because we have dedicated neural hardware for faces -- the "fusiform face area", a relatively small volume of the brain which is used by non-autistic humans for facial recognition/processing. A lot of our sensitivity to human faces is neural structure that's in our DNA, and yes that does pair with a lifelong obsession over human faces to spend huge amounts of energy learning more about them. But after infant brain development we're not relying on a blank slate for human faces.

> One case study of agnosia provided evidence that faces are processed in a special way. A patient known as C. K., who suffered brain damage as a result of a car accident, later developed object agnosia. He experienced great difficulty with basic-level object recognition, also extending to body parts, but performed very well at recognizing faces. A later study showed that C. K. was unable to recognize faces that were inverted or otherwise distorted, even in cases where they could easily be identified by normal subjects. This is taken as evidence that the fusiform face area is specialized for processing faces in a normal orientation.