Alexander Todorov’s new book on Radio National

Face value: Neuroscience shows how first impressions work
RN By Sam Baran for All In The Mind
Updated 23 Jul 2017, 8:04am

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-23/face-value-neuroscience-shows-how-first-impressions-work/8693308

 

Another pair of celebrity doppelgangers

I try to avoid watching the 1990s American TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, but on the odd unavoidable occasion when I do, every time I see the American lead female actor Sheree J. Wilson my super-recognizer brain tells me her face is in some way a match for……

….the Australian politician Terri Butler, who has an intelligent, understated style that I find fascinating, even if I don’t take her politics too seriously. Do Butler and Wilson have anything in common, apart from similar faces? No idea.

Can’t stop spotting celebrity doppelgangers

A man’s mouth decorated with black lippy, those sad-looking eyes that seem to be melting down the side of a long face with minimal cheekbones, on a man with a tall, powerful build and a deep voice that is simply stunning.

 

Why is this look so familiar?

 

Why?

 

Oh yes, that’s why!

Interesting that Fred Gwynne was also a great slab of a man with a deep voice that he shared with us in song, and had a great love of theatricality, a sense of humour, and a willingness to dress like a horrific freak for a job. Similar faces often go with similar lives and similar personalities. Are these similarities more than skin-deep?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fred_Gwynne&oldid=775146731

My eardrums move?

If the human brain works to focus hearing and vision on the same stimuli, I’ve got to wonder why the idea of synaesthesia as a cross-modal way of experiencing the world seems so novel or abnormal to so many people, including researchers.

Woodward, Aylin (2017) Your eardrums move in sync with your eyes but we don’t know why. New Scientist. 21 July 2017.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141467-your-eardrums-move-in-sync-with-your-eyes-but-we-dont-know-why/