] The subjects viewed alternating pictures of cars and
] faces, and asked them to compare each car to the previous
] car they saw and each face to the previous face.
]
] They found that the car fans used just one part of the
] brain to recognise the cars and the faces, taking just a
] fifth of a second to identify the cars.

This is interesting. If you care about something you develop highly efficient ways of identifying it which other people don't have.

] The subjects viewed alternating pictures of cars and
] faces, and asked them to compare each car to the previous
] car they saw and each face to the previous face.
]
] They found that the car fans used just one part of the
] brain to recognise the cars and the faces, taking just a
] fifth of a second to identify the cars.

Sp, because I can indentify cars in a split second... I am slower at identifying faces. Hmmm... Is this why nerds have such poor social skills? :) As new skills are tacked on, and neural nets are configured to deal with those tasks... the performance of nets that impart existing skills suffer? Das pretty coo.