Faces

.

And, crucially, it is by our faces that we can be recognized as individuals.  Our faces bear the stamp of our experiences and our character; at forty, it is said, a man has the face he deserves.

At two and a half months, babies respond to smiling faces by smiling back.  “As the  child simles,” Everett Elinwood writes, “it usually engages the adult human to interact with him–to smile, to talk, to hold–in other words, to initiate the processes of socialization.  The reciprocal understanding mother-child relationship is possible only because of the continual dialogue between faces.”   The face, psychoanalysts consider, is the first object to acquire visual meaning and significance.  But are faces in a special category as fas as the nervous system is concerned?

It seems that there is an innate and presumably genetically determined ability to recognize faces, and this capacity gets focused in the first year or two, so that we become especially good at recognizing the sorts of faces we are likely to encounter.  Our “face cells,” already present at birth, need experience in order to develop fully.

Above all, the recognition of faces depends not only on the ability to parse the visual aspects of a face–its particular features and their over-all configuraton–and compare them with others but also on the ability to summon the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with that face.  The recognition of specific places or faces goes with a particular feeling, a sense of association and meaning.

Recognition is based on knowledge and familiarity is based on feeling, but neither entails the other.  The two have different neural bases and can be dissociated.  In instances of deja vu, it is possible you may find that everyone on the bus, or in the street, looks “familiar” and you may go up to them and address them as old friends, even while realizing that you cannot possibly know them all.

Sources: Face-Blind by Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, August 30, 2010 and “A General Theory of Love” by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

 Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon: A General Theory of Love
Leaders know and science has discovered emotionality’s deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other’s minds.