Thinking Behind Besty

Why Besty

What if your first feeling about a person, or a place, begins before thought?

Besty is built on the idea that human recognition may begin before language. Before we can explain why someone feels familiar, comforting, distant, magnetic, or wrong, the brain may already be responding to visible patterns of form, structure, and resemblance. Besty turns that hidden process into something visual, personal, and interactive.

With Besty, a new face is compared against your own private reference system. You begin with yourself, then add the people you think of as your Red Flags and your Bestys. When you scan a new face, Besty shows how closely that face aligns with each of those personal baselines through similarity scores. Over time, as users compare those scores with lived experience, Besty may help reveal which similarity patterns actually matter to them.

Besty Places extends the same philosophy to environments. People do not only feel something about other people. They feel it about places too. Some spaces calm us instantly. Some feel charged, unfamiliar, or deeply right the moment we enter them. Using a first reference environment as your personal baseline, Besty Places compares new environments against the place you already know feels right to you, measuring how near, far, or even more aligned a new place may be relative to that original comfort point. This is powered by Besty Places, a specialized segmented optical sensing technology that is now patent pending.

Besty does not tell users what a result must mean. It gives them a way to compare, observe, and reflect on patterns that may already exist in their own experience. The purpose is not to define people or places, but to offer a private and entertaining tool for exploration.. For those who want to think more deeply about why similarity, familiarity, trust, comfort, or caution can emerge so quickly, the research below offers context, not conclusions.

Selected research context

- Alvarez & Jaffe (2004), self-resemblance and assortative facial similarity

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470490400200123

- Bruno et al. (2013), self-resemblance in attractiveness judgments

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0068395

- DeBruine (2002), facial resemblance enhances trust

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/77812/

- DeBruine (2005), resemblance can increase trust while reducing romantic attraction in some contexts

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1564091/

- Garrido et al. (2014), rapid subcortical face processing and amygdala pathway

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4229499/

- McFadyen (2019), review of the rapid subcortical route to the amygdala