Neuroscience and social justice

My plan for spinning while watching MIT Neuroscience lectures is working out very well and I am enjoying it as much as I thought I would. As an adamant anti-multi-tasker, this is pretty much the only type of multi-tasking I enjoy. I don't need a lot of brain space for the spinning, but I do need to keep my eyes on what I'm doing. I don't need to watch the lecture most of the time, but when I do, it is easy to pause in the spinning. One keeps my hands busy and one keeps my brain busy. Add a cup of tea and the heat turned up in the studio and it is pretty darn lovely. I only have one of two afternoons a week that I can get away with this, but I take advantage of it when I can. 

The lecture I was listening to yesterday touched on facial recognition which is one of those brain things I find a little fascinating. This is probably because I do not have terrific facial recognition. I can remember watching B. play soccer when he was six and there being many times I had no idea which child was mind because all the little six year old boys all wearing the same uniform all looked pretty much alike to me.

Here are my take aways from the lecture for my readers who share my interest in weird brain stuff. It seems the ability to recognize faces is on a spectrum. Some people absolutely cannot recognize faces, even of their family, and use other clues to help them know who is who. Others people, on the other end of the spectrum, can remember everyone they ever saw. Everyone else falls somewhere along with spectrum with some being better and some being poorer at it. So that's interesting, but here is what is even more interesting. Except for those people at the very far end of the spectrum who remember everyone, it seems that humans in general are very bad at recognizing people who they don't know or are not familiar with. We think we are good at it, but the various studies they have done prove that we are actually pretty terrible at it. 

For example, if subjects are given a set of forty or so photographs of faces of people they have no familiarity with and asked to say how many individuals those photos represent, they always estimate the number to be significantly higher than it actually is. One study used Dutch politicians on the photos and American subjects. The answer was two people, but most subjects guessed more than four. Yet, the exact same photos shown to Dutch citizens resulted in the subjects saying two people without hesitation. It's weird and fascinating. The instructor showed a photo of the test and I paused my spinning to look at it. It looked as though it was of far more than two individuals.

The other thing the instructor confirmed for me, which I have long suspected, is that if you grow up in a low diversity area with little to no contact with people of other ethnicities, you will find it extremely difficult to differentiate between faces of people groups you have little contact. It's not that "all Asians look alike" or "all Black people look alike", it's that the viewer has not created the neural connections to see the differences between individuals. Frankly, I really do think all six year old white boys look alike. (That sounds better than not being able to recognize my own child.)

Here is where my brain immediately went with all this. If humans pretty much stink at recognizing faces of people and ethnicities we are not familiar with, then why the heck are police still using line-ups and having people choose perpetrators from books of mug shots? It would seem that this is the perfect set-up for accusing the wrong person. This is especially true when you combine our inability with our ill-founded assumption that faces are something we are actually pretty good at. It makes us even more dangerous because we don't allow room for error because of our misplaced confidence. And then when you add in ethnicity... Blech.

Why can't neurologists take this information and do something with it to create a positive change in this area? I have no idea if they have tried or not, but often it seems that scientific studies done in university labs only really help the scientists. We all have a role to play in social justice. Fighting to use proven neuroscience to inform identification seems to be a pretty straight line. 

If you are interested in listening to the lecture yourself, here it is.