Feb 26, 2007《紐時周報全文精譯》處處是臉孔 腦內乾坤大 ARE YOU LOOKING AT ME? A grilled cheese sandwich with an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary, sold for $28,000 on eBay. A pirogi, above, is said to bear the likeness of Jesus Christ. Faces can also be seen in a snow-covered view scope, the next, and a cinnamon bun that some describe as resembling Mother Teresa. Why the Human Brain Finds a Face Everywhere 王先棠譯 十幾年前，佛羅里達州好利塢市的黛安娜‧杜賽爾從某個極不尋常的媒介得到 宗教訊息：她親手做的一個烤起司三明治。她盯著麵包表面褐色的烤焦痕跡， 一張熟悉的臉突然映入眼簾。 More than a decade ago, Diana Duyser of Hollywood, Florida, received a religious message through an unlikely medium: a grilled cheese sandwich she had made herself. As she gazed at the brown skillet marks on the surface of the bread, a familiar visage snapped into focus. 2004年，她跟記者說：「我看見一張臉對著我看；聖母馬利亞注視著我。我驚 訝莫名。」 “I saw a face looking up at me; it was the Virgin Mary staring back,” she told reporters in 2004. “I was in total shock.” 杜賽爾將這個已不新鮮的聖物保存十年，擺上eBay拍賣，引發熱烈回響，三明治 最後以28,000美元拍出，顯示有人跟杜賽爾一樣，在這個理論上不可能出現臉孔 的地方發現臉孔。 After holding onto the stale relic for 10 years, Ms. Duyser put it up for sale on eBay, The auction generated so much excitement that the sandwich eventually sold for $28,000, proving that she was not alone in seeing a face where none should reasonably exist. 2006年底，臉孔又上了新聞頭條。歐洲太空總署的宇宙探測車「火星特快車號」 拍下火星表面賽多尼亞區截至目前最高品質的三度空間影像，發現一處貌似臉孔 的地形。這些照片再度點燃各國政府企圖隱瞞火星上出現智慧生物的陰謀論。 Such faces made headlines again near the end of 2006, when Mars Express, an orbiter from the European Space Agency, captured the highest-quality three-dimensional images to date of what looks like a face in the Cydonia region of Mars. The photos reignited conspiracy theories that governments on Earth are trying to hide the existence of intelligent life on Mars. 我們為什麼處處看到臉孔，包括月球表面、羅夏克墨漬測驗、漏油表面的干涉圖 樣？為什麼有些樂事洋芋片看起來酷似卡斯楚？為何一個與德蕾莎修女面容驚人 相似、外號「修女麵包」的肉桂麵包被納許維爾一家咖啡館擺在玻璃罩下保存多 年？ Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s potato chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun? 對腦部如何辨識與處理臉孔資料有全新認識的生物學家與電腦科學家，最近開 始提出一些頗具說服力的解答。 Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data. 早在聽聞黛安娜‧杜賽爾的烤起司三明治之前，德國不來梅大學神經科學家鄒 鳳就覺得，人類處理臉孔訊息的方式可能有別於處理其他物體。她猜腦部有個 優先處理臉孔形象的特定區域。 Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority. 鄒鳳博士說：「有些中風病患能清楚辨認臉孔之外的所有東西。因此我們開始 研究，腦部是否真有一塊專門辨識臉孔的區域。」 “Some patients have strokes and are then able to recognize everything perfectly well except for faces,” Dr. Tsao said. “So we started questioning whether there really might be an area in the brain that is dedicated to face recognition.” 鄒鳳博士用功能性磁振造影術記錄獼猴看到水果、小器具、不規則圖案與臉孔 時，腦部哪些區域會有活動。她很快發現，大腦顳葉裡三個區域的細胞群似乎 對臉孔有強烈反應。 Dr. Tsao used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record which areas of the brain were activated when macaque monkeys were presented with stimuli including fruits, gadgets, scrambled patterns － and faces. She discovered almost immediately that groups of cells in three regions of the brain’s temporal lobe seemed to be strongly attuned to faces. 