Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bob o blam here. The world is full of faces. Faces in wall outlets, faces in lamp switches, faces in cheese graters. Sometimes these faces have religious significance, or like the woman who found an image of the Virgin Mary and her grilled cheese, or the cheeto that
looks convincingly like Jesus. The phenomenon of seeing faces where they're not supposed to be, in clouds, on buildings in tacos is so common and widespread that it has a name paraidolia. In Greek, paraidolia translates as beyond form or image, and it means finding meanings or patterns where there aren't any, like hearing a heartbeat in white noise, or believing that a seat cushion is mad at you. It's easy to dismiss paraidolia as at best of fun optical illusion or
at worst a psychotic delusion. But some scientists now believe that our uncanny ability to find faces and everyday objects points to a new understanding of how our brains process the outside world. Instead of taking in visual cues and then making sense of them. As an apple, a tree or a face. It might be the other way around. What if our brains are actually telling our eyes what to see. We spoke with Kang Lee, a professor of applied psychology and human development at the University of Toronto.
Lee has spent decades studying how infants, children and adults process faces, and relatedly, he gave a popular Ted talk on how to tell kids are lying. Lee explained that we're basically programmed to see faces as a product of millions of years of evolution. Quote as soon as we're born, we start to look for faces. One reason is that our ancestors needed to avoid predators or find prey, all of which have faces. And a second reason is that
humans are very social animals. When we interact with each other, we need to know if the other person is a friend or foe. Since the ability to quickly recognize and respond to different faces could be a matter of life and death. There's a much higher cost for not seeing the lions face in the underbrush than for mistaking an orange and black flower for a lion's face. The brain is better off making a false positive if it means
that you're primed to recognize real danger too. Okay, So if evolution has programmed our brains to prioritize faces, how exactly does it all play out under the hood. The conventional understanding of how we see things is that the eyes taken visual stimuli from the outside world a light, colors, shapes movement, and send that information to the visual cortex, located in a region of the brain known as the
occipital lobe. After the occipital lobe translates the raw data into images, those images are sent to the frontal lobe, which does the high level processing. We look at a cliff, and our brains then have to determine is that a rock outcropping or is it a giant head. That conventional model is what Lee calls bottom up processing, in which the brain's role is to passively take an information and
make sense of it. If the brain sees faces everywhere, it's because the brain is responding to face like stimuli, basically any cluster of spots and spaces that roughly look like two eyes, a nose, and amount. But Lee and other researchers began to question the bottom up of processing model. They wondered if it wasn't the other way around, a top down process In which the brain is calling the shots.
Alice said, we wanted to know whether the frontal lobe actually plays a very important role in helping us to see faces instead of the face imagery coming from the outside. The brain generates some kind of expectation from the frontal lobe, then goes back to the occipital lobe and finally to our eyes, and then we see faces. That question is
what made Lee think about paradolia. Had read those stories of people seeing images of Jesus, Elvis, and angels in their toast and tortillas and wondered if he could build an experiment around it. So Lee recruited a bunch of regular people, hooked them up to an fm R I scanner, and showed them a series of grainy images, some of which contained hidden faces and some of which were pure noise.
The participants were told that exactly half of the images contained a face, which was not true, and we're asked with each new image, do you see a face? As a result of this prodding, participants reported seeing a face thirty four percent of the time, and there was nothing but static. What was most interesting to Lee were the images coming back from the real time f m R I scan. When part disipants reported seeing a face, the face area of their visual cortex lit up even when
there was no face in the image at all. That told Lee then another part of the brain must be telling the visual cortex to see a face. In a paper provocatively titled seeing Jesus in Toast Neural and Behavioral Correlates a Face Paraidolia, Lee and his colleagues reported that when the brain was properly primed to see faces, then the expectation to see a face was coming from the frontal lobe, specifically an area called the inferior frontal gyrus.
Lee explained, the inferior frontal gyrus is a very interesting area. It's related to generating some kind of idea and an instructing our visual cortex to see things. If the idea is a face, then it would see a face. If the idea is Jesus, I'm pretty sure the cortex is going to see Jesus. If the idea is Elvis, then
it's going to see Elvis. The Jesus in Toast paper one Lee teen ig Noble Prize, a cheeky award handed out by the humorous science magazine Annals of improbable research, but Lie says the Paradolia experiment proved the top down processing plays a critical role in how we experience the world around us. He said, a lot of things we see in the world aren't coming from our site, but are coming from inside our minds. Lee has also run
research on babies and racial bias. He found that the very youngest babies were able to recognize differences between faces of all races, but lost that ability as they grew older. By nine months, they could only differentiate between faces that were their same race. The rest started to blur together. The reason is that they had only been exposed to same race faces, in most case mom and dad, for the first nine months of their life. From his research,
Lee now believes that racial biases are not biological. We simply learned to trust people that look like the faces we saw when our brains were first developing. Unfortunately, this can develop later into different kinds of biases based on societal messaging and stereotypes. Lee said. The reason that there are racial biases is because of early experiences. If we created a diverse visual and social experience for children, then
they would be less likely to have biases. The good news is that parents and educators can combat racial bias by exposing infants and toddlers to faces of all races and identifying them by things like names, professions, or other personally identifying qualifiers or interests, not as a white person or a black person. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clain. For more on this amounts of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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