Human brain has a thing for faces

NASHVILLE, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Research at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University has found that the human brain easily remembers faces over other images and won't initially distinguish beauty.

Researcher Isabel Gauthier's studies have found that during the initial few seconds when the human brain recognizes a face, it ignores such concepts as attractiveness, the Nashville Tennessean reported.

Gauthier said that of all possible body parts, the brain is drawn to the face due to its interesting nature.

"As car experts can quickly identify models of cars by shape and birders can call out various species of birds using color, people watchers are drawn to faces," Gauthier said.

The study, which was co-authored by researcher Kim Curby, suggested that the brain can store more faces in memory than other images, and that memory is limited when those faces are upside-down.

"While our results suggest that because experience leads you to encode upright faces in a very efficient manner, when the faces are inverted, we're not so good," Gauthier said. "As odd as it sounds, when you turn the same face upside down, a lot of times we don't recognize it instantly."