The mystery of the human face

Scientists believe they understand exactly how we perceive a face when we see it. Experts already know that there is something special about people who attract us to look at them, even after the baby is born only a few hours.

Discover the mystery of the human face

A brain region called the rhombus (FFA) is determined to be the key. To find out what happened in the brain, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology science team asked volunteers to participate in an experiment. They asked volunteers to look at various face pictures and pictures of an immovable object - a house.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was then used to scan the brains of volunteers. Some faces are considered perfectly normal, while other faces have different distant lines or lines are replaced by contours of other faces, such as a good nose another mouth. Similarly, photos of houses are also manipulated in the same way - different windows or doors.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI ) to scan the brain.(Photo: fmrib)

From these experiments, Galit Yovel and Nancy Kanwisher could determine that the FFA itself produced visual information. FFA does not work when volunteers view photos of houses. This means that FFA really only handles human faces. According to scientists, the face itself is the only one identified, rather than individual characteristics or relative distances of these characteristics. This goes against what some researchers believe in the past.

Dr. Gunter Loffler of Glasgow University, who conducted the same experiment, said: 'It is an interesting study. There has been some debate about the past FFA. This study shows that it is not a problem for the face to activate the FFA region, and the location of the different characteristics or traits that are exchanged or added .

However, according to Loffler, science needs more research to determine this. This discovery is particularly important in treating people with brain damage , as if shocked. Loffler continued: ' I'm not surprised that people have a specific brain region for facial recognition. Even children who have just been born a few hours will stare at their mother's face more than anything else. It is an important skill for social interactions. '

How can the face open doors?

Today, the recognition of human face in biometrics has become a reality. Although there is much debate around this issue, this new technology has been predicted to be a part of everyday life. Some unions have scanned photos of their employees at the entrance and exit gates or to handle stolen cards for fraud. It is also thought that this new technology is a great breakthrough after DNA technology.

Aurora, which developed 3-dimensional software, claims the new technology is sophisticated enough to distinguish between two identical twins.Face detection process takes only a few minutes. A camera using infrared rays builds a virtual network of a person's face 16 times. These networks are then merged into a single pattern and the size of the lines is calculated. Cash machines also apply this face-recognition technology to serve customers.

However, many people criticize that these human face tests are also affected by the lighting of facial expressions and expressions. Aurora claims their software eliminates these so-called mistakes: ' We can't say it works 100%, but our tests show no errors. 3-D human face detection technology is an important step for access control doors. '

Barry Hugill, Aurore spokesman, said: 'Our view of biometrics is neutral. It is another form of identification method and it is no different from traditional photography or fingerprints' . It may take a long time for police to apply this 3D technology. The use of images will quickly become the third court science in parallel with fingerprints and DNA. Although this new technology entered the imagination of the police industry was slow, it conquered the public. And maybe it's just a matter of time before our faces are 'programmed' in our daily lives.

Future face

When Nicolas Cage and John Travolta swapped each other's faces in Hollywood's action film Face-off, the audience thought that they were watching what was imagined. But American scientists have performed donor facial transplants donated to medical research. Today, they are waiting for approval to do the same job on people living with deformed faces.

An exhibition called Future Face, organized by the London Science Museum in early October 2004, posed many problems with this technology to society. Is it possible that in the future humans can choose their own faces ? Perhaps in the near future, people can ' rebuild ' their entire faces.

In the UK, scientists have developed a three-dimensional scanner that allows surgeons to test faces without having to touch them. It will scan the patient's face and arrange more than 50,000 coordinates with an accuracy of about half a millimeter. This tool can become a 3-dimensional model to find errors that choose the best changes, but it cannot 'reconstruct' the entire face.

Future Face manager is Professor Sandra Kemp, research director at the Royal Academy of Arts and a leading academic on virtual culture. She said : 'We hope this exhibition will make people ponder. Many people will not have unpleasant photo albums anymore. Their images are digitally assisted and they can be polished with Photoshop software '.

Professor Kemp expressed concern about the popularity of digitally enhanced images that would make people lose their unique facial features. But the wider consequences are significant. Future Face wants to warn that face-altering behaviors can have a huge impact on our perception of human personality through appearance .

Plastic surgery is not a new phenomenon. Since ancient times, people have shaped the nose with a piece of cheekbones or forehead skin. But that is what happened in the past clearly, and in the future we will face more questions than answers.