Unraveling the Magical Bond Between Faces, Art, and the Human Brain”
As you gaze at the four images displayed above, you cannot help but notice that each one represents a face. These faces hold personal significance for you and evoke various reactions. Some may be familiar, like the distinguished visage of George Washington, easily identifiable as a specific individual. On the other hand, others, like the abstract portrayal by Pablo Picasso, may depict a face, yet fail to resemble any real person.
Faces have always held a special place as powerful social signals, from ancient amulets to the masterpieces of modern painters. Art has consistently found inspiration in the human countenance. However, it goes beyond aesthetics; our brains react distinctly to faces. Recent groundbreaking neurologic research provides remarkable evidence that faces hold a unique position in our brains as well.
When you observe the faces before you, it triggers a captivating phenomenon in your cerebrum. Specifically, a specialized area known as the fusiform facial area (FFA), located in the right hemisphere of the brain, becomes engaged in facial perception. This neural activity is linked to the emotional and cognitive processes that unfold when we encounter faces in our daily interactions.
The impact of faces on art and the human brain is indeed a captivating enigma, inviting us to explore the intricate relationship between visual perception, emotion, and creativity. So, the next time you come across a face in art or in person, know that your brain is delving into a realm of specialized wonders, decoding the essence of this fundamental human element.
Why do faces look similar across different creatures, including humans?
Nature has a smart reason for this. The way faces are arranged helps creatures survive better. For example, the eyes are placed high on the face to see the world clearly, the nose points downward to avoid rain, and the mouth is positioned to eat food that has been inspected by the eyes and nose.
In humans, faces are incredibly important. They are the first thing we notice about someone and tell us a lot about that person. We often judge others based on their facial expressions and decide if we like or trust them. This instinctive reaction to faces goes back a long way in human history.
During our evolution, recognizing and understanding faces became crucial for survival. It helped our ancestors know who to trust and who might pose a threat. This way, they could avoid unnecessary conflicts and focus on finding food and mates. As societies developed, cooperation became essential, and facial expressions played a role in understanding each other’s intentions and emotions. Trustworthy faces were vital for forming alliances, which was crucial for social life.
So, reading faces became a valuable skill that helped humans survive and thrive in their communities. Faces have a lot to do with our social interactions and have played a significant role in shaping human history.
Charles Darwin, in his famous book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” talked about how animals use facial expressions and body postures as a survival strategy. For example, when a dog is about to attack, it growls fiercely, pulls back its ears, and curls its upper lip to show its teeth, especially the sharp canines.
Many animals have similar survival tactics. Cobras can look menacing, baboons may show they are happy by laughing, and birds like the common killdeer try to protect their nests from predators by acting as if they have a broken wing and making loud calls like “killdeee, killdeee” to distract the threat.
These aggressive or distracting behaviours have helped these animals survive and stay safe from potential dangers, ensuring they live to see another day.
The Common Language of Facial Expression.
Human facial expressions serve a special purpose — they are meant to elicit reactions from others. A long time ago, a researcher named Darwin observed that people all around the world express and understand facial expressions in similar ways. Recently, another scientist named Paul Ekman built on Darwin’s work and used more advanced methods to study this.
Ekman travelled to far-off places like Papua New Guinea, where people had little contact with outsiders. He showed them pictures of different emotions like anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, and fear. The interesting thing was that the people from these distant locations could identify the emotions in the pictures in a similar way. This led Ekman to believe that our evolution has given us universal expressions that allow us to convey important information to others.
In a way, these facial expressions are like a common language that we all understand, just like a language is mostly the same everywhere but might have some local variations. Of course, there are exceptions, like when people, such as actors or salespeople, pretend to show genuine expressions to benefit themselves. While culture might influence some details of facial expressions, we all share a set of basic emotions and ways to communicate them through our faces.
Gaining Insights from Face Blindness.
Nature has given us special abilities to understand facial expressions, but how does our brain handle this task? Medical experts and cognitive neuroscience can help us find answers.
Throughout history, doctors noticed that some patients have trouble understanding visual information, and there is a particular condition where a person struggles to process facial information. This condition is known as “prosopagnosia,” which means “facial non-knowledge.”
People with prosopagnosia can recognize other sensory information, like someone’s perfume, the colour of their scarf, or the sound of their voice, but they can’t recognize even a close friend or family member just by looking at their face. One remarkable case is described by Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” In this case, the patient could recognize his wife if she wore a familiar hat, but her face alone confused him.
