Brain Awareness Week 2006
Seeing Heads
- 15th March - 16th April 2006
- Brain Awareness Week exhibit
- Sponsored by the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University
Three young British artists bring us new ways of seeing heads, inside and out. Katharine Dowson and Angela Palmer have undertaken Magnetic Resonance scanning to see into their own brains and bodies, and have transformed their personal experiences into glass sculptures, embossed images, etchings, drawings, and film - self portraits that represent the universality of human anatomy.
Claude Heath has created blind drawings of heads, transforming the bumps on the cranium, felt by hand, into a visual image. These images enable us to understand how our minds construct images.
Brain Awareness Week Seminar
- Wednesday 15 March 2006
- Professor David Perrett
- University of St Andrews
What We Can Tell from Face and how it happens in the Brain
Face perception is something we take for granted, but it is wonderfully sophisticated. We recognize thousands of individuals and can tell subtle shifts in their moods. This lecture will describe the limits to our ability to read faces: can we really tell someone's personality from his face? How do we know from a face whether someone is fighting fit or fighting illness? Are some faces attractive to everyone?
The world of neurology and psychiatry is populated with symptoms in which face perception can be profoundly altered. Sometimes the symptoms seem straight from a horror movie like ’the invasion of the body snatchers', where each face is recognisable but seems to be an impostor. In other instances, faces appear to transform spontaneously. This lecture will explore the way face perception normally works in the brain and attempts to provide a basis for understanding how it can go wrong.
