Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey you, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back today with part
Speaker 1: two of our exploration of facial recognition machinery. Last time,
Speaker 1: of course, we talked about uh some tech biz world
Speaker 1: stuff that that may be highly relevant to your life,
Speaker 1: especially in the near future. We talked about an artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence company that was recently profiled in the New York
Speaker 1: Times as uh selling a service to law enforcement that
Speaker 1: would use while they stole your face right off your
Speaker 1: head and scraped it from the Internet, and now they're
Speaker 1: selling that to law enforcement as a tool supposedly for
Speaker 1: identifying people with a high rate of accuracy, uh, linking
Speaker 1: your anonymous face to all of the digital information that's
Speaker 1: out there about you. Long story short, we're all boned
Speaker 1: unless we, uh, you know, we actually you know, put
Speaker 1: into place various laws and protections that that either keep
Speaker 1: these technologies from fully coming online or make sure that
Speaker 1: they are restricted from destroying the privacy at least of
Speaker 1: you know, private individuals. And we'll talk more about that
Speaker 1: aspect of the subject. I think in the next episode,
Speaker 1: when we get more into the modern technology today, we
Speaker 1: wanted to focus more on the biological world of facial recognition.
Speaker 1: What's been learned in in recent decades in psychology and
Speaker 1: neuroscience about the recognition of faces by animals like us, Right,
Speaker 1: Because ultimately, I guess the counter argument is, Hey, we're
Speaker 1: just trying to teach computers and phones to do what
Speaker 1: humans do and what animals can do, and that is
Speaker 1: look at a face and respond to it, identify the
Speaker 1: individual behind that face. Right. And while that might be
Speaker 1: something that scary as a capability for the machine to have,
Speaker 1: it's something that's uh part of our survival history and
Speaker 1: an important part of our social lives. Oh yeah, because
Speaker 1: we go around every day, we're walking around, we're driving where,
Speaker 1: you know, in an exercise class, etcetera. And our brain
Speaker 1: is engaging in that exercise. Of which human is that?
Speaker 1: Do I know that human weight? I think I know
Speaker 1: that human weight? Further analysis reveals I do not. It's
Speaker 1: a really funny thing actually, when you notice how much
Speaker 1: your brain is just going who's that is that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a it's a ridiculous amount of your your
Speaker 1: processing power is eaten up with that narrative. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes that That's why solitude is sometimes nice,
Speaker 1: because it just removes us from that exercise. Now, granted,
Speaker 1: you could have too much solitude, and I guess maybe
Speaker 1: the brain ends up using all that energy that it
Speaker 1: would use towards identifying or trying to identify strangers towards
Speaker 1: new and destructive things. But yeah, for the most part,
Speaker 1: it is an important part of making your way around
Speaker 1: human society. Now, at the risk of sounding like I'm
Speaker 1: making excuses, I gotta say, hand, this is a complicated subject.
Speaker 1: This is one of those where the deeper I dug
Speaker 1: into it, the more and more it just seemed like
Speaker 1: we were missing out on So I mean, I think
Speaker 1: we just have to preface this by saying it's impossible
Speaker 1: for us to do the whole subject of biological facial
Speaker 1: recognition justice in this episode. We'll do our best in
Speaker 1: a reasonable length of time. Yeah, I find like it's
Speaker 1: easy to sort of glimpse the complexity of it when
Speaker 1: you engage in exercises like say, attempting to draw a
Speaker 1: face that you know. And granted that involves artistic ability
Speaker 1: and talent. That is, sometimes the talented is underdeveloped, but still,
Speaker 1: like even I find myself without having that talent, just
Speaker 1: even the mental exercise of them trying to figure out, Okay,
Speaker 1: if I was to draw Joe's face, Wait, what does
Speaker 1: Joe look like? Again? Okay, I have to form the
Speaker 1: picture in my mind and then I have to then
Speaker 1: I second guess it. I'm like, is that really what
Speaker 1: Joe looks like? Or it's it's even it's even harder
Speaker 1: if I'm not physically in the room with that individual
Speaker 1: to really have horns and pointed teeth like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's that's That's one side, but also just the
Speaker 1: the idea of recalling faces like and granted we're dragging
Speaker 1: in the complexity of of memory when we're doing that,
Speaker 1: but I think it also hints that the it hints
Speaker 1: at how difficult this is to really unwrap what happens
Speaker 1: when we look at another face and identify it much
Speaker 1: less when we recall it from memory. Now, we've discussed
Speaker 1: face perception in the brain before, for example, in our
Speaker 1: episodes on face blindness and in an episode called the
Speaker 1: Doppelganger Network h And in these previous episodes, something that
Speaker 1: we definitely talked about was the history of how our
Speaker 1: understanding of facial recognition in the brain was illuminated by
Speaker 1: studying cases of people with with malfunctions of facial recognition
Speaker 1: in one way or another. Uh, primarily with the condition
Speaker 1: that we talked about in the face blindness episode. It
Speaker 1: is known as face blindness or prosopagnosia, which is a
Speaker 1: condition with a somewhat misleading name if you go with
Speaker 1: face blindness, because people with face blindness, I think it
Speaker 1: would be best explained by saying they actually see face
Speaker 1: is just fine. The real issue is that people with
Speaker 1: this condition have difficulty recognizing faces, not seeing them right. Like.
Speaker 1: One example I always come back to, and I think
Speaker 1: I've probably brought this up in the show before, is
Speaker 1: there's there's an excellent episode of that that television series
Speaker 1: Hannibal about Hannibal Lecter, in which there's a character that
Speaker 1: also has face blindness, and when they behold Hannibal Lecter
Speaker 1: and a key scene, all they see is like a
Speaker 1: featureless flesh mask because it's like they can't see the
Speaker 1: face at all. That is not based on any of
Speaker 1: the material we've looked at in an accounts that we've
Speaker 1: read that is not what face blindness is. It sounds
Speaker 1: like face blindness. The experience of face blindness is more
Speaker 1: akin to say, when I look at some vegetation and
Speaker 1: I asked myself, is that poison ivy? I know, I've
Speaker 1: looked at a picture of poison ivy. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if that's poison ivy or not. It's not like I
Speaker 1: don't see a plant. I just cannot identify it compared
Speaker 1: to other plants of similar form and function, And therefore
Speaker 1: I have to fall back on on Okay, well, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try and remember what are the what are the features?
Speaker 1: Three leaves? Let it be how many leaves does this have?
Speaker 1: And I started to have to gauge in a more
Speaker 1: and a different kind of cognitive exercise to try and
Speaker 1: make a positive identification. Yeah, I mean, I think it
Speaker 1: might be even more complicated a task than that. It's
Speaker 1: like the people who have typical powers of facial recognition
Speaker 1: don't even recognize what a superpower this is that comes effortlessly.
Speaker 1: The point of comparison I've used before, and I think
Speaker 1: I heard back from some people after this episode saying
Speaker 1: it was a good one. Was the idea of holly bushes. Like,
Speaker 1: if you look at one holly bush, you can see
Speaker 1: it just fine. You can note all the colors and
Speaker 1: the shapes and all that. But imagine you're walking down
Speaker 1: the street and you happen to pass by a place
Speaker 1: where that same holly bush you looked at earlier has
Speaker 1: been like dug up and replaced somewhere else. Would you
Speaker 1: notice it was the same bush? I mean, it looks
Speaker 1: like just another bush, right, unless you were engaging a
Speaker 1: far more tedious exercise of like counting the branches on
Speaker 1: the first bush, you know, really getting in there, or
Speaker 1: you know, marking it with a sharpie, that sort of thing, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because our brains are not specially wired to casually notice
Speaker 1: and remember minor visual differences in individual plants of the
Speaker 1: same species. But it appears that typical human brains are
Speaker 1: specially wired to notice and remember minor visual differences in
Speaker 1: the hundreds of honestly pretty similar oblong orbs of meat
Speaker 1: and teeth that we interact with every day. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: because a lot of faces are similar, you know. And uh,
Speaker 1: and and that's often where we get that initial like
Speaker 1: miss characterization, where we glance and we think we see
Speaker 1: somebody we know, but then we realize we don't. And
Speaker 1: occasionally you'll get that kind of like triple tech moment
Speaker 1: where somebody, Oh, at first glance, it seems right, and
Speaker 1: then a second glance it seems almost right, And then
Speaker 1: you always know there's just a very similar looking um
Speaker 1: person to someone that you know, someone I've encountered before.