Scientists studying prosopagnosia realized that specific brain cells responsible for facial processing were damaged in these individuals. This damage caused difficulty in recognizing faces while leaving other vision intact. The brain’s right hemisphere, in a specialized area, is crucial for facial processing.
In simple terms, our brain has unique systems to handle facial recognition, and when there are issues with these systems, people may experience prosopagnosia, where they struggle to identify familiar faces even though their vision is otherwise fine.
Visual Processing in the Brain
Understanding how our brain processes what we see can be quite complex, involving many elements. However, we now have a good overall picture of this visual processing system. It starts when information from our eyes goes to the primary visual cortex in the back of our brain. From there, different pathways, called the dorsal stream and the ventral stream, become active.
The dorsal stream mainly helps us figure out where an object is located. On the other hand, the ventral stream is responsible for recognizing what the object is. This pathway deals with shapes, colors, and faces.
We call this process “the streaming of visual information,” although it’s important to remember that the brain’s communication is far more intricate than just streams. There are many connections and interactions between different parts of the brain that work together to help us identify objects and understand what we see.
On the bumpy landscape of our brain, there’s an area called the occipitotemporal cortex, which deals with visual information. Within this region, there’s a specific part called the fusiform gyrus or the fusiform facial area (FFA). Scientists use scans like positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain’s activity, and they found that the FFA becomes active when we look at faces.
Researchers are still studying what exactly the FFA does. Some believe that faces are perceived as whole configurations, like seeing the whole face at once, while others think that faces are processed by combining different features together.
This debate is part of a bigger discussion in neuroscience. One side suggests that our brain has specific modules that are meant for certain tasks, like recognizing faces — the “Swiss Army knife” model. On the other hand, some argue that the brain has more general mechanisms that can handle various tasks, including recognizing faces, which become special through repeated exposure.
Evidence from various studies using brain scans and other techniques supports the idea that faces are unique and processed in a specific area of the brain, supporting the domain-specific hypothesis. In simpler terms, faces seem to have a special place in our brains, and the FFA plays a crucial role in processing them.
Inverted Faces
Look at the face to the right. Do you recognize this popular figure? Now, turn the page and see how much easier it is to recognize him when the picture is upright.
When we see a face upside down instead of right-side up, something interesting happens in our brain. This phenomenon is called the facial inversion effect. Even though the inverted face has all the same features and relationships as the upright face, our brain processes them differently.
Researchers conducted experiments to study this effect. They showed people a series of upright and upside-down faces and objects, like the cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and a cow. Using a brain scanning method called fMRI, they measured the activity in the brain, indicated by cerebral blood flow, which gives an idea of how the brain is working.
When people looked at the upright faces, there was a significant increase in brain activity. However, when they saw the inverted cartoon characters, there was less brain activity in comparison.
This difference in brain activity between upright and inverted faces provides further evidence that there’s a specific part of our brain, the FFA, dedicated to processing upright faces. So, when we see someone’s face the right way up, our brain reacts differently than when we see it upside down.
Interestingly, people with prosopagnosia, who have difficulty recognizing regular upright faces, actually do better at identifying faces when they are upside down. This suggests that our brain processes upright faces differently from inverted ones. When faces are upside down, it seems like our brain treats them more like other complex things we see, such as a painting by Monet.
For example, when we look at a Monet painting of a beautiful countryside scene, our brain may break down the whole picture into smaller parts to understand it better. Similarly, when we see an inverted face, our brain seems to do something similar by breaking it down into its components to make sense of it.
This shows that the way our brain processes upright faces is distinct from how it deals with inverted faces and other complex visual stimuli. It’s like our brain uses different sets of neurons for these two types of images, and that’s why people with prosopagnosia can sometimes recognize inverted faces better than upright ones.
There’s an interesting phenomenon called the “Thatcher Effect,” named after a famous experiment using an unsettling picture of the former British Prime Minister. Let’s see it with an example of Tom Cruise. When you look at the upside-down picture of Tom Cruise, it seems normal and nothing seems strange about it. However, if you turn the picture right side up, you’ll notice that it looks bizarre and grotesque.
This effect shows that our brain processes upright faces differently from upside-down ones. When the face is upside down, we don’t notice the strange features as much, but when we see it right side up, the oddities become apparent. This provides more evidence that there’s a special part of our brain dedicated to recognizing upright faces, while inverted faces are analyzed differently, focusing on their individual parts instead.
