Face to Face: The Special Ways of Our Social Minds and Brains

Humans and all primates are social. Our primate sociality is a special one: it centers around the face as an active interface of social communication and connects to social cognitive abilities that look deeper than the surface of the face. Understanding the complex brains that make this possible offers insights into our human nature, its origins and hope for treating the many disorders afflicting social behavior.

In this Presidential Lecture, Winrich Freiwald will discuss the organization and function of the social brain and its special connection to the face. From a network of brain areas in the visual system that is exclusively specialized to analyze faces to a network of areas that controls the movements of the face, primate brains have evolved specialized circuitry to support specialized social functions. The different functions of the social brain can now be traced through this specialized network, and Freiwald will take one such tour from the analysis of faces to the memory of people to high-level social cognitive functions. He will then discuss how these discoveries shape our understanding of our brains and minds.

Freiwald is the Denise A. and Eugene W. Chinery professor and co-director of the Price Family Center for the Social Brain at The Rockefeller University. He studied at the University of Göttingen and the University of Tübingen. He performed his graduate work at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and his postdoctoral work at MIT and Harvard Medical School before joining Rockefeller in 2018. His laboratory investigates the neural mechanisms of sociality and intelligence.