鄒博士說：「第一天我們把電極接上去時，嚇了一跳。一個又一個細胞開始對 臉孔產生反應，對其他物體卻毫無反應。」她的研究成果發表於去年十月號 「科學」期刊。 “The first day we put the electrode in, it was shocking,” Dr. Tsao said. “Cell after cell responded to faces but not at all to other objects.” Her results were published in October in the journal Science. 鄒博士的研究帶來令人驚訝的相關發現：她找出對臉孔有反應的大腦部位，偶 爾也會對那些與臉孔僅有一點相像的物體產生反應。 Dr. Tsao’s investigation yielded a surprising related finding: areas of the brain she had identified as face-specific occasionally lighted up in response to objects that bore only a passing resemblance to faces. 她說：「不是臉孔的物體，也許有某些特徵會微弱刺激這些與臉孔有關的細胞。 如果相似程度超出某種範圍，猴子也許會以為看到臉孔。」 “Nonface objects may have certain features that are weakly triggering these face cells,” she said. “If you go above a certain threshold, the monkeys might think that they’re seeing a face.” 她說，如果肉桂麵包、露岩與雲層形狀與真正的臉孔相似度夠高，都可能啟動腦 部辨識臉孔的雷達。 In the same way, she said, objects like cinnamon buns, rocky outcroppings and cloud formations may set off face radar if they bear enough resemblance to actual faces. 麻省理工學院認知科學家帕萬‧辛哈費時數年，想找出哪些特徵會觸發這些臉孔 感應細胞。 Pawan Sinha, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has devoted years of research to figuring out just what attributes touch off these face-specific pings. 用來認出潛在的恐怖分子或偵測闖入者的保全軟體，必須要能準確分辨各種臉 孔。辛哈博士與同事教導這種軟體辨識臉孔時，無意間對人類有時把一個肉桂 麵包當肉桂麵包，有時把肉桂麵包當作神聖修女化身的現象有更深的瞭解。 Security software that is being developed for identifying potential terrorists or detecting intruders must be able to reliably recognize faces. In teaching the software to do this, Dr. Sinha and his colleagues have arrived at unexpected insights into the question of why we sometimes see a cinnamon bun as a cinnamon bun, and other times as the earthly incarnation of a sainted nun. 電腦蒐集各種臉孔資訊，可在幾乎所有存檔臉孔中找出重要的關聯，但在非臉 孔物體間就很難找到。辛哈博士說：「這些關聯其實很簡單，例如眼睛的顏色 總是比額頭深，嘴巴的顏色也比臉頰深。如果你把大約十二種關聯放在一起， 就會有一個用來辨識臉孔的樣板。」 As the computer amassed information on diverse faces, it was able to discover relationships that were of great significance to almost all faces, but very few nonfaces. “These turn out to be very simple relationships, things like the eyes are always darker than the forehead, and the mouth is darker than the cheeks,” Dr. Sinha said. “If you put together about 12 of these relationships, you get a template that you can use to locate a face.” 電腦偶爾會發出錯誤的辨識訊息。辛哈博士說：「這種情況和人類大腦的作用 可能很類似。大腦和電腦一樣，試圖找出這些臉孔中的規律現象，創造一種標 準形態。」 Once in a while, the computer emits a false alarm. “This is a good analogy for what the human brain might be doing,” Dr. Sinha said. “Like the computer, it’s trying to determine what the regularities are in all of these faces to create a prototype. 他說：「但這種標準形態並不完美，有時真的臉孔特徵與這些規律現象無法吻 合，有時非臉孔物體卻能滿足這些條件。」 “But this prototype is not perfect,” he said. “Sometimes genuine faces do not match these regularities, and sometimes nonfaces satisfy them.” 