From birds to brains: My path to the fusiform face area (2024) (kavliprize.org)

Nancy Kanwisher recounts her unconventional, often serendipitous path into cognitive science and brain imaging, beginning with her early exposure to field biology and experiments in Norway. She describes setbacks in graduate training and then a breakthrough through the perceptual phenomenon of “repetition blindness,” before eventually gaining access to PET imaging and later fMRI equipment at Harvard’s Martinos Center. Using fMRI to compare face and object processing, she and her collaborators worked out how to identify consistent face-selective responses across different brains, a step toward characterizing the fusiform face area.