2024 Talking Science featuring Winrich Freiwald, Ph.D.

The Doppelgänger in Your Head. As social human beings, we usually identify other people by recognizing their faces, and we sense the thoughts and emotions of others by reading facial expressions. Faces are so important that our brains have evolved entire regions that do nothing else but analyze facial information. It is both fascinating and perplexing to consider that, while we cannot look directly at our own faces, our interactions with the faces of others play an integral role in our ability to build inner pictures and personality profiles of ourselves. In this Talking Science lecture for high school students, neuroscientist Winrich Freiwald, Ph.D. explains current understanding of what the brain’s face-processing machinery actually does, how these parts of the brain work, and what computations they perform.