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Scientists Decipher the Neural Code For Faces (scientificamerican.com)
New submitter akakaak writes: In a new paper published in Cell, researchers Le Chang and Doris Tsao claim to have uncovered "The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain." They develop a model representing each face as a vector in a 50-dimensional "face-space," and show that the firing rate for each face-sensitive neuron represents the location along a single axis through this space. This allows them to accurately predict the appearance of a viewed face from the collective recorded activity of the neurons. This work is a major advance in the decoding of complex neural representations, and refutes exemplar-based models of face recognition. Further reading: Scientific American
members of The Beatles or characters from The Simpsons activated separate neurons". i bet they did.
That is one weird face.
I'll bet this was some very smelly research!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Basically, the result from the paper show that from the data recorded from the primates' neurons, it is possible to recreate with high accuracy the image the monkeys saw.
The potential technology developed from this finding would astounding. For example, a scanner could be developed that could allow police to ask a victim to remember what the criminal looked like and produce a near photographic image of him.
Steal Your Face
if confirmed, this is the stuff nobel prize winners are made of
I wonder what the output looks like for those of us with face blindness? Do I have an accurate representation in my head and just fail to load it, or am I not saving them properly?
They should test it on the orange sphincter, he can't control his face at all, that's why he looks so stupid on all the photos.
OK they found like 100 neurons which encode faces. That doesn't make it clear at all how and where individual neuron states are stored in your (long term) memory. These neurons themselves obviously cannot do that.
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"What you type is nonsense. What you read is nonsense. Yet, the most purest and honest data we can mine is biometrics." Not an actual quote, but it sounds like something Mark Z thinks in the back of his mind, all 200 neurons.
This appears to be a highly evolved perceptual representation of a core social competence. Even if it doesn't generalize, it's the biggest science result since the second LIGO detection.
It's already enough to further manipulate the masses, once exploited by the ad men, the plastic surgeons, and the mayfly scions of social media.
As a reliable bijection, research can already begin correlating the genomic racial space with 50-dimensional face space, no electrodes required. I'm betting Africa and Australia get all the love.
One caveat: how many more dimensions are required to represent male facial hair? Or is the beard recognizer a different neural subsystem altogether, half a neural highway closer to God?
This looks exactly like my n-dimensional "behavior-space" and the motivation vector that must be zeroed by a behavior or behaviors. This is the way to go.
E Proelio Veritas.
The last thing we need is something that can read your mind and steal your thoughts.