Masks mess with our brain's ability to recognize faces, but research suggests there is a silver lining Carly Thomas Nearly a year into the pandemic, remembering to grab your mask before walking out the door may be getting easier, but recognizing your neighbour, co-worker or third cousin when they're wearing one can still be a bit of a challenge. With so many people around the globe wearing masks regularly these days, "it's like the biggest experiment in face perception that was ever done," said Erez Freud, a cognitive neuroscientist at York University in Toronto. Freud and his co-authors recently published a study that found the human ability to recognize a face is reduced by about 15 per cent if the person has a mask covering their nose and mouth.