The topic of Dr. Brenda Anderson’s presentation is the relationship between the brain and the face. What do people use to define faces? Why can we recognize faces? What fundamental features lead to this? These questions were answered in her presentation. After watching the presentations by Dr. Marlene Behrmann and Dr. Brenda Anderson, I could understand topics of prosopagnosia and brain nerves better.

Through the study of presentations, I acknowledge that the eyes will transform the picture they see into visual signals through some cells and nerves that send signals to the brain. And the brain will recognize, respond, and tell people what they’re seeing. At the beginning of the presentation, Dr. Brenda Anderson showed a landscape painting from Bev Doolittle. We can see many faces in the paintings. It is an amazing experience that the artist shows these human-like faces through the combination of colors and some subjects in the painting. Then she showed Naum Gabo’s Constructive Head NO. 1. This is a face-like sculpture. I could tell that it was a face, but I couldn’t find the complete features that humans are supposed to have. It made me wonder why people could recognize face-like things that are not faces, or when they’re similar to faces. Dr. Brenda Anderson responded. As long as the brain can recognise the visual signals associated with each of the five features, it has the answer. It doesn’t matter if the “face” is abstract, distorted or even if the features are no longer in their proper place. Different areas of the brain receive and process different objects. Humans don’t need a perfect face to recognize them once they see some part of the features. This is also the reason why some people will have prosopagnosia. I was also surprised that no matter how the angle of a familiar face changed in the photo, we would still recognize this person. It’s like the brain automatically transform a 3D image to a 3D version.