Speaker 1: But this is in fact a strange Do you have
Speaker 1: that one person who you see doppelgangers of all the time,
Speaker 1: like one specific friend or celebrity that you always think
Speaker 1: you see somewhere? I guess. I mean there are certain
Speaker 1: you know there, there's certain looks that are you know,
Speaker 1: that are common, certain styles addressing that are common. Um,
Speaker 1: I've got a very weird one. Do you want to
Speaker 1: hear us? Hear it? Okay? So for some reason I
Speaker 1: keep thinking that I see the American UH physician and
Speaker 1: geneticist Francis Collins everywhere, the guy who worked on the
Speaker 1: Human Genome project. Seen a few pictures. I've never met him.
Speaker 1: I've just seen a few pictures of him around UH,
Speaker 1: and I see like basically an older white guy with
Speaker 1: a mustache and glasses, And I think, is that Francis Collins.
Speaker 1: I don't know why interesting. I mean, I find it.
Speaker 1: There are people that I'm on like heightened alertness for
Speaker 1: mainly like for instance, your us. You know, like I
Speaker 1: think this is true of everyone for the most part.
Speaker 1: You don't want to run into your boss. That's say,
Speaker 1: the grocery store, because the grocery store, first of all,
Speaker 1: is an awkward place to run into anybody. I just
Speaker 1: ran into a coworker or the grocery store the other day,
Speaker 1: the worst, great coworker. Nothing against this person at all,
Speaker 1: but when I saw them, I was like, ah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's like, let's have this awkward uh exchange now,
Speaker 1: and let's do it again in one and a half
Speaker 1: minutes on the next aisle, and then let's do it
Speaker 1: another time. And it's just it's a terrible exercise, Andy,
Speaker 1: And then you know your boss. It brings in additional complexities,
Speaker 1: no matter how wonderful your boss happens to be. So
Speaker 1: it's like it results at least in my weird mind
Speaker 1: of you know, me being like hyper alert, like are
Speaker 1: they is? You know, is the is my boss? Here?
Speaker 1: Is a coworker here? I must hide if I see
Speaker 1: them because I want to spare us both the awkwardness
Speaker 1: of running into each other. And that's just around the office, right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so telling one human apart from another is
Speaker 1: obviously a relevant survivals gill. So it's something that our
Speaker 1: primate brains developed a unique capacity for, especially by means
Speaker 1: of recognizing the visual features of the face, and in
Speaker 1: people who have face blindness or prosopagnosia, this recognition capacity
Speaker 1: has broken down, often due to some kind of brain
Speaker 1: injury or lesion, and uh to the person with severe prosopagnosia,
Speaker 1: human faces can present a problem similar to what we're
Speaker 1: talking about earlier, like looking at a plant you know,
Speaker 1: or looking at similar holly bushes the person with prosopagnosia
Speaker 1: can see. The person can see the face, but the
Speaker 1: faces don't really distinguish themselves from one another in memory
Speaker 1: because of damage to the special recognition power. And as
Speaker 1: a side note, there's another interesting fact about face blindness,
Speaker 1: which is that people who have it also very often,
Speaker 1: not always, but pretty often have a kind of location
Speaker 1: blindness as well. They can become easily lost because they
Speaker 1: don't remember visual characteristics of even familiar locations like the
Speaker 1: building where they work or their house. Yes, I seem
Speaker 1: to have call Oliver Sacks writing about this, um totally. Yes,
Speaker 1: the late author and psychologist who who had face blindness
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, yeah he did. He wrote about it autobiographically,
Speaker 1: I believe, in a piece for The New Yorker that
Speaker 1: was really good that we talked about in our face
Speaker 1: blindness episode. Um So. Historically, autopsies on the brains of
Speaker 1: people with acquired prosopagnosia were very informative because these brains
Speaker 1: almost always showed lesions on the bottom of a brain
Speaker 1: region known as the occipito temporal cortex. And if you
Speaker 1: want to picture this, it's kind of the rear middle
Speaker 1: underside of the brain, so you think, go down from
Speaker 1: your temples and then back a little bit and on
Speaker 1: the underside of the brain. Uh. This region of the
Speaker 1: brain is also known as the fusiform gyrus, and brain
Speaker 1: imaging like CT scans and m r I on living
Speaker 1: people also confirmed this correlation. Lesions on the fuse form
Speaker 1: gyrus on the underside of the occipito temporal cortex were
Speaker 1: commonly associated with the inability to recognize faces. Meanwhile, real
Speaker 1: time brain imaging like fm r I has also associated
Speaker 1: face processing with increased activity in this part of the brain.
Speaker 1: So if you look at a human face, your fusiform
Speaker 1: gyros tends to get more blood flow, and for that reason,
Speaker 1: this region of the brain has come to be known
Speaker 1: as the fusiform face area. Now, it's really important to
Speaker 1: note that multiple networks of the brain are involved in
Speaker 1: face perception, and we'll talk about some more studies about
Speaker 1: that as we go on, but it appears somehow the
Speaker 1: fusiform gyrus is especially important and that damage to it
Speaker 1: can tend to cause this another way, Uh, that I
Speaker 1: wanted to complicate the idea we were talking about earlier
Speaker 1: that you can usually see faces correctly with prosopagnosia, but
Speaker 1: that you have trouble recognizing. A complication to that is
Speaker 1: like one study I remember seeing video of where there
Speaker 1: was a patient who had an electrode implanted directly to
Speaker 1: stimulate his fuse form gyros, and he was awake and
Speaker 1: could talk about in real time when there was a
Speaker 1: current applied to this part of the brain. He said
Speaker 1: that his vision remained normal except for people's faces, and
Speaker 1: when the current was applied, people's faces would tend to
Speaker 1: kind of metamorphose. That like their features would appear to
Speaker 1: move around and stuff. Oh interesting, like more so than
Speaker 1: just the experience of staring at somebody's face till the
Speaker 1: information starts, you know, loses kind of consistency. Oh is
Speaker 1: that a thing you experience? Uh, yeah, to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: I mean, with even like saying a word until it
Speaker 1: loses meaning. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's kind of the
Speaker 1: effect to of of looking in a mirror too long,
Speaker 1: you know, where you're not really presented with any new data,
Speaker 1: Like you've you've absorbed all the data that is necessary
Speaker 1: to to properly react and uh and situate yourself in reality,
Speaker 1: but then you keep feeding on the same informational source,
Speaker 1: which you know, is kind of like the road to madness,
Speaker 1: especially in situations of sensory deprivation. I've certainly the experience
Speaker 1: where I stare at somebody's face, or stare at say
Speaker 1: a dog's face long enough that like it's it starts
Speaker 1: to it doesn't look any different, but it starts to
Speaker 1: decohere as like the seat of the soul, and instead
Speaker 1: becomes textures of organs. Do dogs have faces? Of course
Speaker 1: they do. I don't know, it don't really what is wrong?
Speaker 1: I don't think. I mean, I don't think of cats
Speaker 1: as having faces either. They just kind of faces. They
Speaker 1: just kind of have the fronts of heads. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: humans have faces. Where does the Cheshire Cats grin live
Speaker 1: if not on its face? Well, it's a cartoon character.
Speaker 1: Cartoon characters have faces because they are they're made in
Speaker 1: at least partially in our likeness. I've just discovered something
Speaker 1: very sinister about you. I guess a pug kind of
Speaker 1: has a face, definitely, as we've we've reread the pug
Speaker 1: enough to where it it is is close to having
Speaker 1: a faces any any dog can really claim to. Now,
Speaker 1: there's another interesting fact about biological face perception. I think
Speaker 1: I mentioned this in the last episode, but just to reiterate,
Speaker 1: the brain, it turns out processes familiar versus unfamiliar faces
Speaker 1: very differently. Like, when I face is familiar, the brain
Speaker 1: is extremely good at recognizing it accurately, even under difficult
Speaker 1: viewing conditions bad light, weird angles, partial view and all that.
Speaker 1: Less familiar faces fail to be recognized under these same conditions.
