Faces are like magnets to babies. They can’t keep their eyes off us. If you measure their eye movements to see where they are looking in a busy social scene, they are checking out the faces of the other people in the room. This interest in faces begins at birth.
For example, given the choice, newborn babies will look longer at the pattern on the left compared to the one on the right.5 The one on the left looks more like a face than the other, which is identical but upside down. The fact that this is found in babies who have had little experience of faces supports the theory that humans are born to attend to anything that looks like a face. Some argue that this reflects an evolutionary adaptation to make sure babies pay attention to their mother’s face in much the same way that young baby birds instinctively follow the first moving thing that resembles an adult as soon as they hatch.6
FIG. 8: Newborns stare longer at the face image on the left. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
So faces are particularly important to humans. We can distinguish and remember thousands of faces, and yet the differences between individual faces can be so small. As we discussed in chapter 3, the fusiform gyrus of the brain (the area just behind your ears) is active whenever you look at faces.7 However, if you are unfortunate enough to suffer damage to your fusiform gyrus, you can lose the ability to recognize individual faces. The resulting disorder, known as prosopagnosia, can even produce a loss of recognition of one’s own face in the mirror.8
All this brain machinery dedicated to faces may explain why we are hardwired to see faces when there are none, and often in the most unexpected places. Dr J.R. Harding, a radiologist in Wales, told me about the case of a man who had an undescended right testicle.9 This condition is common and usually identified during routine screening around the time a boy reaches puberty. Which reminds me of my own experience. I am not sure how the screening is done today, but in my time, before informed consent, most of us prepubescent boys were left completely terrified and perplexed as to why the school nurse asked us to cough as she cradled our scrotums.
When Dr Harding examined the image of the man’s descended left testicle, he nearly fell off his seat when he saw what was clearly a face. He wrote the case up and published a medical paper entitled A Case of the Haunted Scrotum’ for a bit of fun, which became his ‘least important but most celebrated contribution to radiology’. In the report, Dr Harding offered an explanation for the absence of the second undescended testicle: ‘If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?’
FIG. 9: ‘The Haunted Scrotum’. Face image discovered by Dr Harding. PHOTO © RICHARD HARDING.
Facelike appearances can readily be found among natural and artificial objects. Boulders, knotted tree trunks, and Volkswagen Beetle cars can all look like they have faces. Because faces are so important, we tend to treat their appearances as auspicious. We think of such appearances as more than just coincidences. In his book Faces in the Clouds, Stewart Guthrie argues that our intuitive pattern-processing biases us towards seeing faces, which leads us to assume that hidden agents surround us.10 Building on David Hume’s ‘We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds’ observation that we encountered in the last chapter, Guthrie presents the case that our mind is predisposed to see and infer the presence of others, which explains why we are prone to see faces in ambiguous patterns. If you are in the woods and suddenly see what appears to be a face, it is better to assume that it is one rather than ignore it. It could be another person out to get you. Seeing faces leads to inferences of minds. Those minds may have malevolent intentions against us. Why else would they be hiding in the shadows? Such a bias could be just one of the mechanisms that support a sense of supernatural agents in the world. This probably accounts for why face apparitions are often taken as evidence of supernatural activity. For example, the online casino Goldenpalace.com bought a decade-old toasted cheese sandwich said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary for £14,000,11 and the face of Jesus has appeared on several baby ultrasound scans of pregnant women.
LOVE IS THE DRUG
Faces may be the initial patterns that draw our attention, but it is the emotional experience during intimate moments with those we care about that creates a tangible sense of connectedness. For example, most newborn babies look like grumpy old men with wrinkled skin and bald heads, but to parents these miniature old codgers are beautiful. Mothers can’t help falling in love with their babies because nature has slipped them a Mickey Finn cocktail of hormones that forge a passionate bond. Fathers feel it too, but deep down nature really intended this to be a mother–baby thing. It’s not as if mothers have a choice. Their bodies are awash with chemical messengers controlling their emotions and behaviour.
One chemical is the oxytocin that surges through the mother’s brain around the time of birth to trigger the uterine contractions. It’s also active during breast-feeding. Outside of mothering, oxytocin is stimulated by the physical contact of sex. It’s no surprise then that research has revealed that oxytocin plays a role in social bonding. Weirdly, we know this because of two species of vole. Prairie voles engage in an intense twenty-four-hour courtship, after which they mate for life. On the other hand, their almost genetically identical cousins, montane voles, are promiscuous and have a preference for one-night stands. They do not pair-bond for life. One explanation is that the reward centre in the brain of prairie voles is sensitive to oxytocin, whereas the same centre in montane voles is not.12 Oxytocin gives prairie voles that loving feeling because their reward centres are satiated when they mate, but this doesn’t happen in montane voles. As Mick Jagger sings, they can’t get no satisfaction. When sex scientists blocked reward pathways in the prairie voles, they too became promiscuous with female partners. They did not stick around in the morning or return calls. However, when an injection of a love cocktail including oxytocin was administered to prairie voles, it worked like cupid’s arrow, and they bonded again. You could say that those of us who fall deeply in love are behaving just like prairie voles.
When we say the chemistry is just right between two people, there is real alchemy taking place. Sexual attraction and falling in love are experiences enriched with emotions automatically triggered by a cascade of hormones. These are present in the very first social exchanges between babies and mothers but continue to fuel the passion of social intimacy throughout our lives. When this happens, we feel bewitched, enchanted, under a spell, charmed, and generally not in control. Something strange takes hold of us, and rational thinking seems to fly out the window. Breaking down human attraction into chemical neurotransmitters and sensory stimulus patterns may be how science describes the experience, but when Frank Sinatra sang about that old black magic called love, he was describing the supersense that there are mysterious forces at work when people fall in love.
THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
Chemicals and appearance are just two ingredients in the mix of social connectedness. Timing is everything for social relationships too. When two people don’t get on, they often say that they just didn’t click. We are rhythmic creatures who move in patterns and feel most comfortable with those who move in synchrony with ourselves. Just watch how lovers flirt during a courtship. They exchange glances, utterances, and caresses. If the timing is not right, the relationship is usually doomed.