Human Brain Plasticity and Visual Recognition of Faces and Letters

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The human brain exhibits remarkable plasticity, particularly in the visual system, where specific areas are dedicated to recognizing faces and letters. The face recognition area is located in the right hemisphere and has an analogous section in the left hemisphere that is responsible for recognizing letters. This suggests that parts of the brain can adapt based on cultural development, such as the introduction of letters. In illiterate individuals, the brain's face recognition areas remain bilateral, reflecting the earlier function of these regions as primarily focused on face recognition. With the advent of literacy, the brain repurposes existing structures for new functions, illustrating its capacity to reorganize and adapt to cultural needs over time.

The human brain does a pretty amazing job of taking in a huge amount of data from multiple sensory modalities -- vision, hearing, smell, etc. -- and constructing a coherent picture of the world, constantly being updated in real time. (Although perhaps in discrete moments, rather than continuously, as we learn in this podcast...) We're a long way from completely understanding how that works, but amazing progress has been made in identifying specific parts of the brain with specific functions in this process. Today we talk to leading neuroscientist Doris Tsao about the specific workings of vision, from how we recognize faces to how we construct a model of the world around us.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/29/284-doris-tsao-on-how-the-brain-turns-vision-into-the-world/

Doris Tsao received her Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of molecular and cell biology, and a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the Eppendorf and Science International Prize in Neurobiology, the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.

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