Speaker 1: So what's going on with the brain here? Well, just
Speaker 1: to reference one specific study by Sophia M. Landy and
Speaker 1: Win rich A fry wall To published in Science in
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, called two areas for familiar face recognition
Speaker 1: and the primate brain UH. The authors found quote familiar
Speaker 1: faces recruited two hitherto unknown face areas at anatomically conserved
Speaker 1: locations within the perinal cortex and the temporal pole. So
Speaker 1: in fMRI I, these two areas of the brain, but
Speaker 1: not the rest of the face processing network, responded dramatically
Speaker 1: to familiar faces emerging from a blur, but they didn't
Speaker 1: show any special activity when presented with unfamiliar faces. So
Speaker 1: sounds like the brain also recruits these special additional networks
Speaker 1: in addition to the regular fusiform face area for identification
Speaker 1: when it detects a more familiar face. Now, of course, historically, evolutionarily,
Speaker 1: those familiar faces would be the faces of individuals that
Speaker 1: we are, that are that are part of our society,
Speaker 1: that are part of a close knit group um or
Speaker 1: I guess potentially enemies that you've encountered physically in the past.
Speaker 1: But the modern media version of that is that we
Speaker 1: have all these additional faces as well, like all the
Speaker 1: all the actors we've memorized from watching TV and movies
Speaker 1: and surfing IMDb for example. Yeah, well, I think one
Speaker 1: thing that's important is that when a face is familiar,
Speaker 1: it tends to come with a very complex suite of
Speaker 1: emotional reactions that are implied by the face. You know,
Speaker 1: you see somebody and you know them to be an
Speaker 1: adversary or you know them to be a family member
Speaker 1: or friends that you've got all these complex emotions that
Speaker 1: come out of this emotional response called familiarity. I'd imagine
Speaker 1: the brain's response to unfamiliar faces or less familiar faces
Speaker 1: tends to be more flat, probably, right, Like there's less
Speaker 1: differentiation in the response, right, right, And there's probably a
Speaker 1: lot to be said, And this may be an area
Speaker 1: of separate study, like what happens when you encounter faces
Speaker 1: in real life that you have thus far only encountered
Speaker 1: via media, You know, I mean, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: different scenario, if for nothing else, if nothing else, the
Speaker 1: lighting and the makeup is going to be different. And
Speaker 1: they're so short. Oh that's the thing I'm surprised we've
Speaker 1: never looked into before. There's got to be research on that,
Speaker 1: Like why every you assume that movie stars are seven
Speaker 1: feet tall until you see them in person. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it's because they're standing on apple boxes a lot
Speaker 1: of the times. Um. Now, there's another interesting debate in
Speaker 1: the history of face processing research that we've discussed on
Speaker 1: the show once before. I wasn't able to find a
Speaker 1: resolution here, but but it is sort of a dispute
Speaker 1: among these researchers. So to look at a foundational kind
Speaker 1: of study here, there was a study published in Nature
Speaker 1: Neuroscience in two thousand by Isabel Gauthier. At all in
Speaker 1: the background here was that research had already shown that
Speaker 1: people who had been trained to have an expertise in
Speaker 1: previously unfamiliar objects called greebles will come back to them
Speaker 1: in a second. People who had that expertise would recruit
Speaker 1: parts of the brain that are usually used in the
Speaker 1: processing of faces, such as a fuse form gyrus and
Speaker 1: the occipital lobe. And so greebles are these weird little
Speaker 1: chess piece like objects with abstract kind of goblin ears
Speaker 1: and spikes and stuff. I really like the greebels, you know,
Speaker 1: I was reading about greeple's and uh, greebel's also another
Speaker 1: definition are the and it's pretty closely related, I guess,
Speaker 1: are also the little bits of plastic glued to the
Speaker 1: tops of objects to make them seem more complex. Star Destroyer, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the star Destroyer, I guess, so what the Death Star itself?
Speaker 1: Or a great example of the background on Mystery Sense
Speaker 1: Theater three thousand, at least for a number of seasons there,
Speaker 1: you could if you look closely, you could recognize the
Speaker 1: everyday objects that we're serving as Greebels, such as I
Speaker 1: think a millennium falcon toy was back there as a Greebel.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the more junk that is glued to it,
Speaker 1: the more it looks like it has a lot of
Speaker 1: surface complexity to it. That The board cube is another
Speaker 1: example of this. It's not just a cube, which of
Speaker 1: course it's a model ship, but then they have all
Speaker 1: these little bits on the outside of it and it
Speaker 1: looks even more complicated. Yeah, it's got texture that gives
Speaker 1: it the illusion of functionality. In fact, it's just a
Speaker 1: It's just a surface that hides nothing real behind it. Yes,
Speaker 1: and a similar thing would be true of the greebel's
Speaker 1: used in these studies. So they're like a little imagine
Speaker 1: a little chess piece that's just got different kinds of
Speaker 1: little spikes and features poken out of it. And so
Speaker 1: you can train people on these things and say you
Speaker 1: learn the name for this Greeble versus that greeble, and
Speaker 1: and they'll get names for you know, a group of
Speaker 1: them over time. If people train with objects like this,
Speaker 1: they can learn the names of the different Greebels. They
Speaker 1: look mostly indistinguishable if you haven't trained with them. Even
Speaker 1: though this is again these are like just made for
Speaker 1: the experiment. There's no like pre existing greebel set right, right,
Speaker 1: but you can train people right And so what previous
Speaker 1: research had found is that people who get trained on
Speaker 1: these greebles look at the Greebel's and it seems to
Speaker 1: recruit the parts of the brain that are usually used
Speaker 1: for face processing. This study from two thousand I mentioned
Speaker 1: extended this principle to other areas of visual expertise, including
Speaker 1: birds and cars. So it found that when people had
Speaker 1: acquired an expertise for birds and cars, the brain recruited
Speaker 1: more of the face processing associated networks of the brain,
Speaker 1: such as the fusiform gyros when looking at the objects
Speaker 1: they were experts in. Interesting, okay, and so at some
Speaker 1: points this two thousand study has been used to argue
Speaker 1: that maybe the fusiform face area of the brain is
Speaker 1: more of a visual expertise center than a face center.
Speaker 1: But I think there's also a lot of evidence that's
Speaker 1: going the other way that it has a natural and
Speaker 1: somewhat dedicated role in face perception. Uh That this other
Speaker 1: side saying that it's naturally dedicated to faces is known
Speaker 1: as the domain specificity hypothesis. Uh. So there's stuff going
Speaker 1: back and forth, but just decide. Another one that I
Speaker 1: thought was an interesting follow up to that two thousand study.
Speaker 1: This one was by Yaoda Zoo uh called Revisiting the
Speaker 1: Role of the fusiform Face Area and Visual Expertise, published
Speaker 1: in Cerebral Cortex in two thousand five. It followed up
Speaker 1: from the two thousand study about birds and cars asking
Speaker 1: a reasonable question. The author here says, Okay, if people
Speaker 1: with expertise and birds and cars show increased activation of
Speaker 1: the f f A when they look at birds and
Speaker 1: cars specifically, what if this is quote due to experts
Speaker 1: taking advantage of the faceness of the stimuli. After all,
Speaker 1: birds have faces, and three quarter frontal views of cars
Speaker 1: resemble face is which was funny, But I was like,
Speaker 1: that's actually that's a good question. Well, I think the
Speaker 1: faces of cars came up on a previous episode. We
Speaker 1: were talking about like the our experience as a driver
Speaker 1: of a car and identifying with cars about you know,
Speaker 1: the headlights and the grill. It looks like a face.
Speaker 1: I don't know about birds having faces. I think, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm also I find it hard to believe that that
Speaker 1: that I'm looking at a bird's face when I'm looking
Speaker 1: at the front of its head. So cats, no faces,
Speaker 1: Dogs no faces, Birds no faces. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: that chimpanzee has a face. Gorillas, you know, I would
Speaker 1: give that. I would have attribute faces too, you know,
Speaker 1: the primates, especially higher primates. I don't know about lesser
Speaker 1: primates though, you know, uh, I have to think about that. Wow,
Speaker 1: this is blowing my mind right here. I mean, does
Speaker 1: a shark have a face, Yeah, the shark has got eyes, mouth, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Clams don't have faces, no, no, okay, Oysters don't have face?
