Forget Police Sketches: Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves

Using brain scans and direct neuron recording from macaque monkeys, the team found specialized "face patches" that respond to specific combinations of facial features. In the early 2000s, while recording from epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted into their brains, Quian Quiroga and colleagues found that face cells are particularly picky. In a stroke of luck, Tsao and team blew open the "black box" of facial recognition while working on a different problem: how to describe a face mathematically, with a matrix of numbers. In macaque monkeys with electrodes implanted into their brains, the team recorded from three "face patches"--brain areas that respond especially to faces--while showing the monkeys the computer-generated faces.