Apr 16, 2013

CEREBRART - Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize familiar faces (such as their immediate family members) is impaired, although the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. Further, some impairments in recognizing facial expressions have been reported in a variety of diseases like Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. I think that prosopagnosia and related disorders are caused by jumping between different chaotic attractors in the primate brain networks. The primate face is evolved evolutionary to be a beautiful attractor for the primate brain networks in a turbulent world of chaotic forest ecosystems representing important attributes such as attractiveness or social status. I think that a normal primate brain is able to represent the known faces as attractors of the neural network. Normally, the primate brains gather visual information through the eyes and the primary visual cortex and modify dynamically specific facial muscles to be interpreted properly by other primate brains through nonlinear feedback processes of iteration and mutual communication. Inability to stabilize such complex nonlinear feedback processes may suggest the emergence of chaotic attractors in the brain networks. This CEREBRART work illustrates these ideas artistically.
P.S. According to a recent comment I tried to generate a primary artistic design idea for an artefactual facial attractor to help people with Prosopagnosia ...

13 comments:

  1. How human brain extracts socially relevant information from a chaotic input? Read A Causal Role for the Extrastriate Body Area in Detecting People in Real-World Scenes The Journal of Neuroscience, 17 April 2013, 33(16):7003-7010

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  2. A person who transforms his chaotic monkey mind into human mind and his common human mind into spiritual mind participates in evolutionary change, and his brain creates more and more complex and perfect nervous circuits. Prosopagnosia is not only a disorder of face perception but also a symptom of that chaotic monkey mind.

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  3. ... for example the nose ring helps.

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  4. Exactly! If one is prosopagnosic, a simple change such as donning a pair of sunglasses, may render the best known face unrecognizable. For some prosopagnosics, this can lead to the emergence of chaotic attractors in the brain networks and confusion. Nevertheless, different clearly visible artefacts (necklaces, ear and nose rings and body paint) sometimes provide relevant clues to prosopagnosics’s brain for representing these faces as attractors of the neural network. Perhaps some people tattooed their faces and wore ear and nose rings for creating such attractors. If some person has blue-violet hair, several lines on her forehead or a nose ring, these can be quite helpful in determining her identity. This may appear unattractive, barbarous and bizarre to the foreign eye, but to prosopagnosics it is a helpful means for creating strong non-chaotic attractors.

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  5. ... maybe also for mating.

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    1. Right, facial recognition cues are very important contributors to social and reproductive primate behaviors and avoiding chaotic mating. Numerous studies with functional magnetic resonance imaging have shown that the FFA - fusiform face area in the fusiform gyrus of the brain that is specifically involved in processing faces plays a key role in face recognition and behavior. Although chemical and vocal cues also guide males to females, once the individuals see each other, facial recognition comes into play and less chaotic mating arrangements are more common.

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    2. I disagree. Recent studies have shown that the dynamic properties of human facial movements may play a surprisingly small role in people's ability to infer the emotional states of others from their facial expressions.

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  6. Interesting that tattoos becoming more and more popular...

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    1. If beauty is nevmogotu
      you have to
      organize tattoo ...

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  7. Chaos explained. Heather was 36 when she stumbled across the phrase face blindness in a psychology textbook. "When I saw those two words I knew instantly that was exactly what I had – that explained all the chaos." It's not just other people Heather doesn't recognise – she can't identify her own face either. Some part of their brain was recognising the face, but the brain was failing to pass this information into higher-level consciousness (Electrophysiological markers of covert face recognition in developmental prosopagnosia)
    doi.org/fzmqgz.

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  8. ... maybe someone wish not to recognize yourself in the mirror ...

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    1. There is strong evidence that brain mirror systems play important roles in developmental prosopagnosia - lesions to brain mirror systems produce prosopagnosia

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  9. here, another well-known case of Prosopagnosia

    "When Jesus sat at meat with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him."

    Luke 24:30-31

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