illusion of the Oracle:

The familiar face of empires is external intervention as opposed to local culture. We follow Michel Onfray's thesis about the oracular illusion when one more individual or country tries to avoid the fulfillment of a nefarious prediction, which materializes as a catastrophe. Algeria conquered in 1830 was incorporated into French territory. In 1954 the FLN rebelled, and in 1961, General Charles de Gaulle negotiated the independence of Algeria, causing the disastrous departure of 750,000 French settlers and the death of French supporters. From 1962 to 2021, the withdrawals of imperial powers from their colonies, France from Algeria, the United States in Afghanistan, resulted in catastrophes and uncertainties. The imperial power of the United States aimed to defeat its bipolar antagonist, the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan. They conducted an inconsequential policy to beat their rival, arming and financing the Taliban's victorious resistance, the freedom fighters. The oracular illusion led the United States to support the future antagonist, Islamic fundamentalism, destined for the world caliphate. After the departure of the USSR, American power despised the Taliban, who harbored al Qaeda, leading to 9/11. In 2001 the United States invaded Afghanistan and abandoned it after 20 years of war without the precaution of obtaining plans or safeguards for the government in Kabul. After the disastrous retreat, the victorious Taliban demonstrated, like the FLN in Algeria, the fulfillment of the oracular illusion.

Why Are Some People Better at Recognising Faces Than Others?

Imagine you lose sight of your friends (or parents) for a moment while you are out at the park. You glance around and then spot them in the distance. You easily pick them out from all the other people in the park and you correctly identify them. This process is called familiar face recognition. For most of us, this process seems easy and generally people are good at recognising familiar faces. However, a few people really struggle to recognise the people around them. Other people are “super-recognisers” who have an extraordinary ability to recognise faces very accurately. How good are you at recognising faces? In this article, we outline why some people are better (or worse) at recognising faces and explore the possible importance of brain differences, mental processes, and personality in this ability.

Coarse-to-Fine(r) Automatic Familiar Face Recognition in the Human Brain

At what level of spatial resolution can the human brain recognize a familiar face in a crowd of strangers? Does it depend on whether one approaches or rather moves back from the crowd? To answer these questions, 16 observers viewed different unsegmented images of unfamiliar faces alternating at 6 Hz, with spatial frequency (SF) content progressively increasing (i.e., coarse-to-fine) or decreasing (fine-to-coarse) in different sequences. Variable natural images of celebrity faces every sixth stimulus generated an objective neural index of single-glanced automatic familiar face recognition (FFR) at 1 Hz in participants’ electroencephalogram (EEG). For blurry images increasing in spatial resolution, the neural FFR response over occipitotemporal regions emerged abruptly with additional cues at about 6.3–8.7 cycles/head width, immediately reaching amplitude saturation. When the same images progressively decreased in resolution, the FFR response disappeared already below 12 cycles/head width, thus providing no support for a predictive coding hypothesis. Overall, these observations indicate that rapid automatic recognition of heterogenous natural views of familiar faces is achieved from coarser visual inputs than generally thought, and support a coarse-to-fine FFR dynamics in the human brain.

Search for the Unknown: Guidance of Visual Search in the Absence of an Active Template

Can you efficiently look for something even without knowing what it looks like? According to theories of visual search, the answer is no: A template of the search target must be maintained in an active state to guide search for potential locations of the target. Here, we tested the need for an active template by assessing a case in which this template is improbable: the search for a familiar face among unfamiliar ones when the identity of the target face is unknown. Because people are familiar with hundreds of faces, an active guiding template seems unlikely in this case. Nevertheless, participants (35 Israelis and 33 Germans) were able to guide their search as long as extrafoveal processing of the target features was possible. These results challenge current theories of visual search by showing that guidance can rely on long-term memory and extrafoveal processing rather than on an active search template.

“You’re Not Being Serious Enough!”: Renegotiating Relationships during Lockdown

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 led to a UK lockdown, where citizens were asked to stay at home for an undefined period. This forced people to make sudden decisions regarding where to live and who they would not see. Through 18 semi-structured interviews with individuals aged 27-72, this paper explores how people maintained friend-based, romantic, familial and professional relationships during lockdown in Spring 2020. The enforced separation following lockdown motivated people to reconsider how they conducted relationships in and outside the home. Within the household, people verbally and physically renegotiated boundaries to ensure relationship harmony. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) was utilised to maintain connections with estranged relationships, as people accessed new platforms to replicate familiar face-to-face (F2F) processes online. This article considers the disruption to relationships experienced during this time, providing an in-the-moment insight into the use of CMC in maintaining relationships during the first UK lockdown.

A fast link between face perception and memory in the temporal pole

The question of how the brain recognizes the faces of familiar individuals has been important throughout the history of neuroscience. Cells linking visual processing to person memory have been proposed, but not found. Here we report the discovery of such cells through recordings from an fMRI-identified area in the macaque temporal pole. These cells responded to faces when they were personally familiar. They responded non-linearly to step-wise changes in face visibility and detail, and holistically to face parts, reflecting key signatures of familiar face recognition. They discriminated between familiar identities, as fast as a general face identity area. The discovery of these cells establishes a new pathway for the fast recognition of familiar individuals.