Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.
- Tennessee Williams –
With the easing of the lockdown happening globally, we are ever so slightly closer to entering “tomorrow’s world”… We might even already be in it. Everywhere around the globe, people and politicians are starting to accept that the post-COVID world should not be an exact copy of the pre-COVID world. During the past months, we have all learned about ourselves, learned about our ability to work from home (when applicable) or not, learned our limits at juggling 3 to 4 lives simultaneously (work, teaching the kids, personal, gym,…), learned about the benefits and the limits of the reducing contacts between individuals. We realised that some of our former practices were not the best for the planet (better late than never…) and people are starting to think about the way forward, which would include safe inter-individual contacts (necessary for our wellbeing and mental health) but limited globalised movements and other polluting emissions. It won’t be easy, but it sure will be worth it for the planet. I would like to talk about 2 aspects of tomorrow’s world today: limited globalised movements and face masks.
We’ve talked about it a couple of times already: humans have a need to be out and about. They have evolved a primal need to move, to be active, to explore new territories. Back in our prehistorical days, exploring new areas would increase chances to find food and would ensure the survival of the group. As time passed, people had to move around on multiple occasions to find more welcoming environments. Movement meant food. Food meant survival. Thus, we are meant to move. With the lockdown, the little Cro-Magnon inside us was definitely not happy: how were we supposed to stay indoors for an unknown period of time? Though, we did. Some countries had it easier than others with possibility to go outside for exercising, with or without established perimeters limiting the distance we could cover. The easing of the lockdown has allowed all to go back outside, timidly at first, and rediscover our surroundings. Cro-Magnon is happier. Not fully satisfied, but content. What little Cro-Magnon would really like is the possibility to explore new territories, varied environments, exotic spaces.
An American team of researchers have identified why little Cro-Magnon would want that: exploring new areas, full of colours and varied shapes, improves our wellbeing. We feel good when we discover new places. And that is due to a strange connection in our brain: our internal GPS talks to our reward centre. The hippocampus is the area of our brain responsible (among other things) to log all our movements and is responsible to know where we are at every given time. It is the area that allows you to find your way back home from the shop and provides you with a more or less accurate sense of direction. It is tasked to remember every place we’ve visited and path we’ve taken. It is your very own internal GPS. For some of us, the connection is better than for others, which provide those lucky connected individuals with a better ability to find their way around, even in unfamiliar places. As soon as we step foot outside our home, our hippocampus activates our GPS and when we visit varied places, it activates our reward centre: the striatum. The striatum is the brain region that releases feel-good hormones and gives us pleasure when we eat, when we watch a nice movie, when we have sex… and when we move around. For our brain, movement, discovery and travel is like food, love and good wine: a source of pleasure humans are meant to seek out.
With the easing of the lockdown, we will all need to think carefully and find a balance between our desire to move around and the need to limit (globalised) trips, for both sanitary and environmental reasons. Lucky for us, the brain is highly plastic and has an incredible adaptative ability: by moderating the number of trips and movements we are having, we will be able to reduce our need for it. It would be an opportunity for people to discover the hidden beauty of their homeland, rather than looking for it half-way across the globe.
What about face masks? Face masks are most likely to become a must in public places. With the COVID pandemic, people have become aware of the immunological risks we are exposed to in our daily lives. Flu season might be marked by a required wearing of face mask; public transports might be accessible only when wearing face masks; face masks might be everywhere. As much as I fully support the sanitary reasons behind such decisions, I have spent the last 5 years of my life studying facial expressions. The little scientist inside me is a little bit concerned by the apparition of a new mandatory accessory which will hide half the face away. While I agree that some people have very expressive eyes, most facial expressions are based on the lower face. Most emotional states are expressed with the lower face or the lower face helps differentiate between two emotional states that are expressed very similarly in the upper face (we need to look at the mouth to differentiate anger and disgust most of the time for example). Not to mention the fact that we have a brain region fully dedicated to remembering faces by using the global morphology of faces: the fusiform gyrus.
The fusiform gyrus, or fusiform face area, is able to distinguish between millions of faces. It is the fusiform face area that will tell you whether 2 faces represent the same individual or 2 different persons. This little guy is basically what made us successful as a cooperative species, when we had to know who was who, who we previously interacted with, and who was part of our group. Each human face is characterised by a unique structure; the distance between the chin and the base of the nose, the shape of the nose, the space between the eyes, the shape of the eyes, the shape of the ears, the size of the ears…. A single face has its unique combination of all its element that makes it special and different from all others. And our fusiform gyrus can see that. When we successfully recognise a face, our brain actually gives us dopamine (one of the feel-good hormones) to reward the fusiform gyrus because being able to remember and recognise faces has played a vital role in our societies.
What would happen then if half the information we used to recognise and analyse faces was hidden away by a nice face mask? It is hard to predict at the moment, but I don’t think anything good would come out of it. Or it might. Let’s think about it.
One the one hand, our fusiform face area might struggle greatly to recognise faces hidden behind face masks and end up being useless. The main consequences of such deprived facial environment might be seen in children: kids are born with a half-functional fusiform face area that needs to be trained by being exposed to many faces and receiving feedback from their parents (“remember such and such? You met them before”, “come meet Malcom X”). Children growing up in a post-COVID world might end up with an under-used fusiform gyrus.
On the other hand, because our brain is super plastic, children of all ages (yes, that includes you) might develop other ways to recognise people. In the absence of facial information, we might start relying more on the voice to identify people, their gait, their haircut or even their clothes. We have a lot to learn from prosopagnosics (i.e., people suffering from prosopagnosia = face blindness) for who faces have always all look the same.
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