This face tells me something

“Come on, who is it? »

I noticed that I ask myself this question more and more often. I meet friendly people, I know I know them, but I can’t remember who they are. The dilemma is then cruel: do I admit that I do not replace them or do I chain generic remarks by simulating a perfect control?

In the heat of the moment, embarrassment and confusion, the second option often wins out. (I spent a good seven minutes checking in on a man who obviously knew me the other day…I still don’t know his identity. fall asleep.)

I console myself by telling myself that we all experience this kind of social malaise from time to time. The big question is: can it be avoided?

Boutheina Jemel is an associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the perception and recognition of faces. She generously agreed to give me a virtual interview (and I promise in return to recognize her if I meet her in the street).

She first taught me that humans are interested in faces very early in life. A baby can quickly distinguish that of its mother, for example. Then, over time, he develops an expertise in this type of memory. However, this faculty is not strictly human. Studies show that sheep can also differentiate the face of their congeners… On the other hand, it would take a lot of time with sheep to know how to distinguish them from each other, as humans.

In fact, we are starting from afar, Boutheina Jemel explained to me.

“Often, we are not able to describe a face. Most of them are prototypical: they have two eyes, a nose and a mouth. If you grew up in an Asian country, it is possible that Caucasians all look alike, in our opinion. And Caucasians can have the impression that all Asians look alike because we don’t use the same features to discriminate between faces. »

Precisely, how do we discriminate between them?

If the areas relating to classical memory are solicited, the fusiform gyrus is also involved. This lower part of the brain includes a region important for facial recognition: the fusiform face area. Specific damage to this region can lead to prosopagnosia, a condition that prevents us from recognizing faces…sometimes even our own.

But there is more than biology. Beyond the features, when we identify a facies, we get an almost abstract representation of it. No matter how much our parents wear make-up, disguise themselves or change their haircut, we will recognize them. So there is an emotional aspect to this process.

If I don’t recognize you, then I find you just okayI imagine.

If you want more nuances, know that there is episodic memory and semantic memory. The first is the memory of an episode: we remember having seen a face at such a time or such a place. Semantic memory is well rooted. Few people remember the first time they saw their parents. They recognize them, that’s all.

Now, what can affect our episodic memory and make it harder to place some people?

“The normal effect of aging,” the professor replied immediately. (Great.) The older you get, the more layers of memory you have. If we don’t often revisit a memory, it will be altered and so will the path to access it: “Sometimes the memory trace is there, but our brain forgets how to get it. »

Beyond our age, the more we are overloaded or distracted, the more difficult it is to quickly recognize certain people.

“On the cognitive level, the same mechanisms as for traditional memory apply, according to Boutheina Jemel. Fatigue, stress, whether or not we pay attention to the stimulus can affect our ability to recognize a face. »

The researcher gave me a very telling example. A person who witnesses a crime may have difficulty identifying the individual who committed it, even if they are very good at recognizing faces. For what ? Because the stress generated by the situation harms the encoding of the memory.

And you don’t need to be immersed in such an extreme context to see our memory disturbed… Boutheina Jemel taught me that when we go shopping, our brain registers the faces of the people we meet under the rays, even if we don’t give a damn about these people.

If you then meet one of these people, you may experience “implicit recognition”, or a vague feeling of familiarity. The attention paid to the time of encoding therefore counts for a lot in the identification of a face.

The good news is that it all works! Let’s think of the bar employees who know how to find us even when we move around their establishment. It’s a skill that develops and, surprisingly, you don’t have to stare at several people for a long time to get there…

An article^⁠1 recently published in the scientific journal PNAS argues that training in music particularly improves the memory of faces! In fact, Boutheina Jemel believes that any exercise good for our memory can help us in this field.

Excellent news for people who are aging, tired or have a head full of data… It will make us a little less uncomfortable on the long list of everything that can bother us during the course of a day. .