Inventing Ourselves by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Author:Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

So far in this chapter, I have focused on mentalizing. But understanding other people involves many social processes in addition to mentalizing. What about other aspects of social cognition; how do they develop in the brain? Adolescents are exposed to many more faces than are children, and it is during this period that we start to assess faces for different properties, such as sexual attractiveness, whether the person is a friend or not, and their social status. In the previous chapter I described how the ability to perceive and remember faces changes in adolescence. Is this because of changes in the brain? We know that the ability to recognize a face is present at birth, and that this very early face recognition probably depends on subcortical regions. After the first few months of life, regions in the cortex on the surface of the brain start to take over face processing.

One region that appears to be particularly specialized for faces is located towards the back of the brain in the fusiform gyrus–so much so that it has become known as the fusiform face area (FFA). The FFA is activated in brain-scanning studies whenever participants look at photos or cartoons of faces, and damage to this region causes people to have problems recognizing faces. This difficulty in recognizing faces, when other aspects of visual processing are normal, is called prosopagnosia or face-blindness.

Prosopagnosia doesn’t only occur after damage to the FFA. People with developmental prosopagnosia are unable to recognize faces, whereas they are able to recognize objects and other visual stimuli. It has been estimated that up to 2.5 per cent of the population has prosopagnosia to some degree.*

A famous case of prosopagnosia was the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who, although he knew all about the condition and wrote about it in his book The man who mistook his wife for a hat, didn’t realize until later in life that he himself was face-blind. He could see perfectly well and recognize objects and people, but he couldn’t recognize familiar faces–not even that of his assistant, with whom he had been working for six years. He writes:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.