Speaker 1: All right. Well, I would be interested to hear from
Speaker 1: listeners about this, they might alone and how I feel
Speaker 1: about faces. We'll see. So. The author here mentions that
Speaker 1: the effects could also be due to attentional modulation in
Speaker 1: other words to differences in how experts versus non experts
Speaker 1: paid attention to what they were looking at. That also
Speaker 1: seems like a reasonable explanation. Uh, And so they ultimately
Speaker 1: find here quote in this study, using both side view
Speaker 1: car images that do not resemble faces and bird images
Speaker 1: in an event related fMRI I design that minimizes attentional
Speaker 1: modulation and expertise effect, and the right f A is
Speaker 1: observed in both car and bird experts, although a baseline
Speaker 1: bias makes the bird expertise effect less reliable. These results
Speaker 1: are consistent with those of Gauthier at all, and suggests
Speaker 1: that this suggests the involvement of the right f A
Speaker 1: and processing non face expertise visual stimuli. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: one seems to hold up the two thousand study. But
Speaker 1: I said that, you know, there was a dispute and
Speaker 1: that it's complicated. I found any of other sources saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's all this independent evidence that the brain
Speaker 1: has a dedicated role. Uh, this region of the brain
Speaker 1: or these networks in the brain have dedicated roles in
Speaker 1: face perception. The domain specificity hypothesis and other studies have
Speaker 1: found conflicting results and argued against the expertise theory. For example,
Speaker 1: there was one in two thousand seven in Cognition by
Speaker 1: Rachel Robbins and Eleanor McCone uh that found basically, dog
Speaker 1: experts showed no special face like processing for dogs in
Speaker 1: non face identification tasks. Another thing I was reading is
Speaker 1: some researchers arguing that the engagement of the fusiform face
Speaker 1: area in areas of visual expertise was still somehow maybe
Speaker 1: just an artifact of how attention was being stimulated in
Speaker 1: those test conditions. UH So, I'm not sure if the
Speaker 1: opinion of neuroscientists has shifted largely to one side or
Speaker 1: the other of this debate in the years since. It
Speaker 1: does seem like there's a very solid consensus that at
Speaker 1: least some inherent domain specificity exists for the f A,
Speaker 1: at least in some way it is naturally dedicated to faces.
Speaker 1: But at least as far as I could tell, it
Speaker 1: could be possible to split the difference here, like maybe
Speaker 1: it could be that there's a face perception network of
Speaker 1: the brain shaped by evolution quite specifically to recognize faces,
Speaker 1: and maybe it also just happens to be a good
Speaker 1: part of the brain to recruit for minute visual discrimination
Speaker 1: in other areas that the brain becomes highly adapted to
Speaker 1: through training. Yeah, either way to shake it. I mean
Speaker 1: the take home is that faces are incredibly important, right, so,
Speaker 1: and we see that reflected in the neural machinery devoted
Speaker 1: to it. I think that's exactly right. It's a good point.
Speaker 1: So either side of this debate, whichever one is right,
Speaker 1: it's either that we've got this inbuilt recognition capacity for
Speaker 1: faces that makes faces uniquely special, or we've got a
Speaker 1: visual expertise center that in most people becomes most highly
Speaker 1: attuned at looking at faces. And the only things that
Speaker 1: really rival that engagement of the visi ual expertise center
Speaker 1: is like when you get super into a subject, like
Speaker 1: you're obsessed with birds, right, and it becomes the same
Speaker 1: sort of visual experience too, where you know, you turn
Speaker 1: to somebody say it's airplanes, um, where you're like, I
Speaker 1: wonder what kind of airplane that is? You turn to
Speaker 1: your buddy who's an aviation geek, and they're like they're
Speaker 1: just a glance. They're like, oh yeah, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a spit fire. In the same way that you might
Speaker 1: turn and say, oh yeah, that's Doug, Right, Yeah, when
Speaker 1: when somebody's got visual expertise and you asked them to
Speaker 1: recognize something, you notice how they emotionally light up the
Speaker 1: same way that like you or I do when we
Speaker 1: suddenly recognize an actor in a B movie. You see
Speaker 1: that comparison. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Like it's um, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like, this is what I've been training for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's Robert England out of the Freddy makeup? Is that
Speaker 1: a more generalized reaction? Is that not just us that,
Speaker 1: like people don't just look around for people who have
Speaker 1: familiar faces and recognize them, but get really excited when
Speaker 1: they suddenly recognize somebody. Yeah, I think so. I mean
Speaker 1: I think I see it in other people. So I
Speaker 1: presume that it is part of the you know, normal
Speaker 1: experience or the you know, the traditional experience, because I
Speaker 1: guess if you were to apply it back to again,
Speaker 1: like a small society model, it would be recognizing a friend, right, Like,
Speaker 1: on some level, the the actor that we associate with
Speaker 1: films that we like, like we we we we value
Speaker 1: them on some level, it's almost like they are a friend,
Speaker 1: and spotting them in another film is like spotting a friend.
Speaker 1: Again within the context of films. It might be different
Speaker 1: if you saw him on the street, because you're like
Speaker 1: I would be like, oh, it's that act. That's weird,
Speaker 1: that's that actor from those be movies I've seen. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some like and then I I'll be
Speaker 1: thinking about them covered in blood or something. But you know,
Speaker 1: but within the context of the films, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: my friend is in this. I don't remember their name,
Speaker 1: but they were in you know, a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: old British TV shows and uh and I'm and I
Speaker 1: and I feel, you know, the arousal of recognizing them. Well,
Speaker 1: I think there is some evidence that there are extreme
Speaker 1: similarities in the way the brain reacts to images of
Speaker 1: celebrities and the way the brain reacts to images of
Speaker 1: known friends. I mean, there's a lot of the same
Speaker 1: stuff going on. So I think the brain when we
Speaker 1: see the same face over and over again on a
Speaker 1: TV the brain sort of treats it as if we're
Speaker 1: seeing the same face over and over again next to
Speaker 1: the fire. Yeah, like really that. I mean, that's why
Speaker 1: they called the television show friends. That's why people watched
Speaker 1: it religiously. While people I mean, there's articles today about
Speaker 1: like how important the Netflix deal was to to have
Speaker 1: friends on Netflix because the TV show off the concept
Speaker 1: of friends both because I think they're the same. I
Speaker 1: think based on the way they say people consume the show,
Speaker 1: it is like the familiarity of it. It is encountering
Speaker 1: these same people over and over again. Uh, it is
Speaker 1: like they are your friends. And I mean, I I
Speaker 1: never really watched that particular show, but I remember having
Speaker 1: like a similar relationship with I think it was news
Speaker 1: radio back in the day, and I would watch it
Speaker 1: when I was in college, and it's like I could
Speaker 1: turn it on and and uh, innocence, they were like
Speaker 1: my TV friends. There is I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: to that. I think that goes on with say The
Speaker 1: Office Today we read about like how much people stream
Speaker 1: The Office, and I think a lot of it's not
Speaker 1: even I mean, they're not even like trying to see
Speaker 1: how the plot plays out anymore. It might not even
Speaker 1: necessarily be about the comedy. It's just like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a very comfortable, cozy kind of place you can
Speaker 1: go with familiar faces. Of course, we'll have to leave
Speaker 1: the details of that to the The Journal of Sitcom
Speaker 1: study to be reviewed later on. Maybe we need to
Speaker 1: take a break. Let's do it. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: We're talking about facial recognition. More specifically, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the facial recognition that occurs uh inside the human brain. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: and in the brains of other animals, though there are
Speaker 1: some obvious parallels there. So we discussed to the beginning
Speaker 1: how this this story just gets more and more complic
Speaker 1: hated the more you look at it. And I want
Speaker 1: to complicate things further with a really interesting article that
Speaker 1: I was reading in uh In in the journal Nature.
Speaker 1: Their their news section, they had a news feature by
Speaker 1: a writer named Alison Abbott which was about the work
Speaker 1: of the Caltech neuroscientist Doris Sao, who studies facial recognition.
Speaker 1: And so I'll try to give a brief summary of this.
Speaker 1: So basically, in the late two thousands, uh, sal in
Speaker 1: our colleagues, we're doing repeated brain imaging and targeted electrode
Speaker 1: stimulation studies on the brains of macaques, a type of
Speaker 1: Old World monkey, which allowed them to identify six different
Speaker 1: patches of a part of the brain called the inferior
Speaker 1: temporal cortex on each side of the macaque brain, which
Speaker 1: would react specifically when the monkey saw a face of
Speaker 1: a human or another monkey, but not when looking at
Speaker 1: other objects like a spoon, And stimulation of one of
Speaker 1: these patches would cause activation in all the others. They
Speaker 1: were sort of chained together for simultaneous neural activity. And
Speaker 1: what the researchers learned over time was that individual cells
Speaker 1: in individual patches tended to be specialized to specific parts
Speaker 1: of faces. So one spot in this matrix would respond
Speaker 1: by firing faster consistently based on how far apart the
Speaker 1: eyes were, like say, if the eyes are farther apart,
Speaker 1: it fires faster. If they're closer together, at fire slower.
