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Short Wave

The Human Brain Is Hardwired To Recognize Faces. But What If You Can't?

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 β€’ 6K Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 26 June 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Humans are hardwired to see faces β€” even in inanimate objects. We have a lima bean-shaped part of our brains dedicated to facial recognition. But this process isn't always straightforward. Science journalist Sadie Dingfelder is one of 10 million Americans who are face blind, or struggle to recognize the faces of people they know. In her new book, Do I Know You? she dives into this, as well as the science of memory and imagination.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Plants don't have brains, but they are capable of communicating and maybe even forming memories.

0:05.6

Do you think plants can think?

0:07.6

No. Absolutely. What do you mean by thinking?

0:10.1

I'm Kate the chemist, and on my podcast, Seeking seeking a scientist we're exploring the possibility of plant intelligence.

0:16.2

Listen to seeking a scientist from K-C-U-R, part of the NPR Network.

0:20.7

You're listening to Shortwave. From. I see faces everywhere. In fact,

0:30.9

the human brain is hardwired to see them and things that don't have faces at all. Driving this is the fusiform face area, which is a part of our brain at the back, shaped like an almond or a lima bean that sits right behind our ears.

0:45.4

And for many people, the process of seeing a face and recognizing who it belongs to is pretty seamless.

0:51.5

Sadie Dingfelder, though though always had trouble with this and then one day in her

0:56.5

late 30s. I was in the grocery store with my husband and I was following him around and I noticed he was just suddenly filling our cart with all this junk food which is very out of character.

1:09.0

He's just a food snob.

1:11.0

And so I grabbed some peanut butter out of the cart and I said, since when do you

1:18.0

buy generic? And I just like looked at him and he looked back at me and his face was just this mask of

1:25.3

horror and all at once I realized that he was not my husband he was a random

1:31.0

husband shaped stranger.

1:34.8

Sadie is a freelance science journalist and she couldn't shake how strange this grocery store encounter was.

1:42.0

She joined a clinical study on something called

1:44.4

face blindness led by Joseph de Guutis, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School

1:48.9

and the VA Boston health care system. I expected that when I joined this study I was going to come out as like

1:54.5

uh sort of below average and then I came out like the worst of the worst like I

2:00.9

I was really bad. He told you that you had the fusiform face area of a 12 year old and the facial recognition ability of a quote

2:08.4

mediocre to below average macock. Yeah, I'm on the I'm on the monkey level. Joseph told her she had

...

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