Sunday, February 16, 2014

Your emoticon is really smiling….


OK, this seems a little bit like weird science. The white coat types at Flinders University in Australia say your brain is starting to think that this    :-)   sort of looks like a human face.

It’s an emoticon. Some of us who are the oldest members of the Baby Boomer generation may not have used it very much in our less-than-frenetic texting habits which possibly disqualify us from being fully wired, but we get it—it’s the keyboard version of a Smiley Face.


And now the folks at Flinders, who no doubt righteously determined that they had nothing better to do, have wired up 20 research subjects, and traced their brain activity as they looked at actual human faces and various emoticons including that one.

You guessed it. Our brains have a remarkably complex ability to recognize a face as a human face, and to recognize (identify) specific faces. It’s so tough to do this that the folks who care have only had marginal success in getting a computer to do it. The Flinders research shows that the occipitotemporal loci in the brain associated with human face recognition actually light up (albeit less intensely) when the subject looks at     :-)

And by the way, the research subjects did NOT tend to recognize the reverse image   (-:    as face-like.

Well, that’s the news from Australia.

"This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It's really quite amazing,” said one of the scientists.

I say it’s not necessarily bad news or good news.

….and, umm, not really encouraging, I think…. I think you know what I’m thinking...    :-( 





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