Skip to content
Skeptic Check: About Face episode artwork

Jul 14, 2014 54 min

Skeptic Check: About Face

from Big Picture Science Hosted by Big Picture Science

Face it – humans are pattern-seeking animals. We identify eyes, nose and mouth where there are none. Martian rock takes on a visage and the silhouette of Elvis appears in our burrito. Discover the roots of our face-tracking tendency – pareidolia – and why it sometimes leads us astray. Plus, why some brains can’t recognize faces at all … how computer programs exhibit their own pareidolia … and why it’s so difficult to replicate human vision in a machine Guests: Phil Plait – Astronomer, Skeptic, and author of Slate Magazine’s blog Bad Astronomy Josef Parvizi – Associate professor, Stanford University, and clinical neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Stanford Medical Center Nancy Kanwisher – Cognitive neuroscientist, at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT Greg Borenstein – Artist, creative technologist who teaches at New York University Pietro Perona – Professor of electrical engineering, computation and neural systems, California Institute of Technology Descripción en español First released February 25, 2013.

Episode details come from the podcast's RSS feed.

Embed this episode

Ready to play

Skeptic Check: About Face

0:00 54:00

No transcript yet.

Requests help us decide what to transcribe next.

Frequently asked questions

How long is this episode of Big Picture Science?

This episode is 54 minutes long.

When was this Big Picture Science episode published?

This episode was published on July 14, 2014.

Can I download this Big Picture Science episode?

Yes. Use the download control on the episode player to save the publisher-provided media file.