 "It is a remarkable advance to have identified the dimensions used by the primate brain to decode faces")
The brain has an amazing capacity for recognising faces. It can identify a face in a few thousandths of a second, form a first impression of its owner and retain the memory for decades.
Central to these abilities is a longstanding puzzle: how the image of a face is encoded by the brain. Two Caltech biologists, Le Chang and Doris Y Tsao, reported in Thursday’s issue of Cell that they have deciphered the code of how faces are recognised.
Their experiments were based on electrical recordings from face cells, the name given to neurons that respond with a burst of electric
