Face Culture

Today, I looked down the microscope at the contents of my culture dish, and saw a face staring back at me. I felt a shiver of fear, as if there was some unknown creature hiding in my culture dish, ready to jump out and attack me whilst I sat hidden away, alone, in the darkened microscope room. I looked up hurriedly, to see the red fluorescent lamps of the microscope casting eerie shadows on the walls.

Why do humans see faces in nature? Angels in the clouds, or the man on the moon... Human culture requires us to interact with many different people on a day-to-day basis, and as such our brains are wired to help us perceive faces. Evolutionarily, perhaps it's more advantageous to recognise a face where there is none, than to miss a face that's about to cause you harm. Rarely do we perceive upside-down faces in the clouds, showing that we are tuned to perceive the types of faces that we see every day.

Face recognition requires a complex cortical network between different brain regions.  People with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, find it difficult to recognise even their closest family members. This may be difficult to imagine, but if you want to make sure that you don't suffer from face blindness, you can take a test here.

Sometimes I take face recognition a step further. Not only do a see faces in my culture dish, but I often imagine faces where there is none. A midnight trip to the bathroom evokes some primal fear that a white-masked face will come leering out of me from the hall cupboard, in replica of the 'Saw' horror movies. Perhaps I'm suffering from pareidolia, a condition that means like it sounds.

"Stop watching horror movies, @neuralucy, and get over your pareidolia! There's no hidden microscopic monster man hiding in your culture dish!"