Poker in the News

In a study presented in the Dec. 12 advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience ("Discriminating emotional faces without primary visual cortices involves the right amygdala" Alan J Pegna, Asaid Khateb, Francois Lazeyras & Mohamed L Seghier), researchers suggest that people may be able to "read" people's emotions even when when their eyesight is poor.

The researchers describe a case of a man who had lost most of his vision due to damage from multiple strokes, making him blind and unable to detect movement or shapes. When they showed him pictures of emotionally expressive people's faces on a computer screen, he was able to accurately guess the expressed emotion more often than not--- even though he couldn't tell whether the face was even of a man or a woman.

Brain scans indicated that the part of the brain responsible for processing emotions was activated when he saw emotional faces.

Yeah... Well.... Umm... I wish that I had a little portable brain scanner, about the size of an MP3 player, so that I replay my brain activity and figure out what the hell I was thinking.
Why Your Poker Face May Not Work

Advance Online Publication of Nature Neuroscience