[bcbirdclub] Re: Fw: [TN-Bird] Prosopagnosia, fusiform gyrus & birding
- From: "Don" <donc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'BCBC Listserve'" <bcbirdclub@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:35:51 -0400
That explains the Edsel warbler in my back yard.
Don Carrier
-----Original Message-----
From: bcbirdclub-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bcbirdclub-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Mayhorn
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 4:13 PM
To: BCBC Listserve
Subject: [bcbirdclub] Fw: [TN-Bird] Prosopagnosia, fusiform gyrus & birding
Interesting email I found on TN Birds.
Roger Mayhorn
----- Original Message -----
From: "kbreault" <kbreault@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <kbreault@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 3:22 PM
Subject: [TN-Bird] Prosopagnosia, fusiform gyrus & birding
TN Birders:
There is an interesting article in the August 30th New Yorker written by
Oliver
Sacks (the well known neurologist with books including, An Anthropologist on
Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, on the inability some
people
have to recognize faces and places, prosopagnosia. An abstract is available
at:
www.newyorker.com (the full article requires subscription). It appears that
lesions on the fusiform gyrus, a part of the brain also known as the
"fusiform
face area," and that responsible for face recognition, can cause
prosopagnosia.
The interface (as it were) between humans and birds is in this part of
the article: "Isabel Gauthier and her colleagues tested a group of car
experts
and a group of expert birders, comparing them with a group of normal
subjects.
The fusiform face area, they found, was activated when all the groups looked
at
pictures of faces. But it was also activated in the car experts when they
were
asked to identify particular cars, and in the birders when they were asked
to
identify particular birds. The fusiform face area is tuned primarily for
facial
recognition, it seems, but some of it can be trained to distinguish
individual
items of other sorts. (If, then, an expert bird spotter or car buff is
unlikely
enough to acquire prosopagnosia, he will also, we might suspect, lose his
ability to identify birds or cars.)" Note that Gauthier is a professor of
psychology at Vanderbilt and her publication on birders is: Gauthier, I., et
al., "Expertise for cars and birds recruits brain areas involved in face
recognition, Nature Neuroscience, 2000, 3 (2), 191-197.
Kevin Breault
Brentwood
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