There is no limit to the number of faces the human brain can learn.
People know an average of 5,000 different faces.
Around 3,000 are people you have met, while the remaining 2,000 are famous faces.
There appears to be no limit to the number of faces the human brain can learn.
Dr Rob Jenkins, the study’s first author, said:
“Our study focused on the number of faces people actually know- we haven’t yet found a limit on how many faces the brain can handle.
The ability to distinguish different individuals is clearly important — it allows you to keep track of people’s behaviour over time, and to modify your own behaviour accordingly.”
For the study, 25 people wrote down all the people they knew, including family, colleagues and those they went to school with.
Then they did the same for famous faces.
People were also shown thousands of pictures of celebrities.
The results showed people knew between 1,000 and 10,000 faces each.
Dr Jenkins said:
“The range could be explained by some people having a natural aptitude for remembering faces.
There are differences in how much attention people pay to faces, and how efficiently they process the information.
Alternatively, it could reflect different social environments-some participants may have grown up in more densely populated places with more social input.”
Dr Jenkins continued:
“It would be interesting to see whether there is a peak age for the number of faces we know.
Perhaps we accumulate faces throughout our lifetimes, or perhaps we start to forget some after we reach a certain age.”
Related
- Your brain has an automatic ‘trust detector’ that evaluates faces in milliseconds.
- People find it harder to recognise the faces of people from another race than their own.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Jenkins et al., 2018).
