Because if you only see each other online then it is difficult to recognize each other (in presence) – Corriere.it

by time news

Students from some regions, being able choose between presence and distance learning (Dad), had already returned to class in recent months, but in September they will all return: on the 6th in Bolzano, on the 13th in Lombardy, Piedmont, Val d’Aosta and Trento, on the 15th in Campania and Tuscany, on the 16th in Friuli. After months of school lockdown these kids will have to confront the rules of the pandemic: spaced benches, mask, one meter spacing, hand sanitization. But most of all they will find themselves in a class of semi-unknowns where for the first time since the time of the book Cuore they did not even have a desk mate: no Garrone, big and fat who defended the little ones, today we would say bullied, nor that Rabucco called little mason who sat in front and knew how to make a hare face . With Dad there was no unforgettable companion: everyone followed the lessons from home with the computer via interactive videoconferencing platforms, under the supervision of the teachers. The few extra-didactic reports they blossomed at the change of time when a professor gave way to the one in the next lesson. To find themselves freely, the boys have to wait for the end of the connection that replaced the old bell. Maybe whole afternoons are connected, but nothing to do with the freedom to be in the corridors of the school or wandering around the classroom, things that in any case they will no longer be able to do, prohibited by anti-pandemic rules.

Immediately associate the real image with the corresponding identity

If it has been difficult to accept all this, another problem could now await at least the very young who, practically, may have almost never met their peers in person: the inability to recognize them at first glance. They might indeed make it difficult to immediately associate their real image with the corresponding identity. The difficulty of recognition for those who interacted with someone only online was reported by a German study published in Journal of Neuroscience by Gza Gergely Ambrus of the University of Jena who, through electroencephalographic studies, verified that if you only met someone on one of the many flower platforms with the lockdown, your brain will struggle to identify him live. Brain representations for familiarizing someone’s face are different when viewed live rather than online, even if you interact with him like the guys in Dad did. At first it may seem to recognize a person because the brain perceives a face as familiar before giving it a name, but for a correlation between perception and pigeonholing in the recognition memory, real-life experiences are necessary, the only ones that activate the familiarization process of faces. In fact, the recognition of others is not based only on the flattened image of the face sent back from a computer screen, but on a thousand other information such as the way to move, the tone of the voice, the scent, etc. It is precisely the loss of these details at the basis of prosopagnosia (see the article below) a disorder already known for some time that creates difficulties in recognizing faces, but which does not depend on Dad.


And there are those who need to hear their voice to identify someone

The prosopagnosia an ailment he also suffered from Luciano De Crescenzo who told of how at first glance she found it difficult to recognize even dear friends like Marisa Laurito. Precisely in an interview with Corriere Salute he had said that to help him was above all the voice of his friend, which triggered in him the recovery of memories in the mnemonic archive of faces through the acoustic path that bypassed the visual one, stopped by a slight stroke that had left that unpleasant inconvenience. The ploy, used by many other patients with this disorder such as the one described by Oliver Sacks, who did not recognize himself in the mirror until he spoke, would still work today with people wearing masks. What could be missing is the so-called emotional recognition of faces discovered in 2019 by Israeli and French neurologists: within 300 milliseconds of the sight of a face they are activated the neurons of the fusiform area and the amygdala for the recognition not so much physiognomic, but emotional that it is based on view of the areas around the eyes and mouth and it is precisely this last information that is missing if you wear the mask. Regardless of the protections for the pandemic, the data confirms what German researchers have now discovered: the sense of familiarity of a face is activated before identity recognition.

The face of sadness

Singing sad boy like me, they don’t know how you are Patty Bravo showed a capacity to interpret the sad expression on the face of others which according to a study with functional resonance of theAustralian University of Melbourne on 95 young people (15-25 years), published in eNeuro, it is up to specific brain areas: fusiform area, amygdala, dorsolateral and ventral prefrontal cortex. The song ended with we must never be alone which is a prelude to what has just been discovered by the researchers of Brunel University in London they publish on Brain & Research a study of over 500 people according to which too much loneliness shows sad faces even in people who have neutral expressions.

A study shows that the expression does not make the monk

In 800 the doctor Cesare Lombroso founded criminal anthropology, according to which somatic characteristics (small head, receding forehead, pronounced cheekbones) are criminal predisposition index. In the climate of biological determinism of those times, associating the presence of aggressive traits with various cranial anomalies he cataloged (such as the median cerebellar dimple) cones the concept of born delinquent face. Those ideas, always criticized by science, they still survive in the choice of movie villains, ma a Dutch study from the University of Utrecht just posted on Nature Genetics definitively denies them: there is a series of genes that predispose to the shape of the skull and face, but not the type of brain, so behind a thug’s face a monk’s brain can be hidden.

July 8, 2021 (change July 8, 2021 | 5:59 pm)

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