Page 92 - South Mississippi Living - January, 2024

HEALTHY LIVING
story by Nickie Harris-Ray
FACIAL RECOGNITION
THE SCIENCE OF
The memory is an interesting thing. While certain items can instantly stimulate nostalgia, some take time to process.
The brain processes different memories in different ways. Especially interesting is the way the brain recognizes people. Specific landmarks on the face cause the brain to react in a certain way and immediately stimulate a recollection.
A face is one of the things we see most commonly. The more often we see things, the more our brain adjusts to them visually. The brain is so familiar with recognizing faces that we sometimes see them when we shouldn’t, such as happy or sad car grills, a singing power outlet, or even the famous man on the moon.
Part of the responsibility for recognizing faces comes from
the brain’s temporal lobe. Nerves, or neurons in the temporal lobe, see features of the face and it causes a response. More specifically, the temporal lobe region called the fusiform gyrus solely aims to recognize faces. Its ability was proven in a study due to an accidental finding by a Stanford University neurologist while treating an epilepsy patient. The study demonstrated the
causal role in facial recognition is initiated by the fusiform gyrus. However, several other brain areas function in facial perception.
The brain and its recognition of familiar faces differ depending on how a person appears in your field of vision. When you interact socially more with familiar persons, the variability gap decreases. A study in the Society for Neuroscience reported that social interaction fine-tunes the nerves in the brain to initiate fast and uniform familiar face recognition.
When you see a face, it is processed as a whole. Though you recognize different features such as eyes, freckles, and a dimple, the brain processes them as one face and is very particular about their arrangement. That is why, many times, a face or picture that is upside down in configuration may be more challenging to identify than the right side up.
As highly social mammals, we as humans must be able to identify each other quickly and easily on-site. The highly specialized centers in the brain help to make sure we do just that.
92 | January 2024
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