Are things what they seem? Can you tell a book by its cover? Does the face reveal the heart? Does your appearance give you away?
It does indeed, says brain researcher Yuji Ikegaya, writing in Shukan Asahi.
Your deepest secrets are written all over your face. Why otherwise, he asks, would the human brain be as sensitive as it is to faces? Sensitivities evolve because they're useful, meaningful. When you look at a face and think to yourself, "He's trustworthy; she's weird; he's a gentle, fatherly sort," you won't always be right, but you will be often enough, researchers increasingly believe, to give the lie to King Duncan's observation in Shakespeare's "Macbeth": "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face."