Faces

I never forget a face - names are a different thing. As I learned from Jerry Lucas (Dr. Memory), we remember visual things --physical pictures. Words are mental abstracts-- they are merely mnemonic pegs.

Faces are infinitely interesting - we gaze at a face and wonder, who is that person.

I just re-watched "In the Line of Fire" where the villain disguised himself with various changes to the hair, nose, wrinkles etc. Clint Eastwood (the hero) states - "I know people" by the "eyes".

The eyes may be the windows into a person's soul. How often do you look carefully into peoples eyes? The amount of eye contact has various implications in various cultures.

The face is magical. Infants are constantly attracted to our face - to our eyes. They will spend as much time looking at you as you are willing to spend. Somehow we comfortable staring for long moments into an infant's eyes yet for an adult we will avoid even brief eye contact.

Skype has added a new measure face recognition challenges during telephone conversations. I have spent 40 years communicating "behind a curtain". So often I have said - "It's nice to put the face to the voice". Watch yourself sometime as you are Skype-ing, do your eyes wander?; somehow "virtual" face connections are different from the physical face connection.