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On the hilly topography of the brain is a region called the occipitotemporal cortex, which processes visual information. Located within that region is a specific outcropping called the fusiform gyrus, or the fusiform facial area (FFA). By means of measuring regional cerebral blood with positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, scientists have discovered that this part of the brain is active when people look at faces.
Throughout the long course of human evolution, recognizing and evaluating people on the basis of their faces made an important contribution to survival. Knowing whom to trust and whom to suspect saved many of our ancestors from needless bloodshed, so they could live to obtain food and mate another day.
The depiction of human faces has been a theme of artists from ancient Egyptian wall paintings, to early Hebrew and Christian representations, to Renaissance portraits, to modern abstract paintings. Some contemporary artists present us with distorted faces such as the disturbing portrait by Francis Bacon on the next page. This “face” stymies our psychological need to understand the emotion being conveyed as well as processing by the neurologic cluster in our brain’s FFA to make sense of what we see. In frustrating our normal propensity to understand and process, Bacon forces us to look deeper into the picture.
Although facial perception is associated with increased blood flow to the FFA, expert facial artists may actually show less blood flow as contrasted with novice painters
Consider a famous artist such as Raphael, arguably the most important portrait painter of the Renaissance. What cerebral activity might be going on as he composed Madonna of the Meadow (1506)? From recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, it is possible to recreate the activity of Raphael’s brain as well as the activity of those who view this classic piece of art.
Look first at the exquisite faces painted by Raphael. Now, consider the areas of the brain activated by various components of the painting. A visual scene is viewed bit-bybit as our eyes focus on one part and then move (in little jumps called “saccades”) to another point, and so on. In the case of Madonna of the Meadow, one might focus on the face of Mary, then on the colors, then on a geometric form, and then on cues to perspective, such as distance. Each of these features has specific loci in the cortex as shown in the dorsal (“where”) and the ventral (“what”) streams. Note the location of Mary’s face in the FFA.
The expert painter uses “higher order” cognitive processing. In effect, he could be “thinking” a face, as well as “seeing” it.
Artist's brain is especially efficient at processing faces, he may be able to allocate more cerebral effort to deeper aspects of a person’s face. The preliminary results did indicate that artist shows greater activation in the right frontal area (see upper right two scans) than did the novice painter.