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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vocal bomb here. If you're anything like me, in

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Speaker 1: moments of embarrassment, your face may flush and suddenly feel warm,

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Speaker 1: But during times of intense concentration, the opposite is true.

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Speaker 1: You're more likely to keep a cool head, or rather

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Speaker 1: a cool face. According to new research, a study that

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Speaker 1: evaluated facial thermal temperatures revealed that as a person engages

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Speaker 1: in intense mental tasks, their face and in particular the

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Speaker 1: area around the nose, becomes cooler. The study, done by

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Speaker 1: researchers at the University of Nottingham's Institute for Aerospace Technology

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Speaker 1: and published Indie journal Human Factors, paves the way towards

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Speaker 1: applying thermal cameras in the workplace as a tool to

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Speaker 1: assess how focused or possibly overwhelmed a worker might be,

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Speaker 1: which would be a little much for many work environments,

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Speaker 1: but could help prevent dangerous situations where people's safety depends

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Speaker 1: on a worker's concentration. One a you know where a

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Speaker 1: frazzled worker could become a deadly serious concern is in

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Speaker 1: the cockpit. Passenger air traffic has doubled every fifteen years

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Speaker 1: since the nineteen eighties and is expected to double again

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Speaker 1: by four according to an Airbus Global Market forecast. The

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Speaker 1: forecast predicts that pilots may be operating and increasingly congested

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Speaker 1: skies and more often without copilots. If air traffic controllers

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Speaker 1: and others on the ground can detect through thermal facial

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Speaker 1: imaging when a pilot is in a moment of intense concentration,

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Speaker 1: they can offer to help, perhaps through remote control mechanisms,

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Speaker 1: or at least not further distract the pilot with unnecessary communications.

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Speaker 1: To evaluate how temperatures within a person's face change during

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Speaker 1: periods of concentration, the researchers assembled fourteen students and faculty

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Speaker 1: members at their university and had them complete computer based

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Speaker 1: tasks of increasing difficulty. As the subjects completed each challenge,

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Speaker 1: their breathing and pulse rates were recorded, and a thermal

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Speaker 1: camera took detailed readings of temperature from previously mapped locations

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Speaker 1: on their faces. The researchers found that the link between

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Speaker 1: the difficulty of each task and the coolness of the

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Speaker 1: subject's facial temperatures was striking. Co author Alistair Campbell Ritchie

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Speaker 1: of the University of Nottingham's Bioengineering Research Group said in

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Speaker 1: a press release, we expected that mental demands on an

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Speaker 1: operator would result in physiological changes, but the direct correlation

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Speaker 1: between the workload and the skin temperature was very impressive

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Speaker 1: and counterintuitive. We were not expecting to see the face

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Speaker 1: getting colder. The results were later replicated among a sample

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Speaker 1: of pilots as they operated flights on simulated helicopters. We

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Speaker 1: spoke with Sarah Sharple's, professor of human factors at the

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Speaker 1: University of Nottingham and co author of the study. She

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Speaker 1: said there are a couple of possible explanations for why

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Speaker 1: the nose area in particular becomes cooler with increased concentration.

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Speaker 1: One is that breathing rate tends to increase as a

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Speaker 1: person's mental workload increases, and more air traveling through the

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Speaker 1: nose would decrease its temperature. The other is that during

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Speaker 1: periods of high mental workload, blood diverges to the prefrontal

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Speaker 1: cortex of the brain. That could mean, Sharples says, that

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Speaker 1: more blood is flowing away from the nose and towards

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Speaker 1: the brain. It could also be a combination of these factors.

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Speaker 1: Sharpe's added, however, that there were a few exceptions to

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Speaker 1: the cool nose phenomenon. For that reason, she says, we

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Speaker 1: would recommend, if this were to be used in a

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Speaker 1: real world context, that there be some baseline testing to

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Speaker 1: understand how close the relationship is in each individual between

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Speaker 1: facial temperature and workload. We also spoke with Archangelo Merla,

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Speaker 1: director of the Infrared Imaging Lab at the Institute for

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Speaker 1: Advanced Biomedical Technology at Italy's University of Kiati Pascuera, who

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Speaker 1: agrees that baseline testing is critical when interpreting changes in

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Speaker 1: people's facial temperatures. Merla's research has shown that facial temperatures

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Speaker 1: can reveal a range of conditions, from whether or not

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Speaker 1: a person is lying, to feelings of fear or stirrings

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Speaker 1: of lust. Merla has also found that the temperature of

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Speaker 1: the nose often offers a key signal. He said, reading

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Speaker 1: nose temperature is an effective physic theological tool as an

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Speaker 1: indicator of a transition state, but the best approach is

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Speaker 1: to take into account changes in temperature across the entire face.

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Speaker 1: Apart from pilots, sharples, and visions, that thermal cameras could

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Speaker 1: play a role in assessing workload and other settings, including

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Speaker 1: in factories where workers interact with large machinery. But if

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Speaker 1: the idea of your boss keeping tabs on you via

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Speaker 1: a thermal camera, feels intrusively big brethery, you're not alone.

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Speaker 1: Sharples asks, for example, who would own a worker's thermal data,

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Speaker 1: the worker or the employer. She said, you can imagine

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Speaker 1: a situation where thermal imaging data intended for real time

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Speaker 1: monitoring could be stored and then presented during an end

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Speaker 1: of year performance report. It's my feeling that these kinds

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Speaker 1: of technologies will increase in the workplace, so we have

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Speaker 1: to make absolutely sure we deal with all the ethical, legal,

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Speaker 1: and social implications. Today's episode was written by Amanda Onion

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Speaker 1: and produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more

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Speaker 1: on this end lots of other cool topics, visit our

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Speaker 1: home planet, How staff Works dot com. M