Do you remember me? by Barbora Misakova

Walking down the street full of people. People standing near the news stand, people sitting at the coffee terraces or benches. People are just everywhere you look. As you are walking through this crowd something catches your eye. You noticed one familiar face in this big group of foreign and unknown faces. And even though you don't know who that person is, you know for sure, that you have already seen his or her face somewhere. You can't remember where did you meet this person, and you hardly can remember her name, but you remember the most important thing – the face. How is it possible that we are remembering faces of people we met just once in our life? Or why is it such a problem to remember the name of a person when we have no problems with recognition his or her face among lot of other faces? Neuroscientists know the answer – fusiform face area.

Scientists found out that in our brain there is one pea-sized region which reacts more strongly to faces than any other objects – fusiform face area or FFA. Cars, dogs, houses or body parts are then hardly to recognize because, as the scientists say, FFA is specialized system which is dedicated to processing faces. So what is the FFA? FFA system is a small area of our brain which lies halfway back in the head. Most of the people have two FFAs – one on the right and one on the left side of the head, but the right one is dominant. Researchers say that the answer on a question “Why are we able to recognize faces?” lies in the evolution. They say that primates and humans had their brains developed for easy and quick spotting of friend and foe which helped our primate ancestors to stay alive. Scientists identified the FFA ten years ago when they were scanning human and monkey brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (also called fMRI). These days fMRI enables them to zoom in and study brain tissue even closer than it was before. As Kalanit Grill-Spector, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto said “it's like viewing grains of sugar rather than the whole cube.” Except understanding how we are able to recognize faces, this discovery can help with preventing or treating depression, autism or social disorders.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20080821/wl_mcclatchy/3024518;_ylt=AlPD.XUrDqrpE8RItMAO4aGs0NUE

by Barbora Misakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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posted by Lucia Adamova