It is with our faces that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death.
Our age and our gender are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions that Darwin wrote about, as well as the hidden or repressed ones that Freud wrote about, are displayed on our faces, along with our thoughts and intentions. It seems a strange irony that we need science to rekindle faith in the ancient ability to read mnds. That old skill, so much a part of us, is not much believed in now.
Infants are early masters of detecting and expressing emotions, which may help to explain their inborn fascination for faces. If you want to capture the attention of an infant, you will have more luck using an expressive human face than any other object in the world. Babies have an intrinsic appetite for faces: they look at them, peer at them, gaze at them, stare at them. Infants just a few days old can distinguish between emotional expressions.
An infant can detect minute temporal changes in emotional responsiveness. This level of sophistication is coming from an organism that won't be able to stand up on his own for another six months. Why should a creature with relatvely few skills be so monomaniacally focused on tiny muscular contractions visible beneath the skin of another creature's body?
The answer lies in the evolutionary history of the limbic brain which is not only the seat of dreams, but also the center of advanced emotionality. What one sees, hears, feels and smells is fed into the limbic brain which fine-tunes physiology to prime the body for the outside world. The limbic brain specializes in detecting and analyzing just one part of the physical world--the internal state of other mammals. Emotionality is the social sense organ of limbic creatures.
Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity called limbic resonance--a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes when we look into the portals to a limbic brain, our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.
Though we might admire arms and legs, breasts and buttocks, it is the face, first and last, that is judged "beautiful" in an aesthetic sense, "fine" or "distinguished" in a moral or intellectual sense.
And, crucially, it is by our faces that we can be recognized as individuals. Our faces bear the stamp of our experiences and our character; at forty, it is said, a man has the face he deserves.
At two and a half months, babies respond to smiling faces by smiling back. "As the child smiles," Everett Elinwood writes, "it usually engages the adult human to interact with him--to smile, to talk, to hold--in other words, to initiate the processes of socialization. The reciprocal understanding mother-child relationship is possible only because of the continual dialogue between faces." The face, psychoanalysts consider, is the first object to acquire visual meaning and significance. But are faces in a special category as far as the nervous system is concerned?
It seems that there is an innate and presumably genetically determined ability to recognize faces, and this capacity gets focused in the first year or two, so that we become especially good at recognizing the sorts of faces we are likely to encounter. Our "face cells," already present at birth, need experience in order to develop fully.
Above all, the recognition of faces depends not only on the ability to parse the visual aspects of a face--its particular features and their over-all configuration--and compare them with others but also on the ability to summon the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with that face. The recognition of specific places or faces goes with a particular feeling, a sense of association and meaning.
Recognition is based on knowledge and familiarity is based on feeling, but neither entails the other. The two have different neural bases and can be dissociated. In instances of deja vu, it is possible you may find that everyone on the bus, or in the street, looks "familiar" and you may go up to them and address them as old friends, even while realizing that you cannot possibly know them all.
Sources: Face-Blind by Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, August 30, 2010 and "A General Theory of Love" by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.
69-year-old Van Hoisington (on the right in the picture) is the founder, president and chief investment officer of Hoisington Investment Management, a boutique investment firm in Austin, Texas, with about $5 billion under management. Though small and far removed from money centers like New York and Hong Kong, this firm's investment thesis cuts to the heart of what might be the most important question facing the global economy today: Is inflation about to rise or 
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