Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: not too long ago, Robert and I did an episode
Speaker 1: about prosopagnosia, or the condition often known as face blindness. Now,
Speaker 1: we discussed a little bit in the episode how that
Speaker 1: is kind of a misnomer because it's not so much
Speaker 1: blindness but an inability to recognize and and recall familiarity
Speaker 1: with faces in the same way that that most people can,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, Like, this was something that was kind
Speaker 1: of a challenge and coming up with landing page art
Speaker 1: for that episode because they didn't want to go with
Speaker 1: a Hannibal like face of like faceless specter kind of
Speaker 1: an image. What I ended up doing is picking one
Speaker 1: where you had an individual with a pixelized face, because
Speaker 1: I felt like that granted with faceblinness or not seeing
Speaker 1: a pixelized face, but they it is more in line
Speaker 1: with a distortion of sensory data and inability to to
Speaker 1: correctly identify somebody based on this particular area of sensory information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it implies scrambling of matching. Yeah, So this was a
Speaker 1: really interesting topic to me, and I was glad we
Speaker 1: did an episode on it. But I knew in the
Speaker 1: episode since one of the figures we came across was
Speaker 1: that multiple studies have done surveys and found that somewhere
Speaker 1: around maybe between one and three percent, usually estimated around
Speaker 1: two percent of the general population has some level of
Speaker 1: developmental prosopagnosia. So one in fifty people you can expect
Speaker 1: are going to have some level of trouble recognizing faces
Speaker 1: within the normal range of human ability. And what this
Speaker 1: meant is, well, we've got to have tons of listeners
Speaker 1: who have some form of face blindness. So we asked
Speaker 1: in the episode if anybody wanted to share their experience
Speaker 1: as well. We heard from a lot of you. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: And like you said, we knew we were going to
Speaker 1: get sense some listener feedback here, but I guess I
Speaker 1: wasn't really prepared for just how many, because essentially the
Speaker 1: the episode I think aired on a Thursday, and so
Speaker 1: the entire weekend was just but mostly emails from listeners
Speaker 1: who have some degree of face blindness. Oh, I'd say
Speaker 1: by sometime on Friday, I think we'd heard from at
Speaker 1: least a dozen people, but they just kept coming in.
Speaker 1: So we we do have to say that we're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to get to all of the
Speaker 1: messages we got from everyone who got into contact with
Speaker 1: us about face blindness or related topics. Some people reported, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, similar related ideas that I think would also
Speaker 1: be fun to discuss. But today we wanted to read
Speaker 1: some of these messages and talk about what what ideas
Speaker 1: get brought up in them, and also relate back to
Speaker 1: some other some other follow up research. Yeah, and since
Speaker 1: all the emails today are about face blindness, I took
Speaker 1: the liberty of of taking out our mail bot, Carnie's
Speaker 1: facial recognition software. So now he is going to identify
Speaker 1: Joe and me purely by by smell and by touch.
Speaker 1: Which one of us is the rough one? I'm going
Speaker 1: to leave that to Carney. Carney is going to develop
Speaker 1: his own a smell and touch profile for each of us.
Speaker 1: This this may be disgusting, t M. I I think
Speaker 1: I'm just getting over my my gross like alligator winter hands.
Speaker 1: I can't like really dried out in my knuckles. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: only I had cut myself shaving this morning, which sometimes
Speaker 1: I do I sometimes they come into the podcast studio
Speaker 1: and I'm still bleeding um from the neck. That would
Speaker 1: have actually helped Carney out quite a bit, I think. Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully at least Carney can hand messages to one or
Speaker 1: the other of us in either way they'll get read
Speaker 1: right and and he may since none of it, neither
Speaker 1: of us is bleeding, he might make an incision on
Speaker 1: one of us, just to keep track, So just be
Speaker 1: prepared for that. Okay. Our first message is from our listener, Lindsay,
Speaker 1: who writes in and says, hello, Robert and Joe. I
Speaker 1: just finished listening to your episode about face blindness. I
Speaker 1: could relate a lot to the bits about Oliver Sacks.
Speaker 1: Much of what he said was familiar, even if I
Speaker 1: hadn't realized it before hearing your show. I've often wondered
Speaker 1: if I have face blindness, but then usually dismiss myself
Speaker 1: as a hypochondriac and tell myself it's because I'm not
Speaker 1: paying enough attention to my surroundings that I can't recognize
Speaker 1: people or place as well. Professionally, I'm an artist, so
Speaker 1: you just assume about yourself that you must be good
Speaker 1: at observation, right, So why can't you remember if you've
Speaker 1: met someone before. It's a confusing situation to be in.
Speaker 1: I pay a lot of attention to the slope of
Speaker 1: people's noses, clothing styles, or their mannerisms to help me
Speaker 1: rely on recognition. Auditory cues and context are also very useful.
Speaker 1: The problem is much less pronounced with people I see frequently,
Speaker 1: whereas a passing acquaintance or celebrity is much harder. It's
Speaker 1: also difficult to visualize people's faces as a whole in
Speaker 1: my mind. Sometimes I can zero in on features about
Speaker 1: them or expressions, but my mental image of their face
Speaker 1: is often somewhat blurry. It's odd because I have a
Speaker 1: very good memory for other things. I'm also directionally challenged.
