t now she hasee bnn given something more difficult. so ere eha shs to make a f muchiner discrimination. she'gotheseargets which are theseli ttle circles with spokes. t all of these targets, arrar 6e 0 of them on here edemb edemb amongst a clutredd fiel of distcting information. and when you hav more competition, you get more neglect. so the greater the competition for selection, the less, the greater the inattention you find in these patients. >> and the definition of neglect here is the idea that it doesn't, it doesn't get your attention. >> yeah, that's right. >> indeed. >> it also makes thepoint that you made last time, how much relearn about the normal functioning of the brain. it's amazing. amazing. in fact, in the old days as you pointed out, all that we really knew of brain function came from these guys, clinical neurologists. no wonder we were in bad shape. >> rose: let me just talk about the relionship of this in some sort of globa global-- workspace. >> so what we know is the areas of the brain that are damaged in neglect involve usually the parietal cortex or the frontal cortex or the connections between these regions. and particularly in the right hemisphere, actually corresponding areas in the left hemisphere are involved in language in the human brain. but these areas are not only involved in selection, so if you get damage to these first areas you getroblems with attention and selection, but they are also the areas that have been implication-- implicated in conscious awareness. so this global workspace that eric was mentioning, you need to broadcast to the rest of the brain before things become aware. these areas were supposed to be those critical knows broadcasting that information, making thing things consciously aware to the brain. >> what i think is so wonderful about this is we had such a primitive understanding of the biological nature of consciousness even a decade ago. and we don't have a profound understanding now. but at least we're begin tolling understand not only aspects of normal consciousns but really subtle defects of consciousness. you can begin to think about them in biological terms. >> richard, this is where we ask toou help us undersnd exacy why faces are uniquend -- >> yeah, the question is what is special about a face. it is a pretty special thing that there are experiments that suggest that a newborn baby at the age of nine minutes will prefer to look at faces when shown pictures of things than other objects. nine minutes after birth. and at a year, will recognize itself in pictures. so it's quite a remarkable thing. i want to talkabout something that masud mentioned. that humans are visual beings. and when we start asking questions such as why, i think we need to go back to basic principleses. and of course for us that's charles darwin. now what darwin said was that we became adapted to our environment in order to feed and pro create. i abbreviate, of course. and the face people ofte forget san organ of communication quite apart from everything else. >> emotion. >> but also speech also the mere fact of kinship, knowing who is yr kin, who you are going to fight with in order to get to the food and so on. now of course these are very basic things but one can extrapolate them to a life of social beings. so the face is vital to social interaction. we are the most, one of the most especially attractive species around well. have an enormous visual cortex. about a third of our brain is involved in vision. and we are constantly doing it. to the recognition of faces is critical to us. there are various ways in which we can do it. some people are superexperts. they can pick out faces le that. others are very bad at it. here's a face, everyone recognizes there is a face. so a fis is a face. that's the very lowest level. >> yes. >> then yohave got tory and understand well what's happening in terms of recognizing that face as being a particular face so this is where the-- agnosia comes it in this is where some people find it extremely difficult even to recognize their own face in the mirror. and can't can be even be startled by the mirror when coming to shave. some people have defects which appeato be lying in between the sort of low level getting the first bit of information, tells you it's a face, and the processing which leads you to pick up an individual face. so they n be shown faces of family members and not recognize them. but if all the family members are put together, they can pick out individual familyembers. so the context changes the way that you perform. people with this condition from lesions are not common. and they often have other neurological disorders. they might have a bit of blanking out of a corner of space. they might not ceclors properly so they're getting information which is less rich than the rich information that mals ud was talking abt. so some of the information that gets taken away from this masse sense other manufacturing that comes in is perhaps being taken away successively by brain mechanisms, modules in the brain which are designed to help us recognize a face so this is a slide that you haveeen already on the left where you can quite clearically-- clearly see the face. on the right it quite difficult to see the face. you can see the vegetables. >> see, i would have said when you said this is a face, i would say no, it's not, it's a painting because i'm mortgage interested in the artificialiality, in many ways, then i am in the reality. >> rose: interting. well, are you making another interesting point. which might be worth inserting here. in the sense that i think we've got to understand that the vish sul-- doesn't record anything, the visual system doesn't record anything t is creating a visual reality. what is out there in physical space is not necessarily what our brain is creating. what our brain creates is an interpretation of physical space which going to give us the advantages, the evolutionary advantages which i was talking about. >> richard is also make noring point. if you look at this cup and i turn it upside down, you have no difficulty seeing it's a cup. that's not true for the face. it's the only object if you turn it you have sipe-- upside down you have difficult recognizing it, even if you are family you have difficulty recognizing subtle changes. >> it seems to be that the brain devotes more space to representing faces than any other object. it's extraordinary how much. you see all those patches at we discussed before so owsho oingfi to show you is a ort vide first. you need to look carefully there are two patches on both ses, indistinguishable. and there will be a sudden flash and then you ought to pick something out on the left side bet