ANDZREJ KRAUZEMy addiction to crime novels unexpectedly wormed its way into the preparation of this neuroscience-focused issue of The Scientist. A faithful follower of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, I am well acquainted with Hole’s detective partner Beate Lønn, whose contributions to crime solving rely heavily on her fusiform gyrus, which allows her to recognize “all the people she had ever met.” So finely tuned is her brain’s face-perception machinery that Lønn is “one of thirty-odd people in the world who were known to have this ability.”
Lønn’s feats of face recognition make for good pulp fiction, but Kerry Grens’s cover article, “A Face to Remember,” gave me a true-to-life understanding of how face recognition is processed in the brain. It’s riveting reading: Neural stimulation of “face patches” in the fusiform gyri of seizure-prone patients induces temporary face blindness—the inability to know a person’s identity by looking at her face. Face perception seems to be lateralized to the brain’s right side. And in monkeys, individual neurons in face patches respond to different aspects of a viewed face, such as the tilt of the head or the space between the eyes.
Collecting the experimental data to explain face perception has been heavily dependent on the development of ever-more detailed brain imaging techniques: positron ...