Speaker 1: And then others would respond specifically to changes in other
Speaker 1: features like the size of the nose or in the irises.
Speaker 1: And they use this knowledge to create what has been
Speaker 1: called now a face code, a kind of top level
Speaker 1: system for sorting faces along these major dimensions that the
Speaker 1: brain responds to in a specialized way. So you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like if you're creating a character in a
Speaker 1: wrestling video game, you've got like maybe sixty different values
Speaker 1: that you can just the sliders on. And so it
Speaker 1: turns out that the brain, at least according to this
Speaker 1: research appears to have individual neurons dedicated to each of
Speaker 1: those sliders, so like as the as the slider goes
Speaker 1: from zero to one hundred, that individual neuron starts to
Speaker 1: fire faster and faster. So you can see these like
Speaker 1: coded regions of the brain that map to individual elements
Speaker 1: within the face. Now, an interesting thing here was that
Speaker 1: the outermost cells in the cortex seemed to respond to
Speaker 1: the most obvious stimulis, such as like face shape with
Speaker 1: you know, things like distance between the eyes or length
Speaker 1: of the mouth, whereas deeper cells seem to focus more
Speaker 1: on more minute data like things about the texture of
Speaker 1: the skin and stuff like. I guess to some extent
Speaker 1: that like lines up with our experience of of glimpsing
Speaker 1: somebody and then maybe doing that second look or that
Speaker 1: more detailed look to follow up on the initial impression. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. But then to read a
Speaker 1: quote here quote, The research seemed to point to a
Speaker 1: mechanism by which individual cells in the cortex interpret increasingly
Speaker 1: complex visual information until at the deepest points individual cells
Speaker 1: code for particular people. And this goes with a finding
Speaker 1: by a researcher named Rodrigo Keion Kuroga, who earlier in
Speaker 1: the two thousands discovered something that was called in the
Speaker 1: media Jennifer Aniston cells uh to come back to friends,
Speaker 1: because these were literally single neurons that appeared to respond
Speaker 1: to pictures of specific famous or familiar people. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it was also found that this so if you have
Speaker 1: a cell for Jennifer Aniston in your brain, the Jennifer
Speaker 1: Aniston cell would respond to the evocation of a concept
Speaker 1: of that person as well as to the picture. So
Speaker 1: it would respond to seeing a picture of of Jennifer Aniston,
Speaker 1: or to like seeing her name written, or even to
Speaker 1: seeing lists of movies that she appeared in. And am
Speaker 1: I correct? And remember what Jennifer Anderson was one of
Speaker 1: the friends, right, Yes, just going to be sure on
Speaker 1: that that I wasn't making that up. Okay, you're talking
Speaker 1: about friends, like you know, Well, I I was pretty sure,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't one percent sure. Well, they could just
Speaker 1: as easily have been David Schwimmer cells. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: the thing is, I can definitely picture her in my mind,
Speaker 1: and I can picture David Schwimmer like they're they're just
Speaker 1: coded in there. I mean, there's no denying their faces.
Speaker 1: It does make me wonder if you could conceivably, like,
Speaker 1: knowing about these cells, that Jennifer Anderson cells, could you
Speaker 1: remove Jennifer Jennifer Anderson from your mind? Oh, I wonder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly how that works theoretically speaking, obviously
Speaker 1: not like do it yourself at home kind of a thing.
Speaker 1: But uh, it's where I wonder if that would be
Speaker 1: an interesting sort of eternal Sunshine in the Spotless Mind
Speaker 1: kind of spin off idea, because of course that the
Speaker 1: nature of that film was like completely removing a person
Speaker 1: or experience from the brain, like wholesale memories at all.
Speaker 1: But what if you could only remove the face of,
Speaker 1: say an individual who brought you stress or grief, Like,
Speaker 1: what would that alone do? How would that impact the
Speaker 1: other information that is there if it itself is untouched.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, as usual, the things inside
Speaker 1: the brain turn out to have a much more complicated
Speaker 1: relationship to our you know, our phenomenal experience of the
Speaker 1: world and our internal experience of thoughts usually than would
Speaker 1: be implied just by like a single cell change in
Speaker 1: the brain has this clear effect on life. But I
Speaker 1: don't know, I mean, uh, I would suspect that changing
Speaker 1: that one cell would not entirely eliminate this person from
Speaker 1: the brain, because you have complex networks of memories and
Speaker 1: emotions that will involve familiar people in celebrities. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know another thing. This is not something we came across
Speaker 1: in the study. But it also makes me wonder about
Speaker 1: the faces of individuals in literature. Then that one might
Speaker 1: read like when you've never seen you've never seen them,
Speaker 1: and but on some level it is probably not like
Speaker 1: the detailed version of a face unless you're doing an
Speaker 1: exercise that I would do almost religiously as a young
Speaker 1: reader and still fall back on occasionally, and that is
Speaker 1: subbing an actor into a role casting the book. I
Speaker 1: would do that all the time when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: and again I'll still sometimes fall into it today. But
Speaker 1: then other times there will be of a kind of
Speaker 1: there will be a face or an almost face in
Speaker 1: my head. Maybe it's not super detailed, it's not as
Speaker 1: detailed as a real person, but it's there, kind of
Speaker 1: floating around in my head, and when I think of
Speaker 1: that character, that face emerges. I think we've missed the
Speaker 1: time window for this, But I'm now recasting Dune with
Speaker 1: the cast of Friends. Right, so Duke Leto is David
Speaker 1: Swimmer and uh and let's see Joey is is Paula Trades? Right?
Speaker 1: I guess so? No, Actually, Hollywood people, if you're listening,
Speaker 1: here's my pitch redo The Punisher starring David Swimmer as Punisher. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's Swimmer has been good in something, so
Speaker 1: I guess I can I can imagine him playing the Punisher.
Speaker 1: I'll go ahead and go that far. It's only one
Speaker 1: way to know. So Eventually, after doing all this research
Speaker 1: about these sort of like neurons or patches of the
Speaker 1: brain that are coding for individual variables that can vary
Speaker 1: with the human face, sal and our colleagues began researching
Speaker 1: um broader variables for visual recognition of objects that worked
Speaker 1: very much along the same lines as the face variable neurons.
Speaker 1: So some examples that were cited in Abbot's feature on
Speaker 1: this neurons that appear to respond specifically to quote, whether
Speaker 1: something is spiky like a camera tripod or stubby like
Speaker 1: a USB stick. So you could have kind of a
Speaker 1: slider in the brain that corresponds with a specific tiny
Speaker 1: patch about whether it's got spikes or whether it's kind
Speaker 1: of rounded or something the kiki bubba thing. But then
Speaker 1: other things might correspond to whether something is animate like
Speaker 1: a cat or inanimate like a spoon. Uh. And there
Speaker 1: can be things in between that maybe a washing machine
Speaker 1: is a little more a little more animate than a spoon,
Speaker 1: but less animate than a cat. And again this would
Speaker 1: be expressed by how rapidly that's that neuron fires when
Speaker 1: viewing that particular stimuli. But Sal and her colleagues got
Speaker 1: to the point where they could predict the appearance of
Speaker 1: an object that a subject was looking at with reasonable
Speaker 1: accuracy based on sampling the firing rate of just about
Speaker 1: four hundred neurons. So you can get all these different
Speaker 1: variables just by looking at how fast those neurons are firing.
Speaker 1: And this suggests that there could be a feature based
Speaker 1: coding system that may operate across the whole brain. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so taking away from this research, Sal is talking
Speaker 1: to the to the author here and and she says
Speaker 1: that you know that the brain is not like quote,
Speaker 1: a sequence of passive sieves fishing out faces, food or ducks. Instead,
Speaker 1: she says, quote, it's a hallucinating engine that is generating
Speaker 1: a version of reality. Based on the current best internal
Speaker 1: model of the world. And I think this is a
Speaker 1: really important and interesting way to think about visual perception
Speaker 1: and recognition. There's so much going on in any image
Speaker 1: of the world that you look at. It seems almost
Speaker 1: impossible that your brain is actually registering all the information constantly,
Speaker 1: simultaneously and updating based on you know, what is actually
Speaker 1: taking place in the world. It seems more like your
Speaker 1: brain is kind of creating an illusion that you are
Speaker 1: looking at the world and then pretty frequently updating little
Speaker 1: key bits of data about that illusion. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like in my experience to bring us
Speaker 1: back to Dungeons and Dragons, it's like playing Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons and tell yourself, yeah, I know what all the
Speaker 1: rules are, but then when individual rules come up, you're like, actually,
Speaker 1: I need to check that rule again. Maybe I don't
Speaker 1: know that rule. That's kind of what it's like to
Speaker 1: walk around the world and and take in visual sense data.
