Have you ever had a creepy feeling that you were being watched? From Living the Scientific Life: the Helix Nebula.
And, from the New York Times, this completely unrelated article:
Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun?
Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data.
Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority, like an airline offering first-class passengers expedited boarding.
“Some patients have strokes and are then able to recognize everything perfectly well except for faces,” Dr. Tsao said. “So we started questioning whether there really might be an area in the brain that is dedicated to face recognition.”
More here.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, by carefully inspecting every bite of food in order to make sure it wasn’t Jesus or somebody, I was eating a lot less and finally losing some weight. On the other hand, I feel more relaxed now without that creepy eye spying on me all the time.
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