In reading for this week's class, I couldn't help but be reminded of the time we spent on mirror neurons the other week. Solso's chapter on faces was really fascinating for me, and I think it ties in directly to what Livingstone had to say about the mirror neurons. Solso states that "Faces touch us. These faces deserve your careful attention. Study them". To me, what is so fascinating about faces is our ability to read them with such ease. Of course, there are various neurological disorders that can prevent people from being able to understand the expression on another's face, but for most people the act of understanding an expression is as simple as looking at the face. Of course, cognitively speaking there are many complex activities happening in the brain that allow us to reach this kind of expression comprehension, but we aren't aware of those processes.

The pictures of faces that Solso uses are excellent examples of this kind of immediate understanding of the feeling described by the faces. Migrant Mother, California and Weeping Woman (page 141, figure 5.4) both impart a sense of sadness and loss- even if one were to view these pictures out of context and without the titles, the observer would still understand the emotional messages.

All of this reminds me of an experiment I took part in last spring. My brother-in-law is currently working on his PhD in Sweden, and he is studying mirror neurons. I was spending time with him in the lab as we were working on a mirror neuron study together, and he asked me to do a test in the MRI machine. The experience itself was rather unsettling, as I'd spend the previous three weeks in an intensive sort of 'intro to fMRI' course with him, and was acutely aware of the fact that he was about to see inside my brain- a thought which, in itself is very strange. Before I got into the machine, he had me kind of strapped in with a sort of head gear on- this was a pair of goggles with screens on the inside, so that Benny could show me a series of images while I was inside the MRI machine.

The images were a series of faces, probably about 60 in total- but each face was of a different person with a 'disgusted' look. My only job in the first part of the test was simply to view the precession of faces. In the second part, I had to physically imitate the expressions as each face was shown on the screen. The point of the work, though Benny did not discuss it with me in any great detail because I was a subject, was to establish first that there is a kind of specialized recognition area for disgust as an emotion (there has been some debate, as I recall, as to whether or not disgust is truly an emotion), and then to establish that the mirror neurons code for both the perception of disgust and the expression of it- just as we discussed in class, with monkeys viewing someone grabbing for an item and then grabbing the item.

It sounds like a very simple test, just to view faces and them imitate them; and I suppose that it seems so simple because of the fact that this kind of research has become popularized by contemporary neuroscientists like Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran. But if you stop to think about the fact that, over the course of the barely 30 minutes I was in that MRI machine, Benny was able to actually see which part of my brain were activated by the stimulus- I am floored by the fact that we as a scientific community have been able to come so far. Thoughts are suddenly categorizable in a very quantifiable way, despite their inherently qualitative and hard-to-describe nature.

I seem to have gotten a little bit off track with this, so I will try to bring myself back to Solso. I think that part of the reason I was so fascinated by his chapter About Face was the notion of specific brain regions being devoted to this act of recognition. Surely faces are not the only things we recognize in this way. I couldn't help but thinking of my conference work, which is on typography. One of the things I'm looking at while writing my paper is the actual act of reading- and in Maryanne Wolf's book, Proust and the Squid, which is about the reading brain, she gives a great insight into the cognitive processes of reading. According to Wolf, the second stage in the half-second-long process of reading a word, is to recognize the letters. Wolf asserts that instead of there is no area of the visual cortext directly dedicated to recognizing words; i.e. there is no fusiform gyrus equivalent for letters. Rather, "Learning to read changes the visual cortex of the brain. Because the visual system is capable of object recognition, the expert reader's visual areas are now populated with cell networks responsible for visual images of letters, letter patterns, and words. [...] Donald Hebb proposed the notion of cell assemblies, groups of cells that learn to operate as working units. If a common letter pattern or a word like "bear" appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own networks, rather than individually activating the large number of unrelated individual cells responsible for the lines, diagonals and circles within the letters."

In other words, Wolf is telling us that there is no specific spot in the brain that processes letters as the fusiform gyrus processes faces; but in some ways, the reading brain is far more astonishing. An "expert reader" (each of us in this class are expert readers, after our years and years of experience and our practice with a great number of types of texts) has a brain which has actually learned the specific organizations of lines, diagonals, circles, etc.. that make up each letter. Put even simpler: our brains have actually changed their cyto-organization, have learned the Gestalt organization of each letter- and various words or letter patterns. That, to me, is incredible. That our brains have actually adapted to the act of reading- which is not at all evolutionarily necessary.