Speaker 1: Uh and and but but I love this idea of
Speaker 1: the hallucinating engine of the of the brain because this
Speaker 1: this does this description matches up so much of what
Speaker 1: we discussed on the show that your memories are not reality,
Speaker 1: that your perception is not reality, that your feelings are
Speaker 1: not reality. Not to say that all three of those
Speaker 1: things are lies. That they are based on they're based
Speaker 1: on reality, but they themselves are not accurate. They are
Speaker 1: not one. They're not a reflection of the world. They
Speaker 1: are at best a distorted reflection of the absolute reality.
Speaker 1: And even then, like it's hard to even say what
Speaker 1: what that is, right, I mean, the vision. Your vision
Speaker 1: is not a camera feed. It is not recording passively,
Speaker 1: objectively everything that happens in front of your face. It
Speaker 1: is instead sort of a hallucination that is quite frequently
Speaker 1: updated with little bits of data. Right. And that's without
Speaker 1: even getting into discussions of how our vision and other
Speaker 1: senses match up against the other organic senses of various
Speaker 1: creatures in our world, things with far sharper vision that
Speaker 1: can see in different wavelengths, things was far sharper hearing,
Speaker 1: and sent that that therefore live in what I've I've
Speaker 1: often seen described as like a different sensory world. Um,
Speaker 1: but you can't walk around the world reminding yourself of that.
Speaker 1: But ultimately, like the version that you form in your
Speaker 1: head has to be your working model of reality. And
Speaker 1: you know, otherwise that you just go mad. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a really interesting thing that gets pursued at the end
Speaker 1: of Abbott's article here where she talks about the idea
Speaker 1: of like what's the best model for sort of the
Speaker 1: whole brain visual perception of what you're seeing in front
Speaker 1: of you and uh, and she makes reference to this
Speaker 1: idea of predictive processing. Quote. The brain operates by predicting
Speaker 1: how its immediate surroundings will change millisecond by millisecond and
Speaker 1: comparing that prediction with the information it receives through the
Speaker 1: various senses. It uses any mismatch or prediction error to
Speaker 1: update its model of the world. So maybe you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're kind of simultaneously simulating the world in front
Speaker 1: of you at the same time you're watching it, and
Speaker 1: the watching could be there to note little ways in
Speaker 1: which your prediction is turning out wrong and then trying
Speaker 1: to fix it right, or being hypersensitive to the ways
Speaker 1: that the that your sensory input matches your uh, your simulation,
Speaker 1: which can be a great way of just wandering into delusion,
Speaker 1: you know, or living in a state of paranoia because
Speaker 1: you're just you're just looking for the the the the
Speaker 1: sense data that will back up the version of reality
Speaker 1: that you have stored in your mind that you're you're
Speaker 1: cultivating in your mind. Yeah. Absolutely. Uh. There's one more
Speaker 1: point of comparison that I thought was interesting because the
Speaker 1: article makes reference to optical illusions. You know, there's this
Speaker 1: question of so when you look at an optical illusions
Speaker 1: one of those things that has like a double image valance,
Speaker 1: it's the duck and it's the rabbit, you don't see
Speaker 1: the duck in the rabbit halfway. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: see it both at the same time or halfway between
Speaker 1: you see it. I mean, most people tend to see
Speaker 1: fully duck and then there's a flip in the brain
Speaker 1: and the brain readjusts and then you see fully rabbit.
Speaker 1: Isn't that interesting? Like, what's causing that flip? Nothing has
Speaker 1: changed in terms of what you're looking at, But suddenly
Speaker 1: the brain undergoes some kind of internal change and it
Speaker 1: has completely reversed what you perceive yourself, what you perceive
Speaker 1: in front of you. Like another example would be when
Speaker 1: the the accidental face in a design is pointed out
Speaker 1: to you and then you cannot unsee it um or
Speaker 1: like one one for me is the double hangar that
Speaker 1: it looks like a drunken octopus that wants to box
Speaker 1: a second. Yes, yes, on the back of a door
Speaker 1: that's got two little prongs. Yes. Before it was just
Speaker 1: a code hanger, but then once that was pointed out,
Speaker 1: that's all I can see, Like, that's how it's coded
Speaker 1: in my brain. It's fighting Joe octopus. Yeah. Or if
Speaker 1: you look at Edvard monks the scream. But if has
Speaker 1: anybody ever told you to look at it and see
Speaker 1: if you can see the Springer spaniel. No, I don't
Speaker 1: think I've done that exercise. Okay, look at the head
Speaker 1: on the screen next time and just think Springer spaniel
Speaker 1: and then you won't be able to unsee it. So
Speaker 1: there's another interesting development about facial recognition in the brain
Speaker 1: that I was reading about in a article by a
Speaker 1: couple of researchers named Anna K. Boback and Sarah Bate
Speaker 1: who at the time we're conducting research on face perception
Speaker 1: at Bournemouth University in England. Uh And so they point
Speaker 1: out that one aspect of a typical human brains face
Speaker 1: perception is the ability to engage what they call a
Speaker 1: configure role or holistic strategy for visual processing, meaning that
Speaker 1: these human brains are able to sort of see faces
Speaker 1: as a whole rather than examining the independent features of
Speaker 1: a face one at a time. And I've actually read
Speaker 1: there was something similar going on with visual expertise that
Speaker 1: like when people have visual expertise for cars, they're much
Speaker 1: better able to get an idea of what a car
Speaker 1: is with a holistic, sort of one glance view rather
Speaker 1: than having to look at individual parts of the car.
Speaker 1: And this ties into something I've read about people with prosopagnosia.
Speaker 1: Oliver Sacks actually describes this process of of a sort
Speaker 1: of hack or work around for their condition that basically
Speaker 1: involves examining the elements of a face for special identifying
Speaker 1: marks or features, the way you might look for, you know,
Speaker 1: a known dint or bumper sticker to identify a familiar
Speaker 1: car from others of the same model in color, or
Speaker 1: a particular hairstyle I think is sometimes brought up right,
Speaker 1: or style or mode of dress. So bo Back and
Speaker 1: Bait describe some research they conducted on people with typical
Speaker 1: face perception versus people with prosopagnosia versus people sometimes known
Speaker 1: as super recognizers who were sort of the opposite end
Speaker 1: of prosopagnosia. They have unusually high accuracy in remembering and
Speaker 1: recognizing faces, even for people that haven't seen in a
Speaker 1: long time. And the authors here right that they used
Speaker 1: eye tracking software to see where these different groups of
Speaker 1: people tended to look when they were examining a human face,
Speaker 1: and there were some interesting differences here. So they found
Speaker 1: on average, people with typical face perception would tend to
Speaker 1: focus basically around the eyes most when trying to identify
Speaker 1: a face. Um and they note some previous research on
Speaker 1: people with acquired prosopagnosia, including a two thousand eight study
Speaker 1: from the Journal of Neuropsychology by Orbon disagree at all,
Speaker 1: and it found that people with face blindness tend to
Speaker 1: look less at the eyes and at the upper area
Speaker 1: of the face, and tend to look more at lower
Speaker 1: regions of the face like the mouth when trying to
Speaker 1: identify faces. And the authors note that their their recent
Speaker 1: research again showed people with prosopagnosia we're looking less at
Speaker 1: the eyes than typical subjects. Meanwhile, they note that super
Speaker 1: recognizers in their studies tended to on average focus more
Speaker 1: on the nose which was kind of strange, but they
Speaker 1: had an idea about that, is, so, is it something
Speaker 1: special about the nose itself as a feature of the face,
Speaker 1: or is it, as they kind of propose, more of
Speaker 1: a diagnostic center of the gaze, Uh, that that gravitates
Speaker 1: towards the center of the face when we are better
Speaker 1: at getting a holistic sense of a face from a
Speaker 1: glance rather than trying to examine its individual features one
Speaker 1: by one. And so the authors here argued that it
Speaker 1: is the center of the face, rather than the eyes
Speaker 1: in particular or any other feature that optimally engages the
Speaker 1: brain's facial recognition systems. Interesting. I mean, one thing that
Speaker 1: it brings to mind when you look. It's kind of
Speaker 1: the old adage right to look someone in the eyes,
Speaker 1: to to sort of engage in a more direct theory
Speaker 1: of mind with them, right to try and sort of
Speaker 1: it's like you're having a like a mind melt moment
Speaker 1: right where it seems like if you're looking at someone's nose.
