49. There’s a Special Part of the Brain Just for Recognizing Faces

Imagine that you’re walking down a busy street in a large city when you suddenly see the face of a family member. Even if you were not expecting to see this person, and even if there are dozens or even hundreds of people in your visual field, you will immediately recognize him or her as your relative. You’ll also have an accompanying emotional response, be it love, hate, fear, or otherwise.

Although the visual cortex is huge and takes up significant brain resources, there is an additional part of the brain whose sole purpose is to recognize faces. Identified by Nancy Kanwisher (1997), the fusiform face area (FFA) allows faces to bypass the brain’s usual interpretive channels and helps people identify faces more quickly than objects. The FFA is also near the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center.

Faces Capture Attention and Communicate Emotion

Because of the FFA, people will pay attention to faces. Consider using photos and pictures of people’s faces on your slides. In order to stimulate the FFA, the face needs to look like a face; in other words, it needs to have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. For maximum recognition, use faces that are full front. Faces at an angle or in profile are not as easily recognized by the FFA.

Don’t use faces that are distorted unless you want to convey a negative message. One of my clients once used a face that was made up of the left half of one person’s face and the right half of another’s. It was attention getting, but also very creepy.

Because the FFA is so close to the amygdala, faces communicate emotion directly to the emotional centers of the brain. A picture of someone showing emotion—whether happy, sad, disgusted, or afraid—will communicate more quickly and deeply than words can.

We Look Where Others Look

Eye-tracking research shows that if a face in a picture is looking away from us and toward something else on the screen, then we tend to also look at the other object on the screen.

If you as the presenter turn and look at the screen behind you, then your audience will look at the screen too. This is a good thing if you are trying to draw the audience’s attention to something on the screen. But if you keep looking at the screen behind you because you are nervous or because you have forgotten what is on the screen, then you are just distracting the audience from listening to you.

The best presenters and public speakers are so practiced with their presentation that they don’t have to look at the screen at all. I’ve seen presenters subtly click a remote in their hand that you can’t see. They don’t have any monitor in front of them. They know what comes next and what is appearing on the screen behind them. They are so confident that they just smoothly continue talking through every slide.