Mexico happened a nearly absurd news: Solano state a woman named Leonora look through her husband’s cell phone, found a husband and strange women intimate photos, so angry, will husband cut. But the police investigation found that the photo is actually years ago Leonora and her husband’s old photo.
How could a person not recognize his own face? Don’t tell me, it’s really possible.
According to our common sense, “recognizing oneself” in a mirror or photo is a very natural, simple and clear thing, but in fact it is not. Through various psychological experiments and studies of various cognitive disorders, psychologists have found that “recognizing one’s own/another’s face” is a complex process that involves at least three different dimensions: cognitive recognition, affective recognition, and unification of sensory information. Any error in the analysis of any of these dimensions can cause the face to become unfamiliar in the blink of an eye.
I’m sorry, your face data cannot be retrieved
To figure out this problem, we need to analyze what kind of process is “seeing people and recognizing faces”. First is the cognitive level of recognition: when we see a face, the visual system will first analyze its features, what is the shape of the face, how big are the eyes, where is the nose and mouth …… But this is only the first step. Next, the cognitive system “labels” different faces. That is to say, our brain for the various facial features of other people, there is a library of visual features in different categories. This “database” is located in the fusiform gyrus of the brain.
The fusiform gyrus is part of the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain. Neuroscientists in the brain have studied the fusiform face area above the fusiform gyrus in brain imaging studies. It is so named because the neurons here are very active when the tester sees a face and basically only respond to face information.
The image of another person’s face that comes in from the visual system is broken down into many visual local features, which are compared one by one in a “database”, and then our brain comes to a comprehensive conclusion about who the face really belongs to.
You have probably heard of the term “face blindness”. The direct cause of face blindness is that the “facial features database” in the brain is not working properly. For example, in the 2011 movie “The Phantom Menace”, Milla Jovovich’s main character Anna suffers from face blindness after she unintentionally witnesses a murder and suffers a head injury while running from the murderer. From then on, everyone’s face, including her own, becomes strange and distorted in her eyes, and she can only recognize different people by features such as the color of their clothes and the style of their ties.
The cause of the onset of a significant number of people with face blindness is brain damage caused by an accident, with the injured area spreading to the fusiform gyrus. As a result, they become like Anna in the film: after seeing another person’s face, although they can make a preliminary visual analysis and know that it is a human face, they cannot identify who the face belongs to, and can only recognize it through reminders from others or other visual symbols.
That person isn’t me, it’s just a resemblance!
However, another group of people who experience “unrecognizable self” symptoms have a specific mental illness called “Capgras syndrome”. They can recognize their own faces and the faces of others in mirrors, photographs, or face-to-face social situations, but stubbornly refuse to believe that the face belongs to the original owner, believing it to be a stand-in actor.
Why does this strange phenomenon occur? This is because, when we see ourselves and others whose identities are known, the cognitive system engages in a “two-layer verification”. The first layer is the visual feature recognition by the fusiform gyrus; the second layer is the recognition by the emotional system, which is left to the emotional regions of the brain. We get excited when we see a loved one, we feel comforted when we see a family member, and so on.
The birth of emotions causes our body to experience physiological arousal, which is manifested by a slight sweating, increased heart rate, rapid breathing, etc. These arousal signals can be measured by the skin’s electrical conductivity. These arousal signals can be measured by the skin’s conductive response. Once these signals are present, it’s a sort of stamp of approval from our emotional region: “I reacted to seeing this person, so it proves that I know him/her.”
Thus, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have concluded that people with the stand-in syndrome, due to the blockage of specific brain circuits, make it so that when they see their loved ones and friends, they don’t feel the intimacy that they should feel when they see someone close, and they don’t experience physiological arousal. In other words, due to the loss of the plus V authentication sent from the emotional region, the brain feels very puzzled: “It’s obviously my own face, but how come I just don’t feel it!” This mismatch between visual and emotional information also produces a sense of psychological discomfort. In order to resolve this doubt as well as the discomfort, the brain comes up with a solution, “This must not be the real me, it’s some double that looks exactly like me.”
Interestingly, even ordinary people with normal cognitive abilities are able to change their perception of their external features under the manipulation of certain external cues, which involves the unification of sensory information.
British neuroscientist Manos Tsakiris has done an interesting experiment. Volunteers who took part in the test had their faces repeatedly swabbed with a machine brush while watching a video on a computer screen of a stranger’s face being similarly swabbed. When the test was over, the researchers asked the volunteers to choose the face that most closely resembled their own from a series of images of faces, and surprisingly, the volunteers all chose an image of a face that better matched the stranger’s face on the computer screen. This is because during the test, the volunteers were induced by continuous visual reinforcement to identify with and intrinsically relate to the stranger’s face on the screen. One of the most common scenarios in reality is that we have been using various photo retouching software and beauty filters for a long time, thus allowing ourselves to form a visual cognitive bias: the real me really looks just like the highly beautified self in the filter.
Therefore, the unlucky Ms. Leonora may not be a mere “oolong” criminal who deserves to be ridiculed, but she may have experienced some unfortunate experiences in her life that led to cognitive disorders and early signs of “face blindness”. Therefore, one’s perception of one’s own self-image is not static, but is always influenced by external cues and the updating of the “image database” in one’s consciousness, and changes all the time. As the saying goes, “You can’t step into the same river twice”, our self-perception of ourselves is also like a changing river, coming from the past and heading towards the unknown.