Speaker 1: I mean that that reminds me of exercises people say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, if you want to, you know, cut down
Speaker 1: on anxiety during a um like an interview, look at
Speaker 1: the person's forehead, you know, don't look at them in
Speaker 1: the eyes. So it feels like a holistic view of
Speaker 1: the face is also an impersonal view of the face.
Speaker 1: It feels, at least to me, it feels like if
Speaker 1: you're looking somebody in the eyes, you're also engaging in
Speaker 1: consideration of their mind, which might conceivably be distracting from
Speaker 1: the identification process. Right, So maybe it's better to to
Speaker 1: look at the nose, like, don't think of this person
Speaker 1: as a person, think of them as a face that
Speaker 1: matches up with a name. They didn't mention that, and
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that, but I think that's a
Speaker 1: very interesting point, Yes, that like, perhaps by focusing a
Speaker 1: little bit less directly on the eyes, you are somewhat
Speaker 1: deep personalizing the experience of the face recognition, and thus
Speaker 1: you can you can cut out some emotional distraction. Now,
Speaker 1: then maybe that's just my individual like social anxiety speaking there,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know, I mean, we don't know
Speaker 1: that's the case. That's just like an interesting possibility, yeah,
Speaker 1: because well, I mean, it reminds me how in the
Speaker 1: last episode we were talking about technology for facial recognition,
Speaker 1: of course being used by law enforcement. And one of
Speaker 1: the things the author's note in this article here is
Speaker 1: that human super recognizers are in many places now being
Speaker 1: directly sought out and employed by law enforcement. So like,
Speaker 1: you know, to be able to like look at video
Speaker 1: feeds and try to match people with known photos of
Speaker 1: of wanted criminals and stuff. Again, that kind of like
Speaker 1: impersonal recognizing thing, especially you know, in a law enforcement context,
Speaker 1: seems like it's possible it could be aided if you
Speaker 1: are seeing less of a person's humanity when looking at
Speaker 1: their face and just literally trying to make the most
Speaker 1: act you're a match of features. Has this been exploited
Speaker 1: in a network crime solving series yet? Oh, like the
Speaker 1: dexter of super recognizing. Yeah, and I would be shocked
Speaker 1: if it has not happened or at least been pitched
Speaker 1: to a major studio super recognized heer i'd given an episode.
Speaker 1: But you know, this also makes me think about the
Speaker 1: different types of machine face recognition systems out there, of which,
Speaker 1: of course, you know, we know there are many. Some
Speaker 1: are more oriented around specific details of the face. For example,
Speaker 1: I've seen the idea of distance between the eyes. Again,
Speaker 1: this is something that humans and macaques apparently used as
Speaker 1: a major metric for face evaluation, but it's also a
Speaker 1: common thing used by machines. Uh. But but others probably
Speaker 1: take a more holistic approach. I'm not an expert in AI,
Speaker 1: but I imagine that the neural net based facial recognition
Speaker 1: algorithms trained on wild photo data might be more reasonably
Speaker 1: compared to the face as a whole biological process. That
Speaker 1: makes sense. All right, On that note, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break, but we'll be right back. Than alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've been talking about facial recognition largely
Speaker 1: in this episode. We've been talking about the complexity of
Speaker 1: organic facial recognition, the kind of facial recognition is going
Speaker 1: on inside the human brain and in the brains of
Speaker 1: animals as opposed to UH that going on with AI
Speaker 1: right now. One of the things I know we talked
Speaker 1: about it in the last episode was among our many
Speaker 1: concerns about artificial intelligence for facial recognition, where there are
Speaker 1: various types of bias that have been documented to show
Speaker 1: up in in UH computer based AI for facial recognition. Yeah, specifically,
Speaker 1: we're talking about issues involving problems with these AI programs
Speaker 1: recognizing black and or Asian faces because this also this
Speaker 1: is interesting because it also forces us to confront not
Speaker 1: only racial bias in the creation of programs and AI,
Speaker 1: it also mirrors our organic issues with facial recognition for
Speaker 1: races other than our own. UM. There there's been a
Speaker 1: lot written about this topic. There's been a number of studies,
Speaker 1: but just in UH, just last year from July, there
Speaker 1: was an article in The Guardian title of a perception
Speaker 1: of other races look alike rooted in visual process says study.
Speaker 1: And this looks at a Stanford University study on this
Speaker 1: oft researched issue. At one point that the researcher stressed
Speaker 1: it was something we were just talking about earlier. What
Speaker 1: are human senses pick up on is not necessarily an
Speaker 1: accurate representation of reality and if as we've discussed before,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of consolidation involved, the loose stitching of
Speaker 1: things together based on actual perceived details, on memories, on
Speaker 1: preconceived notions, on fears, suggestions, and more. And this is
Speaker 1: a particular m r I assisted study. UH. It only
Speaker 1: involved twenty white individuals evaluating the faces of black faces
Speaker 1: and white faces, but it showed greater activation of of
Speaker 1: of face recognition regions in the brain. When when a
Speaker 1: white test subject looked at white faces compared to black faces, now,
Speaker 1: dissimilar faces, that being you know, phases that are no
Speaker 1: matter what you know, the race of the individual might
Speaker 1: be stand out more. Um, dissimilar faces resulted in a spike,
Speaker 1: but apparently the spike was still greater in cases of
Speaker 1: dissimilar white faces. Now, to be clear, this is not
Speaker 1: a case of oh, we as humans do this because look,
Speaker 1: here's our brains doing it. You know. A lot uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot was was not taken into account
Speaker 1: with the studies such as the social backgrounds of the
Speaker 1: individuals and all. As always, one assumes an interplay of
Speaker 1: of neural software and socio cultural conditioning. But above all
Speaker 1: they want to drive them. It's also not proof that
Speaker 1: racial prejudice is to be dismissed as being just a
Speaker 1: a neurological reality. Well why would that mean it should
Speaker 1: be dismissed. I mean, even if it is a neurological reality,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make it okay, right absolutely Uh. Here's the
Speaker 1: quote from doctor Brent Hughes, a co author um of
Speaker 1: of of the paper from University of California, riverside quote,
Speaker 1: individuals should not be let off the hook for their
Speaker 1: prejudicial attitudes just because we see evidence of race biases
Speaker 1: in perception. To the contrary, these race biases and perception
Speaker 1: are malleable and subject to individual motivations and goals. So
Speaker 1: again coming back to the interplay between software and hardware,
Speaker 1: but I think I do think there's a lot to
Speaker 1: contemplate here. The way are organic and and currently our
Speaker 1: technological facial recognition systems are subject to racial bias. But
Speaker 1: then in both cases they are malleable. There are ways
Speaker 1: to tweak and improve, just as there's a there's room
Speaker 1: to allow these imperfect perceptions of reality to color what
Speaker 1: we believe about the world. Probably one of the most
Speaker 1: important things is for people not to be lulled in
Speaker 1: by the misperception that because something is a computer algorithm,
Speaker 1: or that it's a machine, that it's impossible for it
Speaker 1: to have a bias. I mean, clearly, we just know
Speaker 1: that that's not true. I mean, obviously the machine isn't
Speaker 1: motivated emotionally. The machine doesn't say hate people or care
Speaker 1: about people in whatever way, but it's guided by rules
Speaker 1: that are created by training based on data sets that
Speaker 1: are in the real world, which might incorporate racial biases,
Speaker 1: or it can be trained, you know, on explicit rules
Speaker 1: generated by people, whether by malice or just by mistake,
Speaker 1: have some kind of racial bias incorporated in them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and on the human side of things, this is
Speaker 1: only a glimpse at very broad facial perception because also
Speaker 1: consider how cute into facial expressions we are and how
Speaker 1: this too can be biased. I was looking at what's
Speaker 1: in a face, how face gender and current effect influence
Speaker 1: perceived emotion from two thousands sixteens was in the front
Speaker 1: Frontiers and Psychology, and the findings included a a bias
Speaker 1: to perceive male faces as more negative and the perceptions
Speaker 1: of female faces depended on current mood. So to summarize
Speaker 1: both cases, the male face that an individual perceived and
Speaker 1: needs to be happier looking compared to a female face
Speaker 1: to elect an interpretation of even just neutral emotion. So
Speaker 1: just male faces in general are interpreted as having more
Speaker 1: negative emotion in them. Yes. And then meanwhile, the happier
Speaker 1: a given male observer is, the more inclined they are
Speaker 1: to see a female's face as happy, which is which
Speaker 1: is kind of completely but that comes back again to
Speaker 1: like what is my emotional state? That is then uh,
Speaker 1: that is then affecting the emotional state I perceive in
Speaker 1: other people. And all of this is adding to my
Speaker 1: perception of what's going on in reality. Oh, this is
Speaker 1: the classic like, oh, yeah, she thought the joke was funny.
