Upside Down Frown
This is the name of a song, by, yeah, yeah, I know, who else, They Might Be Giants. It gave me a strange thought.
I heard on the radio there is a psychological phenomenon under which some people - those with certain types of brain damage or who were blinded early in life and regained sight later - cannot detect a specific photo-manipulation of faces.
You may have seen the manipulation in an airline ad in the last year or two. A pretty woman is smiling at you, but there is something very disturbing about the image, and it takes a few seconds to work out the problem. It's that her eyes and mouth are inverted and placed back on her face. The faint smile is literally an inverted frown.
Once you see the trick, it's rather disturbing, even more than when you couldn't tell what was wrong. For some reason, blind folks whose sight is restored as adults cannot tell what the heck is bothering you about the photo. The speculation is that there is some part of facial recognition that has to be learned in order to see the trick.
I wonder if the songwriter saw one of these and it reminded him of the sensation of people giving you a false face during conversation? That you get the feeling something is wrong, but you can't quite ....
I heard on the radio there is a psychological phenomenon under which some people - those with certain types of brain damage or who were blinded early in life and regained sight later - cannot detect a specific photo-manipulation of faces.
You may have seen the manipulation in an airline ad in the last year or two. A pretty woman is smiling at you, but there is something very disturbing about the image, and it takes a few seconds to work out the problem. It's that her eyes and mouth are inverted and placed back on her face. The faint smile is literally an inverted frown.
Once you see the trick, it's rather disturbing, even more than when you couldn't tell what was wrong. For some reason, blind folks whose sight is restored as adults cannot tell what the heck is bothering you about the photo. The speculation is that there is some part of facial recognition that has to be learned in order to see the trick.
I wonder if the songwriter saw one of these and it reminded him of the sensation of people giving you a false face during conversation? That you get the feeling something is wrong, but you can't quite ....