Reading Faces

March 27 2015

Reading faces

I'm a blind man tracing braille.

An illiterate,
cleverly reading between the lines
who has learned to listen well.

How easy to miss
that phoney smile, constricted eye.
Yet intuit, somehow
every furrow and blink, smirk and sniff
flush and flare and twitch.
That distended vein
ticking away
like a time-bomb.

And how, in the dark
I can feel your breath
like a warm wet whisper.
Sense the brush of your lips,

insistent, tempting

red.
Hear that imperfect nose
with its faint whistling of breath.

But touch
makes you utterly clear,
my fingers stroking your face
as a sculptor probes his clay
before it sets.

Before it's tempered by fire

hardened in glaze.

Faces change
at the speed of light,
eyes adjust to the dark.
So do not trust
even yourself.
And do not judge
until time can tell.

Because covers lie.
Because ultimate truth
is not refracted light.
Because the heart rules
and love is blind,
reading her face
in the blink of an eye.

This poem is about the unconscious brain: about feeling vs. thinking, intuition vs. logic, the quick heuristic vs. deliberation. Because perception is irrational, emotional, intuitive, and lightning-quick. Because there is sight -- the mechanical processing of light in the visual cortex -- and then there is vision: which includes the fleeting micro-expressions we aren't conscious of seeing; which is as much feeling as logic; and which recruits many more parts of the brain, areas involved in things like judgement and feeling and salience. So the metaphor that pulls the poem together is the blind man, who sees just as well: the braille ...the stroking you face ...the love is blind and blink of an eye. (I've written before about how even the mechanics of sight is not a simple one-to-one translation of light into neural impulse and then cognition: that there is a lot of missing and filling-in, not to mention the distortions of expectation and selective vision and confirmation bias. But the idea of vision I'm referring to here is even further along the processing pathway of higher cognition, and introduces even more subjectivity into the nature of perception.)

I was reading an article in the New Yorker about computer algorithms for facial recognition, cutting-edge artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to read human emotion (We Know How You Feel -- Jan 19 2015). It contained this phrase: "our faces are organs of emotional communication". I like this idea of seeing the face as an organ and as a singular whole, instead of just as a convenient location for eyes and ears and mouths, one that's a small part of larger organ systems like skin and bone. Because as social animals, our faces are how we interact, and so essential to survival. Hundreds of thousand of years of evolution have honed the face, as well as our ability to read it. Even simple facial recognition -- being able to instantly attach a name and/or a context to a face -- takes tremendous processing power and speed; something computers have traditionally had a great deal of difficulty with. (Although there are some otherwise perfectly neuro-typical people with a condition called prosopagnosia who can't do this: the famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sachs, for example. (My deficit is a lot more common: terrible at remembering names, but always "know" the face!)) The phoney smile referred to in the poem is interesting in this discussion of computer intelligence: apparently, we think we're a lot better at discerning deception than we are, while those cutting-edge computers are actually much better at sussing out the truth. So as the poem says, do not trust/ even yourself: don't be smug about your ability to read faces and insincere smiles.

The poem questions whether we see as well as we think we do. It alludes to this new research into micro-expressions, which are so fast and subtle we aren't consciously aware of either making them or reading them, but do anyway. And so it questions the conceit that we are rational, logical, and deliberate; and acknowledges the power of emotion, intuition, and unconscious thought. So seeing is not necessarily believing. And there may be as much truth in sound and touch, as well as our 6th sense: that gut-deep knowing that supersedes first impressions.