Weird, did you say weird? These days, many of us are experiencing a singular phenomenon. At the bakery on the corner, at the café next door, at the children’s school and sometimes even at work, strange faces appear. The baker has a funny chin; the nursery nurse, a toothy smile; the headmaster of the school is unshaven; the waiter pouted. What’s going on ? All these people whom we had never seen “in full” simply took off their masks – in two and a half years of Covid, we have met people despite everything. And, systematically, we are amazed by their “lower face”.
“No, that doesn’t fit”, was thus, roughly speaking, my first thought when I came face to face in the street with another student’s mother – who moreover seemed as surprised as me to discover myself. and chuckled at me with this delightfully counter-intuitive phrase: “Without the masks, we no longer recognize ourselves! » The reality of her face collided with what I imagined it to be, so much so that it took me a few moments to adjust to it. But what had I imagined, exactly? And according to what criteria had I modeled a virtual lower face for her? “It’s probably a completion mechanism, explains Sylvie Chokron, research director at the CNRS, neuropsychologist at the Rothschild Ophthalmological Foundation and columnist for the “Science & medicine” section of the World. When we have to recognize something of which we only have a part, the brain completes with a priori. In this specific case, it is a priori non-visual. The brain composes a bottom of the face according to the upper part, but also according to the voice, the personality, our feelings towards this person. We construct a representation for ourselves, a little like reading a novel. »
The shock of the visual adjustment
Extraordinary: the mother of little Hélio, like the nursery staff or the new merchants in the district, would therefore have been the characters of my unconscious novel for two years… This is also what Lionel Naccache, neuroscientist at the Institut du brain and neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, author of Indoor cinema (Odile Jacob, 2020): “One of the key findings of the study of perception and consciousness is that human beings produce meaning, constantly and unconsciously. In the case of visual perception, light information is printed on the retina and is transmitted to the brain; but this information is constantly interpreted. The motor of meaning is so strong, with us, that we invent the non-perceived. For example, in the cinema, what your retinas receive are twenty-four fixed images per second; but what you experience is a continuous film. Well, what you weren’t shown, between two images, you invented. I call it fiction. »
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