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?

Or are we looking at a quirk of our own brains? What does any of this have to do with the

neurologist Oliver Sacks 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 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.

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 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 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.

...