When we see a friend's face, how do we instantly know who they are?

Dora Sal looks closely at the brain patterns of monkeys to help unravel this mystery.

This year, she received the Cavalry Prize in neuroscience with Nancy Canwisher and Vinrick

Frywald for identifying a specialized region of the brain where facial recognition happens.

Scientific American Custom Media, in partnership with the Cavalry Prize, spoke with Doris

to learn more about her discoveries and how she's using them to unlock a bigger question.

How do our brains represent the world?

As a kid, Doris Sow was surrounded by science.

Her mother was a computer programmer, and her father is a mathematician.

I always grew up with the sense that being a scientist was the most noble life-calling.

That really came from my parents talking to them.

It was part of our family. But Doris didn't think she'd be a

scientist. I didn't think of myself as particularly interested in science. I like math. My parents

gave me geometry problems. And I love that. And I certainly didn't think about the brain when I was

a kid. You know, I like to play. I play with

Barbie dolls. I love to read biographies. That all changed when she was in sixth grade.

I remember just waking up one morning and suddenly for no real reason wondering if space is

infinite or not. Because it seemed like if space is infinite, that seems incredible. I'd

never thought about infinity before. And if it wasn't, how could that be? So I just kept going

these loops. And I remember obsessing about this for days. She revisited this question in high

school as she started reading about artificial intelligence and neuroscience.

Books by philosophers like Emmanuel Kant made her think about how our minds perceive space.

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