How do we remember and recognise someone's face whom we haven't seen for years.please explain scientifically?

Question

science says we remember or recognise someone's face or visual diagrams in studies as electrical impulses/energy or something sort of that and can remember him straightaway when we meet our school friends even after many years.after death, what happens please explain because science says that "energy cannot be created or destroyed,it can be converted from one form to another" .what happens to electrical impulses/energy having visual content of the person's life.also spare a thought for those people who are watching vulgarity. please explain scientifically,no rubbish or funny answers, it means waste of time and no best answers rating.

Answer 1

Ok, now this is a good question.

Inorder to understand the what actually goes on, I will need to explain the pathway of the visual system (note: the brain and its information is always running and it does'nt stop at one place. basically, the brain never sleeps). Also note that this will not be a short answer. Inorder to understand how the information is passed, you need to read the full answer. I will a few websites below in order of the information so that you can follow along.

http://www.lrn.org/Graphics/Senses/figur...

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/cglidd...

http://sharpbrains.files.wordpress.com/2...

_____________________________________

Visual stimulus (old friend, face). The light from that stimulus hits the rods and cones of your eye. When photons hit these rods and cones, it causes them to react biochemically and sends an electrical impulse (in this case, energy is conserved Light to electrical) to the optic nerve and that goes to the optic chaism and down the optic tract towards to lateral geniculate nucleus (Thalamus: aka relay station of the brain) and out to the optic radiations (bunch of nerves that connect to the thalamus) and finally to the occipital lobe (or first destination called the striate cortex). Simple cells in the striate cortex, which pick up on line orientations only (ie a straight line or a curved line, any line, not moving in space in a single orientation). The simple cells sends their information to complex cells which also pick up on multiple orientations of lines and movements of these lines. These complex cells make a basic 2-D image of the object (we are now in the extra-striate cortex). These complex cells send their information to hypercomplex cells which make a 3-D image of the object. So far we only put the lines together to make the gestalt (whole image) of the object (it is almost complete). You still do not have a clue what this is yet. Now these hypercomplex cells send their information down the dorsal stream and the ventral stream for information in space and naming the object.

The dorsal stream heads up to the parietal lobe which analyzes where the stimulus is in space. The ventral stream heads down towards the temporal lobe, which is used for recognition of the stimulus and also contains memory/emotional aspects.

___________________

Now I showed you how the infomation is sent from the eyeball towards the pariteal lobes and temporal lobes (please remember that these two streams need to work at the same time or together inorder to understand the image). Face recognition is complex: Let me start with the parietal lobe. As said before, it tells you where an object is in space. Well, that is a very general statement. The parietal lobe is connected to the temporal lobe via the lateral fissure. Anyway, the parietal lobe can recognize faces due to the proper orientation of the nose mouth etc in space. The disorder of not recognizing a face is called propsoagnosia. Naming the face or the idea of "I know you from somewhere" or "You look familiar" strikes the emotional and memory aspects of the limbic system. Let me take you down this road. The visual stimulus comes all together, from both streams, in the temporal lobe. The visual and auditory stimuli separate in the heirarchal pathway. The visual information goes down the inferior temporal gyrus and auditory is superior temporal gyrus and goes towards the anterior part of the temporal lobe called the temporal pole. Then we move inwards toowars the center of the brain where memory and emtion centers are located. The electrical pathway, from the temporal lobe, goes medial (inward) twoard the perirhninal cortex (it gets olfactory information from the olfactory bulb), the to the entorhinal cortex, thne to the parahippocampus and finally to the hippocampus. This is where the limbic system is, along witht he amygdala (fear). This is where you get the conscious aspect of "I know this object" or just recognizing things. This is also your emotional center. Also one more place I need to talk about. The information is also sent to the polymodal pathway of the temporal lobe, which deals with biological movement and categorizing items. Also information is sent to the frontal lobes for judgement and other stimulus analysis. This is where working memory or short term memory is located.

_____________________________

I took you down all of the common paths. Now lets try and put this together into a whole idea. You need to recognize that all of this occurs at once.

Your brain must have memorized a specific cue of a person inorder for you to remeber him. Maybe he wears glasses, or has a certain smell, or anything that the brain can use to remeber this person. Then the memory aspect runs through the categorization information and long term memory for this. Then somehow you remember this person or he looks familiar to you.

I do not know how random electrical signals that move in a systematic way to produce memopry or even a knowledge of the person. This is pretty much the nobel peace prize question. How does random electrical signals produc

Answer 2

its simply bcoz of our forebrain which has an memory lobe. there the things we see, listen gets registered. duration of remembering is the impact the thing has on our life/mind.

by the way its not that easy to learn its scientific depth. the one's writin in here must have simply copied from a site, those who knows really donot have time to sit n explain, so just be satisfied in what i said bcoz more u learn, more questions come to your mind

by the  way am a med. stu. too, so telling by my experience.

all the best!

Answer 3

Reinforcement is important in forming memories because it moves the memory relationship from short-lived categories to longer-lasting ones. For example, if you met a man called John Byrd at a party, you'd see his face, hear his name, and you'd be aware of the social context of the event. At first this information is loosely held in immediate memory, just long enough for the event to play itself out. Immediate memories are held in various modality-specific regions of the brain, meaning that immediate visual memory is probably held in visual parts of the brain, immediate auditory memory in auditory parts of the brain, and so on.

If you paid attention during the introduction, the relationship between sight, sound, and awareness is brought together into working memory, somewhere in the prefrontal lobe of the brain. When the event moves from immediate memory to working memory, certain features will be lost. You probably won't remember background conversations from the party, and you may not remember the color of the Mr. Byrd's shoes. The loss of distracting information is an important feature of human memory, and is critical for efficient storage and recollection of experiences.

At this point you might rehearse the event by saying the name to yourself, or by making up a mnemonic (John Byrd, who has a big hook nose like a bird). The mnemonic and the rehearsal cause the memory to move from working memory into long-term memory, a change that starts in the brain's hippocampus. The process of converting working memory into long-term memory is called consolidation, and again, it is characterized by the loss of distracting information. Several days after meeting Mr. Byrd you may not be able to remember what color his tie was or whether he wore a wristwatch, but you will still remember his face, his name, and the person who introduced you to him. The consolidation phase of memory formation is sensitive to interruption; if you are distracted just after meeting Mr. Byrd, you may have trouble remembering his name later.

So to recap, the event of meeting John Byrd started out in immediate memory, spread out in various modality-specific regions of the brain. Reinforcement through attention caused the relationship between sight, sound, and context to consolidate into working memory in the prefrontal lobe. Further reinforcement through practice caused more consolidation, and the most critical relationships in the event (the name, the face, and the context) were tied together in the hippocampus. From there, the memory relationship is probably stored diffusely across the cerebral cortex, but research on the actual location of memory relationships is still inconclusive.