Brain Glitch That Warps Faces
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
When your therapist won't take your calls anymore, there's always The Last Show with David Cooper. Have you ever heard of someone that sees all faces distorted? In some cases, faces look like demons. Well, it's a rare brain condition where if you have it, perfectly normal faces suddenly appear twisted, drooping, strange, even grotesque sometimes. The people you see are real, but the distortion is happening entirely inside your own brain. Tonight, what that glitch reveals about how we actually see each other. We're going to discuss that with psychological and brain sciences professor at Dartmouth College, Brad Duchesne. Brad, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, David. This sounds totally wild to me and might to most people, the idea that you could look at a face and not see what everyone else is seeing.
Tell me more about it.
What is prosopometamorphopsia and how does it affect perception of faces?
How often does this happen? It's quite rare. And it is wild. I mean, I've been studying this condition for years, and yet I'm still amazed by the stories we hear from people. So these are individuals who, when they look at a face, they will see some aspect of that face distorted. And sometimes it's the feature's shape. Sometimes it's the position of the features on the face. Other times it might be the texture of the face or even the color of the skin. To me, this sounds like someone is hallucinating, but the thing that struck me is that these people aren't hallucinating. This is just like a daily experience. The brain just seems to scramble the face. Why is the brain doing this? Why is our brain vulnerable to do something like this in rare cases?
Yeah, so we've got a network of what we call face-selective areas in the brain, and when there's a glitch within this network, then you can get face distortions. Faces seem to have their own dedicated circuitry in the brain. Is my understanding correct? There's a portion of our brain that is just dedicated to processing other people's faces. Tell me about it. Yeah, that's exactly right. So if I were to put you into an fMRI scanner and we were measuring the activity in your brain, we showed you faces, we showed you objects, places, things like that, we would find something like 12 to 14 areas within your brain that show really strong responses to faces and little or no response to other categories.
And then people go in and will record from neurons within those areas and they find that the neurons within those patches respond to faces and faces only. And so this is a network that's specialized for for processing faces and so we use this network to figure out who we're seeing around us how they're feeling what they're interested in terms of what they're attending and all the other information that we get from the face now at the risk of taking too far a tangent here is this why when i look at like an electrical plug i can see a smiling face or i look at like a coat hanger i seem to recognize smiley faces everywhere is that portion of my brain lighting up when i do that That's exactly right.
Yeah. So the face network is pretty liberal in what it'll allow into the system. So as long as there's some minimal configuration of stimuli that indicate that something's a face, what will turn on that network? Okay, back to the rare brain condition. Can you say the name of it for me? Because at the commercial break, I was trying to pronounce it and I definitely failed. Sure. So it's prosopometamorphopsia. Prosopo meaning face and then metamorphopsia meaning distortion. And so it's face distortions is what we're talking about. And we always call it PMO because prosopometamorphopsia is such a mouthful. It certainly is. OK, PMO, what are some of the distortions that people report? I think the sensational headline is some people see a sort of demonized face.
But what would people with PMO report? What would be some examples? Sure. I mean, we could first we could lead off talking about the guy who was said to have demon face syndrome. So this is a gentleman that we work with. who lives in the US. And every single face that he sees in daily life, the features are stretched back.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:54
2
What is prosopometamorphopsia and how does it affect perception of faces?
0:54–4:06
3
Why do some people perceive faces as distorted while others do not?
4:06–7:46
4
How does the brain's circuitry affect our perception of faces?
7:46–9:55
Speakers
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