"Hackeando" el reconocimiento facial

Most people when they see the images experience some or all of the following:
a) it is very hard to focus your eyes to see the image clearly, it seems blurred.
b) the image is somehow "wrong" and disturbing
c) the image is very memorable and even when it "hurts to look at" you keep on looking at it for a while
d) there is some sort of emotional response: perhaps you hate it, can't stand it, perhaps you feel curious, you feel intrigued
e) some men even get the feel that the girl(s) in the image are quite attractive

 

Did you experience any of those?
Why does all of that happen then?

Those images mess up  the ability of a hierarchical neural network to match the image to a pattern it would already know.
The image forcibly causes a conflict between two logical layers in your brain. The "lower" layer is entirely assured and convinced that the eyes and mouths you are seeing are real eyes and mouths. They are in the right place (on a face) and they even might be pretty blue eyes, while the "higher" logical layer above the lower layer considers a wider and more broad meaning to the visual input; yes they might be real eyes and real mouths, but is the context right? is it a human face or an alien face?

The brain is a pattern matching machine. It tries to match signals into patterns and once it finds a pattern it will strongly stick with it and favor that pattern over those of any potential alternative patterns. The brain is also a  hierarchical neural network; meaning that when your eyes see sensory input, they don't know what it is that they are seeing. Only the higher levels of hierarchy match the patterns and later tell the eyes where to focus on; to look at a person's face if it's a person, to look at the text if it's a book, to look away if it's the sun.
Much of the brain's visual pattern matching is tied to the human face. Humans are very social and one of the most important aspects of social function is to recognize emotions, body language, expressions etc in other humans. Hence the brain is very much wired towards pattern matching in facial expressions, eyes, etc. Happy, sad, angry, scared etc - we can all read these emotions from just looking at a picture, or even better with looking at a real person who is displaying them on her face. The eyes see some sensory input and the higher hierarchical levels of our brains figure out the meaning, example; since her eyes are wider and more open than usual, eyebrows pushed forward and down a bit = she must be a bit angry. etc.

TaneLi