I have a neurological disorder that makes it difficult for me to recognize faces out of context, even of people I know well. The average brain, however, is wired to do a pretty remarkable job at such a task–but how? The opening of “How the Brain Spots Faces,” a post by Mark Brown at Wired UK that reports on MIT face-recognition experiments:

“Our brains are made to find faces. In fact, they’re so good at picking out human-like mugs we sometimes see them in a jumble of rocks, a bilious cloud of volcanic ash or some craters on the Moon.

But another amazing thing about our brain is that we’re never actually fooled into thinking it’s a real person looking back at us. We might do a second take, but most normal brains can tell the difference between a man and the Moon.

Neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to investigate how the brain decides exactly what is and is not a face. Earlier studies have shown that the fusiform gyrus, located on the brain’s underside, responds to face-like shapes — but how does it sort flesh from rock?”

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A parade of faces from “Cry,” Godley & Creme, 1985: