Cambridge (ddp). For a honeybee man not the same person is: despite their very simple brain insects can distinguish individual human faces – a skill that was thought capable of only mammals with their complex central nervous system. The discovery, which has made an international team of researchers in a study with trained bees, is again doubts about the theory, that there is a nonfunctional specializing in facial recognition in the human brain. Christa Neumeyer report on their work from the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz and her colleagues in the journal «Journal of experimental biology» (vol. 208, S. 4709). Until recently it was regarded as certain that in humans a nonfunctional called «informally face area» (FFA) to the perception of faces is specialized. For this talk including a significantly increased activity in the FFA when viewing faces, in contrast to other objects and a strongly impaired face detection in case of damages in this nonfunctional. A few years ago a study was however doubt on this theory: Darin, scientists have shown that the FFA is active even when, for example, an ornithologist at a bird or a motor vehicle valuation a car. The results of the team to Neumeyer put into question the theory of the highly specialized reproduces, but show them that face detection works even without a complex brain. The scientists had to fly their test bees again and again to a vessel with sugar water which was before the photo of a face. In fact, learned the insects in the course of time, to associate this face with the reward and chose the familiar of four offered faces preferred. Even when the researchers removed the sugar water and also an unknown’s animals in addition to the famous face, the bees flew to unerringly on the familiar image. Apparently, the bees, whose Gehirn of about had fewer neurons than that of the person can easily individual faces tell apart and they also days later still recognize, close the researchers. However it is this mechanism probably not to the same kind of face detection, found in humans: bees have a very good memory for pattern, which, for example, allows them to keep apart different flower types. As in humans, the quick and accurate identification of a face plays an important role in the social environment, human faces to bees are therefore “only really strange looking flowers», as it puts the zoologist James Gould in a comment.