Sophie: A Murder in West Cork - Netflix.

Exactly.

IB and Sophie had a landline, this was covered well in the West Cork podcast. They were on the old analog line so numbers called or the times were not logged on the phone system. I wonder how billing worked back then though? I seem to remember itemised bills in the late 80s.

Good points. No one seems very interested in identifying the man with MF, including AGS, DPP and GSOC. That leads me to suspect, assuming he exists, he is/was an official of the state in some capacity.

Thank you, this demonstrates my point nicely. The fusiform face area is adapted to recognise and attach emotional weight to faces. As the quotes you added show, this region is adopted by experts or connoisseurs to attach emotional weight to things they are particularly attached to. Obviously there is no evolutionary basis for a recognition area in the brain for cars or horses so the FFA is co-opted for this role. In ordinary people, it is used for face recognition and recall.

In this article, we present recent findings from studies on the neuronal mechanisms of face perception and recognition in the light of current theoretical models. Results from brain imaging (fMRI, PET) and electrophysiology (ERP, MEG) show that in face perception particular regions (i.e. FFA, STS, IOA, AMTG, prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex) are involved. These results are confirmed by behavioral data and clinical observations as well as by animal studies. The developmental findings reviewed in this article lead us to suppose that the ability to analyze face-like stimuli is hard-wired and improves during development.

Our data show that FFA activation is correlated on a trial-by-trial basis with both detecting the presence of faces and identifying specific faces. However, for most non-face objects (including cars seen by car experts), within-category identification performance was correlated with activation in other regions of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, not the FFA. These results indicate that the FFA is involved in both detection and identification of faces, but that it has little involvement in within-category identification of non-face objects (including objects of expertise).

A recent study showing experience is not necessary for the face specific region to develop, adding persuasive evidence that it is innate and genetically coded. This, along with evidence that prosopagnosia is hereditary, argue against face perception resulting purely from visual experience:

We show that visual experience is not necessary for face-selectivity to develop in the lateral fusiform gyrus, and neither apparently is a feature-based proto-map in this region of the cortex. Instead, our data suggest that the long-range connectivity of this region, which develops independent of visual experience, may mark the lateral fusiform gyrus as the site of the face-selective cortex

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/37/23011