[danaris]

"We haven't yet found a specific neural structure for recognizing faces" is far from evidence that no such structure exists. Our understanding of the brain still has massive gaps in it, and I can testify from my own experience working for a psychology & neuroscience department (which includes one person particularly specializing in perception, from the very basic "light hitting the optic nerve" stage all the way to object categorization and recognition) that we still have a lot to learn in this area specifically.

It may very well be that there isn't a brain structure dedicated to this, and that would be fascinating, too! But to denigrate the people doing their best to understand this stuff 30 years ago as "pseudoscientific" just because they made an assumption about how plastic the brain was without our benefit of 20/20 hindsight is very much uncalled-for.

[Legend2440]

Your brain is a structure for learning structures.

It doesn't need to have a built-in module for recognizing faces; it wires up a face-recognition system on the fly, from visual data.

[anonymouskimmer]

> Your brain is a structure for learning structures.

And it does so by having specialized structures.

> It doesn't need to have a built-in module for recognizing faces; it wires up a face-recognition system on the fly, from visual data.

Except it does appear to have such a special structure, the Fusiform Face Area. If it did not, people with prosopagnosia wouldn't just have problems with recognizing faces, but would have more general pattern recognition problems.

[acomar]

> "We haven't yet found a specific neural structure for recognizing faces" is far from evidence that no such structure exists.

proving a negative is, famously, quite hard. an unsolved problem, even. facial recognition has a plethora of evidence beyond an argument from evolution. the notion that we humanize tools is one that, as yet, lacks that evidence. I urge people to be more skeptical of arguments from evolution. we understand very little about our evolution and it's easy to insert our own worldviews and beliefs into such arguments, allowing them to state virtually anything we like in a plausible envelope with the shape of a scientific argument. I'm not just calling the argument about humanizing tools pseudoscience -- I'm applying it equally to every other argument from evolution that lacks other motivating evidence.

[anonymouskimmer]

I understand your original point was about a neural structure involved in humanization, and not of facial recognition, but am responding to the point you let the interlocutor derail this to.

> > "We haven't yet found a specific neural structure for recognizing faces" is far from evidence that no such structure exists.

> proving a negative is, famously, quite hard.

Whether structure or not, we do have very strong evidence that a mechanism of facial recognition exists as there are people who lack this mechanism to various degrees.

This article posits that we have indeed discovered a specific neural structure involved in facial recognition: https://www.aipc.net.au/articles/the-neuroscience-of-facial-...

> The brain has even evolved a dedicated area in the neural landscape, the fusiform face area or FFA (Kanwisher et al, 1997), to specialise in facial recognition. This is part of a complex visual system that can determine a surprising number of things about another person.

[acomar]

thanks, I appreciate this