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You'd think you walk around remembering all the hotties, but in fact? What you really
remember are the uggos.
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Hey peeps, Trace here for DNews. When your brain sees a face, what does it do? It first
has to notice it's looking at a face, using the bits of a face and putting them together
it attempts to recognize it and gauge its level of attractiveness. From there we decide
if we want to remember that face or not -- all in a split second.
Most people would agree, Angelina Jolie has an attractive face. She has evenly spaced,
large eyes; full lips and her features are properly sized and placed on her face in a
generally symmetrical way. Obviously, attractive faces are great // *smile* // but science
has unexpectedly revealed our brains remember imperfect faces BETTER than the beautiful
ones. The average symmetrical, attractive, face is just ... boring to our brain. Whereas
one we might consider an "ugly" face -- which really means asymmetrical with imperfections
-- is easily remembered! Something about it is novel and interesting!
There's something called the Von Restorff Effect, which basically says our brains are
better at recalling unusual things, rather than ordinary things. A study in the American
Journal of Psychology from 1997 found distinctive faces tend to be more easily recognized. If
your friend has a scar or a mole or a misshapen eye, like poor Sloth from the Goonies -- then
you'll immediately recall who he is -- more so than your twin friends -- who could be
hard to tell apart.
Another part of this, is task switching. We've talked before about the brain's inability
to multitask. When you're in conversation and someone you recognize, but just can't
QUITE place walks by, what happens? You stop talking. Your brain can't search its face
library and talk at the same time. A study in PlosONE from 2003, found attractive faces
tend to mess up this task-switching too. When you try to sneak a look at an attractive guy
in class, the brain turns off active listening in order to process the attractive face.
A new study published in the journal Neuropsychologia found similar results to the first, but measured
both recognition AND attractiveness. The researchers showed attractive faces to participants and
asked them to memorize them. Later they were asked to identify which faces they'd seen
before. Like in the first study, recognition got all wonky when both faces were similar
regardless if they were attractive. But, these new results reveal our brains are finding
uniqueness more memorable!
An imperfect face is more likely to contain a misshapen or out of line part. A certain
kind of nose, eye or mouth will set off something in our brain that serves as a cue to help
remember that face later.
Though, perhaps if you're pretty and have a beauty mark like Cindy Crawford, or a piercing
or a tattoo you now are more novel and easier to remember. Science needs to look into that
next.
Funnily enough, there were a lot of false positives in the study. When people saw attractive
people, they were more likely to say they'd seen that face before. Simply put, we want
to roll with the hotties.
Do you think you remember ugly faces or attractive ones more? There's a comment box down below
the video for a reason. Why not subscribe, and tell us what you think? Thanks for watching
DNews!