this is pretty imperfect, and
the fundamental problem is that the composite is built from
pieces and parts, like the guy's eyes look like that,
(31:05):
and his mouth looks like that, his nose like that,
and so on. But that's not the way the human
visual system works. It recognizes faces based on the whole picture,
the gestalt, where the whole is perceived as more than
the sum of the parts. And so it turns out
that reconstructing a face from pieces and parts is not
(31:27):
really so easy. I'll also mention another face recognition issue
which shows up in courts all the time, and that's
the other race effect which I mentioned earlier. People are
more likely to misidentify individuals of other races, for example,
a Hispanic person identifying a Japanese person and so on.
This is not racism, it's just neuroscience. Your brain comes
(31:51):
to represent what you see around you, and so in
many ways, the legal system has to chew on the
issue of how brain recognized faces and wear brains don't
do it so well. Okay, So moving beyond courts into
the broader society, we're now entering a brave new world
of face recognition technology. There was a big moment in
(32:15):
twenty eighteen in China where new face recognition technology picked
out a person that the authorities wanted out of a
crowd of sixty thousand people at a concert, and apparently
when they came up and grabbed the guy, he was
infinitely surprised because he assumed that being in a giant
crowd made him safe, that no one would ever be
(32:37):
able to spot him, and he was of course right
that no one could, but the computer did. Now, this
was an example where face recognition technology performed at a
superhuman level, but note that the technology often messes up
and also does something that's very human paradolia. We always
see algorithms mistakenly idea identifying faces where there aren't any,
(33:02):
which mimics the same tendencies that we have as humans.
For example, remember the jack O lantern that I mentioned
earlier that the Facebook algorithm mistakenly identified as a human face.
Computers tend to impose patterns as much as we do.
And I just want to say that even though we're
often worried about new technologies and its face recognition abilities,
(33:24):
what's also going to grow out of this are increasingly
sophisticated assist of devices. You have AI driven tools that
are going to offer real time face recognition support which
is going to allow you to recognize your friend when
you see him totally out of context. But more importantly,
this has the potential to enhance the quality of life
(33:47):
for people with prosopagnosia. So let's wrap up. Face recognition
is a remarkably computationally intensive thing that we do, and
even though it seems effortless, we have these massive, specialized
neural networks that underpin our ability to do this. This
ability highlights the very special role that faces play in
(34:10):
our social lives and in our interactions, and it's so
important that we all experience things like paradolia, where we
impose an interpretation of faces on other patterns all around us,
and this underscores our brain's need to make sense of
the world, to impose order on chaos, and to connect
(34:32):
what we see with what we know. And finally, we
saw that skill in face recognition varies widely from person
to person. We can measure this from brain imaging in
people's performances, and we find a spectrum from super recognizers
to those who are face blind. And understanding how different
(34:53):
reality can be on the inside is critical for living
in a society and understanding one another as it stands now,
most people on the planet are unaware of this spectrum.
They've never heard of something like prosapagnosia, and as a result,
they don't recognize it in themselves or in a loved one.
So this is one of the things we gain from
(35:15):
a deeper understanding of the brain, a broader empathy that
allows societies to interact more richly. So the next time
you see a newborn baby, lock onto its mother's face
and track the face and study it, just remember that
you're not just seeing something cute, you are catching insight
(35:39):
into deep circuitry of the inner cosmos. Go to Eagleman
dot com slash podcast for more information and to find
further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at egleman
dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and
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