Speaker 1: I was laughing. Yeah. Now, this is just one study
Speaker 1: I'm referring to here and should be taken as the
Speaker 1: gold standard or anything. But it does provide a glimpse
Speaker 1: and it just again how complex and unreal our perception
Speaker 1: of reality is. And I think, you know, it makes
Speaker 1: sense because we are we are such social creatures that
Speaker 1: the social reality uh a human is of tremendous importance.
Speaker 1: But of course, reading the social reality of a person
Speaker 1: is rooted in various conscious and subconscious processes. It also
Speaker 1: depends on theory of mind. It's highways susceptible to to
Speaker 1: to buy us based on conditioning, culture and more. Now
Speaker 1: now currently mostly what we've talked about with UM, with
Speaker 1: AI and facial recognition software, it is concerning just the
Speaker 1: measurements of the face, the appearance of the face, and
Speaker 1: not so much emotional states. But that's uh, that's not
Speaker 1: to say that that the programmers of these these AI
Speaker 1: are not interested in reading that information as well, or
Speaker 1: at least the marketers right, But well no, I mean
Speaker 1: I guess both because yeah, to do a little more
Speaker 1: on faces and emotion. I think some of the same
Speaker 1: problems with human perception of emotion in other people's faces
Speaker 1: are translated now to technology, say, except made even more
Speaker 1: blunt and inaccurate. Um. So many technology companies in recent years,
Speaker 1: including IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etcetera, have all been advertising
Speaker 1: AI that can read human emotions by inferring them from
Speaker 1: facial expressions. And there are some cases where even companies
Speaker 1: that have shied away from doing facial recognition, as in like,
Speaker 1: you know this is Jeff's face, have still said it's
Speaker 1: okay to try to just look at a face anonymously
Speaker 1: and judge what its emotional state is. And this is
Speaker 1: being advertised as useful for evaluating candidates in a job interview,
Speaker 1: or analyzing emotional states of customers in a retail environment
Speaker 1: you know you want happy customers, or assessing potential threats
Speaker 1: from people trying to conceal anger all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: Even saw one that was trying to sell it as
Speaker 1: a as like a driving safety feature. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: detecting like road rage on the face. So just one example.
Speaker 1: In August twenty nineteen piece I was reading in Wired
Speaker 1: discussing Amazon's image analysis software known as Recognition with a
Speaker 1: k uh yeah, just the spelling of that is terrible.
Speaker 1: But uh so, at the time, this was claiming to
Speaker 1: be able to assess emotions in faces, including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, discussed, calmness, confusion,
Speaker 1: and then the newest one they had just added to
Speaker 1: the list when this article came out was fear. Okay,
Speaker 1: well that's a big one. Was at last, I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's the one they brought online last. That makes me
Speaker 1: think of the end of Starship Troopers. It's afraid. Uh So,
Speaker 1: what is the scientific research tell us about how well
Speaker 1: these algorithms should be expected to do in reading emotions?
Speaker 1: I was looking at a paper by Lisa Feldman, Barrett,
Speaker 1: Ralph Adolph's, Stacy, Marcella, alex In Martinez, and Seth D.
Speaker 1: Pollock in Psychological Science in the Public Interest published in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen called Emotional Expressions Reconsidered Challenges to inferring emotion
Speaker 1: from human facial movements, and they looked at you know,
Speaker 1: like a ton of I think, like over a thousand studies.
Speaker 1: It was huge to review, and they conclude that the
Speaker 1: whole premise on which these algorithms is based is close
Speaker 1: to worthless because, shocker, there is a little bit of
Speaker 1: information about emotional states encoded in human faces, but it's
Speaker 1: not nearly enough to give you a very accurate picture
Speaker 1: of internal states. People's faces reflect all kinds of strange, complicated,
Speaker 1: fleeting emotions back and forth. They might be faking emotions
Speaker 1: with their faces, and they even when humans read each
Speaker 1: other's emotions, which we were just talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: they're not always totally good at doing, but when humans
Speaker 1: do it, they incorporate way more than just the face.
Speaker 1: They incorporate body language, tone, all kinds of things to
Speaker 1: read emotion. And the the AI s are not even
Speaker 1: that good. They're just going off the face. And the
Speaker 1: researchers say that, you know, the evidence concludes that looking
Speaker 1: at the face alone is completely insufficient to get an
Speaker 1: accurate picture of internal emotional states. And it's kind of
Speaker 1: dangerous to suggest that you can get an accurate picture
Speaker 1: of emotional states just with facial analysis. To read a quote.
Speaker 1: Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information
Speaker 1: are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise, but our
Speaker 1: review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how
Speaker 1: people actually move their faces to express emotions and other
Speaker 1: social information in the variety of contexts that make up
Speaker 1: everyday life, as well as a careful study of the
Speaker 1: mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another.
Speaker 1: Uh So, the way to read their conclusion is these,
Speaker 1: these facial recognition algorithms might be able to predict emotion
Speaker 1: with a rate slightly better than chance based on faces.
Speaker 1: You know. So they read your face and they see
Speaker 1: a smile on it, and they say, this person is happy.
Speaker 1: And that's a little bit better than guessing your emotional
Speaker 1: state at random, but not a lot better. You have
Speaker 1: these these programmers never heard tracks of my tears. They
Speaker 1: not know how how smiles. But it does sound like
Speaker 1: we could get to the point where we could be
Speaker 1: driving automobiles that tell us to smile more to to
Speaker 1: because you know, we already have them. That they try
Speaker 1: and sort of judge what are like state of wakefulness
Speaker 1: is based on our driving performance. You know, where they'll say,
Speaker 1: do you need a break, and they'll be like a
Speaker 1: coffee cup symbol, a little pop up on the dash. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's not that difficult to imagine a scenario where
Speaker 1: one will will you know, pick up on some very
Speaker 1: broad signs of displeasure and start chiming in with some advice.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm but just thinking about this
Speaker 1: is making me mad. I want to say, go download
Speaker 1: some malware computer, you don't know me get broken. What well,
Speaker 1: what if it was more subtle than that. What if
Speaker 1: if if your car picked up on some very you know,
Speaker 1: overt signs of displeasure. What if your cards just told
Speaker 1: you that it loved you. I think I would fall
Speaker 1: for that. I would, you know, if it was presented appropriately,
Speaker 1: I would be like, yes, thank you. Finally, wrap your
Speaker 1: hands across my engines. All right, that's enough, Bruce. We
Speaker 1: are we ready to wrap up for today? Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: but I think we will be back with at least
Speaker 1: one more part right where we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the history of facial recognition technology and a little more
Speaker 1: about the modern implications, possible regulation schemes and stuff like that. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: in the meantime, certainly, we'd love to hear from anyone
Speaker 1: out there because we all have faces, we have some
Speaker 1: experience with with with facial recognition and varying levels of
Speaker 1: facial recognition. I know we've heard from listeners who have
Speaker 1: who have you know, varying degrees of difficulty or I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from someone who thinks they might be
Speaker 1: a super recognizer or is like a what a verified
Speaker 1: super recognizer. In the meantime, if you want to listen
Speaker 1: to other episodes of the show, you can find them
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. If you go to stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com, that will shoot you
Speaker 1: over to the I heart listening for this show. But
Speaker 1: wherever you get the show, make sure that you rate, review,
Speaker 1: and subscribe. Those are the ways you can help us out.
Speaker 1: And don't forget about Invention. That's our other show. That
Speaker 1: is a journey through human techno history and what right now,
Speaker 1: we're talking about fire technology over there, we're talking about
Speaker 1: matches and also just the the ability, the massive step
Speaker 1: forward in human technology that enabled us to not only
Speaker 1: capture fire, but to re create it. Huge thanks as
Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hi, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: heart Radio is at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Bids Witty
Speaker 1: Problem