Faces

It is with our faces that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death.

Our age and our gender are printed on our faces.  Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions that Darwin wrote about, as well as the hidden or repressed ones that Freud wrote about, are displayed on our faces, along with our thoughts and intentions.  It seems a strange irony that we need science to rekindle faith in the ancient ability to read mnds.  That old skill, so much a part of us, is not much believed in now. 

Infants are early masters of detecting and expressing emotions, which may help to explain their inborn fascination for faces.  If you want to capture the attention of an infant, you will have more luck using an expressive human face than any other object in the world.  Babies have an intrinsic appetite for faces: they look at them, peer at them, gaze at them, stare at them.  Infants just a few days old can distinguish between emotional expressions. 

An infant can detect minute temporal changes in emotional responsiveness.  This level of sophistication is coming from an organism that won’t be able to stand up on his own for another six months.  Why sould a creature with relatvely few skills be so monomaniacally focused on tiny muscular contractions visible beneath the skin of another creature’s body?

The answer lies in the evolutionary history of the limbic brain which is not only the seat of dreams, but also the center of advanced emotionality. What one sees, hears, feels and smells is fed into the limbic brain which fine-tunes physiology to prime the body for the outside world.  The limbic brain specializes in detecting and analyzing just one part of the physical world–the internal state of other mammals.  Emotionality is the social sense organ of limbic creatures. 

Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity called limbic resonance–a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states.  It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience.  Instead of seeing a pair of eyes when we look into the portals to a limbic brain, our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricrochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity.  Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor.  When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.

Though we might admire arms and legs, breasts and buttocks, it is the face, first and last, that is judged “beautiful” in an aesthetic sense, “fine” or “distinguished” in a moral or intellectual sense