換言之，如果一頭混色乳牛身上的深淺斑點恰好符合我們心目中的臉孔形象， 我們可能就把這個巧合解釋成耶穌基督或瑪麗蓮夢露顯現。 In other words, if the pattern of light and dark patches on a brindle cow happens to correspond to our conceptions of what a face should look like, we may interpret the coincidence as a visitation from Jesus Christ or Marilyn Monroe. 波士頓大學神經科學家渡邊健夫說，人類在不同物體中發現臉孔的傾向源自神經 結構，但我們每天所見的大量真實臉孔，也可能多少促成「修女麵包」現象。他 在學習過程方面的研究也顯示，腦部受到頻繁刺激後，就算刺激物不在，大腦仍 會感受到這個刺激物。 While the human tendency to see faces in other objects is rooted in neural architecture, the large number of actual faces we see every day may also be partly responsible for the Nun Bun phenomenon, said Takeo Watanabe, a neuroscientist at Boston University. His studies of learning processes show that after the brain is bombarded with a stimulus, it continues to perceive that stimulus even when it is not present. 由於人們隨時隨地看到臉孔，人對臉孔的敏感度也高到足以持續產生錯誤的確認 訊息。這種對普通刺激的超強敏感傾向，也許代表一種生存優勢。 People have gotten so used to seeing faces everywhere that sensitivity to them is high enough to produce constant false positives. This tendency to become hyperattuned to common stimuli may represent a survival advantage. 渡邊博士說：「舉例來說，假如你活在原始時代，對老虎出沒非常敏感就是好事。」 “If you lived in primeval times, for instance,” Dr. Watanabe said, “it would be good to be very sensitized to tigers.” By ELIZABETH SVOBODA 原文中提到的一些圖片： http://0rz.tw/c02rX 原文參照 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/13/news/faces.php 關鍵字句 本文重點有二：腦（brain）與臉（face）。作者詳細探討人腦從各種物體發 現臉孔的可能機制（possible mechanism）。有趣的是，人類竟會在麵包這 種「不可能的媒介」（unlikely medium）上找到宗教形象（religious image）。 神經科學家（neuroscientist）與電腦科學家（computer scientist）一直在 研究大腦如何辨識與處理臉孔資料（how the brain recognizes and processes facial data），想對人腦有更深入的瞭解（gain new insights into the human brain）。 腦部的神經結構（neural architecture）非常複雜，不同區域（areas of the brain）各司其職，但是某些區域與臉部辨識關係密切（face-specific）。 雖然眼前的物體不是人臉，但是眼睛一看到形狀酷似卡斯楚尊容（the spitting image of Castro）的洋芋片或是和德蕾莎修女驚人相似的麵包（a bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa），就會觸動與辨識臉孔有關的腦部細 胞（trigger face cells）。 被刺激活化（activated）的細胞，會發出錯誤警告（emit a false alarm）， 接連產生偽陽性反應（produce constant false positives），把不太像人臉 （bear a passing resemblance to face）的東西也看成人臉， 恐怕是過度敏 感了（over sensitized ）。 本文開頭說，一位婦人凝視（gaze at）自製烤起司三明治時，一張熟悉的面容 突然浮現眼前（A familiar visage snapped into focus ）。我們也可以說， 經過高人指點，原本模糊不清的思緒瞬間有了焦點（Fuzzy thoughts suddenly snap into focus.）。 Snap這個動詞有「拍照按下快門」之意，你可以說，她拍了一張日出的照片（She snapped a picture of the sunrise.）。 本文第七段提到，不來梅大學的鄒鳳博士依稀覺得（have an inkling）人類辨識 臉孔的機制與辨識其他物體的機制不同。Inkling這個字，有模糊理解（vague understanding）之意，因此have an inkling與havea clue語意類似，都沒有達到 完全理解（complete understanding），仍處於研究探索（investigation）階段。 （王先棠） -- 趙客縵胡纓 吳鉤霜雪明 銀鞍照白馬 颯沓如流星 十步殺一人 千里不留行 事了拂衣去 深藏身與名 閒過信陵飲 脫劍膝前橫 將炙啖朱亥 持觴勸侯贏 三盃吐然諾 五嶽倒為輕 眼花耳熱後 意氣素霓生 救趙揮金槌 邯鄲先震驚 千秋二壯士 烜赫大梁城 縱使俠骨香 不慚世上英 誰能書閤下 白首太玄經 李白 俠客行 --

※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 139.223.28.55