By IANS
New York : We remember some faces and places because of our genes, says a new study that shows how such skills are linked to our genes.
Researchers at the University of Michigan studied two groups of twins – identical twins having identical genes and fraternal twins who were not genetically identical.
Each twin watched a series of faces, places such as houses, objects such as chairs, and pronounceable nonsense words such as “banrat” flash onto a computer screen.
They pressed a computer key if they saw the same image pop up twice. Meanwhile, the scientists scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The brain scans showed that during the test, brain activity patterns were more similar among identical twins than fraternal twins when the twins recalled faces and places, but not objects or made-up words, online edition of health magazine WebMD reported.
“Genetics do play a crucial role” in remembering faces and places, write University of Michigan’s Thad Polk and his colleagues.
Evolution may have carved the ability to recognise faces and places into the genes, Polk’s team suggested in The Journal of Neuroscience.