Are you the type of person who has trouble connecting someone’s name with a face, even if you’ve seen them many times before? Chances are, this could be because of your genetic makeup. Scientists and psychologists like Jeremy Wilmer, a psychologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, have been studying people’s facial recognition abilities, trying to find the source of them. They’ve found that a person’s ability to recognize faces isn’t at all connected to their general intelligence or other mental abilities like spoken language or reading ability, or even memorization. Scientists found that there is a piece of brain matter that is specialized to react to faces we’ve seen, but this brain matter plays only a part in the facial recognition process. This region of the brain passes along the faces we’ve seen to a different part of the brain which stores memories. Scientists are now trying to figure out what recalls these memories, allowing for better facial recognition. However, Wilmer has said, “We found evidence that on average, upwards of 75 percent of the differences between your face recognition ability and that of the next person are due to the genes you inherited from your parents.” So they are looking into people’s genetic makeups, convinced that most of where we get this ability, comes from our parent’s genes.
I personally have an easier time remembering people’s names rather than faces, and I know my mom is the same way. I found this article very interesting, and I think that if scientists continue to study this we could have a greater insight into the human mind.
To read the full article, click here.
To see someone you recognize was always a special treat, but to think that some people may not even have this ability is crazy. I had no idea that some people may have a gift for recognizing people they saw 5 years ago in a restaurant to not being abele to recognize one you saw last week.
I thought that scientists also had mostly everything about the brain figured out, but little did I know that they still are unclear about how we recognize different people. Bradley Duchaine said “We don’t even know where to start.” In fact, the area of genes they are looking at, might not even be the same genes that allow us to recognize faces in the first place. If we find the answer to this, we may be able to see how and why other people react to faces the way they do.
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