Picking criminal faces from the minds of victims

Suppose a crime victim could offer a precise image of the criminal.

It may be possible.

According to Engadget, it is a surprisingly easy task for the brain to create a record of a face and it requires a mere 200 neurons to do so.

To determine how the mind performs this feat, scientists used monkeys and recorded which neurons fired and which didn’t when shown a set of pictures.  What they discovered is that the neurons weren’t responding to individual faces, but rather each neuron was responsible for recording a specific feature of every face it saw.

For instance, one neuron might fire for a dimple on the left cheek or a hooked nose. Using this data, the scientists were then able to recreate, with stunning accuracy, what a face looked like simply by observing how the neurons were firing.