Vanessa Van Edwards explains how a specialized brain region behind your right ear decodes faces in milliseconds. Your brain is constantly scanning for facial cues because they carry rich social information. This obsession with faces even makes you see them in inanimate objects like food and mountains, a phenomenon called pareidolia.
Our brain is actually adapted to read facial expressions, and there's a specific part of our brain that we use to read facial expressions. It's actually right behind the right ear. It's a part of our brain that has specifically developed to read facial expressions. The funny thing about this is that part of our brain is hyper-aware. We know inherently that reading faces gives us extra social information, and so we are always on the lookout to read people's facial expressions, whether we're in a crowded room or we're on a video call. This is why, as humans, we tend to see faces everywhere. Have you ever ever noticed that you see faces in food sometimes? In mountains? In rocks? And that is that part of our brain that's looking for faces everywhere. We know that spotting facial expressions holds so much information.