Inside the Artist’s Mind
Throughout history, artists have been fascinated by human faces, and they have depicted them in various art forms, from ancient Egyptian wall paintings to modern abstract artworks. Some contemporary artists, like Francis Bacon, create paintings with distorted faces that can be unsettling.
Bacon’s portrait challenges our ability to understand the emotions conveyed in the artwork and how our brain processes what we see. Our brain has a special area called the FFA that helps us make sense of faces. But in Bacon’s painting, the face is distorted, making it difficult for our brain to comprehend the emotions and meaning behind it.
By frustrating our natural inclination to understand and process faces, Bacon encourages us to take a deeper look at the painting. It invites us to explore beyond the surface and ponder the deeper emotions and messages hidden within the distorted face.
We don’t know much about how an artist’s brain works while painting a face. However, it’s common sense to think that when artists focus on faces, there must be more blood flowing to the FFA, the special area in the brain that deals with facial perception.
Surprisingly, expert artists who are really good at painting faces might show less blood flow in the FFA compared to beginner painters. This might be because experienced artists have practiced for a long time and have become more efficient in their brain’s facial perception, so they don’t need as much blood flow in that region. It’s like they’ve trained their brain to handle facial features better over time.
Let’s imagine a famous artist like Raphael, who was a brilliant portrait painter during the Renaissance. We can wonder what might be happening in his brain while he’s painting a masterpiece like Madonna of the Meadow (1506). Although we can’t directly look into Raphael’s brain using modern technology, we can use these techniques to study today’s artists.
When Raphael painted faces like Mary’s in his artwork, different parts of his brain would get activated. Our brain processes a visual scene bit by bit, like focusing on one part and then moving our eyes to another. In Madonna of the Meadow, we might focus on Mary’s face, then the colors, the shapes, and the perspective (how far things look). Each of these features has specific areas in the brain that handle them, called the dorsal and ventral streams.
While we can’t scan Raphael’s brain, we can do that with modern artists. A project called “The Artist’s Brain” did just that. Humphrey Ocean, a renowned portrait artist, had his brain scanned while drawing faces. They compared his brain activity to someone without much art training. The results showed that a novice artist, someone new to art, had more brain activity in the FFA, the part that deals with facial perception, compared to an experienced portrait artist like Ocean. This suggests that Ocean’s brain is more efficient at processing faces because he has practiced and studied faces for years. As a result, he might not need to think as much about the basic features of a face and can focus on deeper aspects, like understanding a person’s emotions and personality.
In simpler terms, a skilled artist like Ocean has trained their brain to handle faces better, allowing them to see and understand more than just the surface appearance. Their brain is like “thinking” a face, not just “seeing” it, as they dive into the deeper meaning behind the artwork they create.
The Important Function of Faces
Our faces play a vital and special role in our lives, even though we may not think much about them as we groom ourselves in the morning. They have been essential throughout evolution, shaping our social interactions and inspiring art for centuries. Artists have always known how important faces are, and they create portraits that capture our attention and emotions.
Now, with modern techniques, we are starting to understand how our brain is wired to value faces so much. Our brain’s structure and how it works show us that faces are central to our daily lives. This lesson was learned long ago by our early human ancestors on the Serengeti Plains, where they relied on facial expressions to understand each other, even before language developed. Faces have always been a powerful and privileged part of our nature, and their significance continues to shape our lives today.
References
- Darwin, C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York. D. Appleton & Company, 1872: 115–145.
- Ekman, P, “Cross-Cultural Studies in Facial Expression.” In P. Ekman (Ed). Darwin and Facial Expressions: A Century of Research in Review. New York. Academic Press, 1973.
- Ekman, P. “Facial expressions.” In T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Eds). Handbook of cognition and emotion. New York. John Wiley & Sons, 1999.
- Sacks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. New York. Summit Books, 1985.
- Tong, E, Nakayama, K, Moscovitch, M, et al. “Response properties of the human fusiform face area.” Cognitive Neuropsychology 1999: 17: 257–279.
- Solso, RL. “The cognitive neuroscience of art: A preliminary fMRI observation.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2000, 7: 75–85.
- Robert L. Solso, Ph.D.”About Faces, in Art and in the Brain” Cerebrum Dana Foundation, July 1, 2004