Speaker 1: If I park my car to walk to a specific restaurant,
Speaker 1: I often forget which way I need to walk to
Speaker 1: get there, and so I look for queues like how
Speaker 1: close I am to the end of the street and
Speaker 1: how far I remember the restaurant being from the end
Speaker 1: of the street, or I'll hope to see a distinctive
Speaker 1: tree or building I know is across from the place
Speaker 1: I'm going to. The issue seems exacerbated if the streets
Speaker 1: look very similar. If they're all flat and straight at
Speaker 1: right angles to one another, it's hopeless. I frequently forget
Speaker 1: where I park in parking lots and have learned to
Speaker 1: notice the angle I need to walk to the front
Speaker 1: door of a store to get back to my car,
Speaker 1: a sign that is in line with the row I
Speaker 1: parked in, or I'll park in a similar location every
Speaker 1: time I visit it. I've never been diagnosed with prosopagnosia,
Speaker 1: so take all this with a grain of salt. I
Speaker 1: wonder what percentage of people actually get diagnosed or just
Speaker 1: explain away the whole situation I do with theories of
Speaker 1: early memory loss or a short span of attention for
Speaker 1: my surroundings brought on by the age of instant gratification. Regardless,
Speaker 1: I hope this was insightful best. Lindsay, that was very incifle.
Speaker 1: I especially appreciate, uh finding out that that that Lindsay
Speaker 1: is an artist. Yeah, and uh, and about how there's
Speaker 1: this sort of expectation that they would have perfect observational skills. Now,
Speaker 1: we actually heard from more than one person who reported
Speaker 1: having some degree of face blindness and reported being a
Speaker 1: professional artist. I think we heard from I think at
Speaker 1: least three people like this. Now, we do, I think,
Speaker 1: tend to have a lot of artists out in the audience.
Speaker 1: We hear from them often. Um, but yeah, I think
Speaker 1: this is really interesting. I was reading a totally different
Speaker 1: story that was published and wired back in two thousand
Speaker 1: six by a writer named Joshua Davis about prosopagnosia, and
Speaker 1: he profiled a bunch of people and one of the
Speaker 1: people he discussed with prosopagnosia was this guy named Tom
Speaker 1: in the story. And one interesting feature of mom was
Speaker 1: that Tom was an artist and he loved doing sketches
Speaker 1: of people of his friends and family. But when he
Speaker 1: drew people, they didn't have faces. And he didn't think
Speaker 1: this was weird because he thought, you know, I'm identifying
Speaker 1: the people in the pictures, and they're identified by their
Speaker 1: posture and things like that, why do they need faces?
Speaker 1: Another person might look at those drawings and think, oh,
Speaker 1: that's kind of creepy. That's like, you know, drawing people
Speaker 1: without faces, like something out of the ring or something.
Speaker 1: But like, uh, but no, I mean it made sense
Speaker 1: to him, and you can see why it would if
Speaker 1: you are cataloging people by visual cues other than the
Speaker 1: minute differences in the arrangement of eyes and nose and
Speaker 1: mouth and stuff that comes so naturally to most people,
Speaker 1: you know it. I have to think of it in
Speaker 1: terms of of writing too, Like one might easily jump
Speaker 1: through the conclusion, oh, well, you uh you write fiction. Uh,
Speaker 1: you must have just a great grasp of of human
Speaker 1: psychology and character, or or you must have just you know,
Speaker 1: uh fu too graphic memory of the world around you
Speaker 1: so that you can uh describe it, um, you know,
Speaker 1: on the page. But you know, obviously there are a
Speaker 1: number of different You look at any any writer and
Speaker 1: compare them to another writer, and they're going to have
Speaker 1: a different degrees of focus in detail on say a
Speaker 1: physical setting, or even on you know, character and internal dialogue.
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to say that some writers may
Speaker 1: write about people because they don't have some sort of
Speaker 1: spectacular insight into how they work, and maybe they're mystified
Speaker 1: by people, and therefore like this is their way of
Speaker 1: trying to really dissect it and figure out what's going on. Well,
Speaker 1: to go back to a similar episode we've done in
Speaker 1: the past, when we did an episode on a phantasia
Speaker 1: the Blindness of the Mind's Eye, The lack of inner imagery.
Speaker 1: We heard from lots of listeners who they said, I
Speaker 1: have a fantasia and here's what it's like. And we
Speaker 1: heard from more than one writer of fiction who who
Speaker 1: lacked uh inner maagory. And you might think, like, how
Speaker 1: can you write a story if you can't picture a
Speaker 1: scene in your head? But they did, And in fact,
Speaker 1: you might imagine how some people who don't picture scenes
Speaker 1: in their head could have other ways of organizing information
Speaker 1: in their brains that actually could lend themselves very well
Speaker 1: to crafting narration. Yeah, yeah, I could see where it
Speaker 1: would be a strength in some cases, because I feel
Speaker 1: like in my own writing, oftentimes I'll have to such
Speaker 1: a crystal clear image in my head of what a scene,
Speaker 1: should you know, look like in the mind's eye, and
Speaker 1: I'm chasing that and it's an exercise of chasing that
Speaker 1: mental image and making the paper replicated. And if I
Speaker 1: were not chasing that specific image, then then it would
Speaker 1: be a different exercise, but perhaps one that is more
Speaker 1: in line with reaching the reader. Yeah. If you start
Speaker 1: with the visual image of a scene and then you
Speaker 1: try to put that visual image into writing for the reader,
Speaker 1: your writing is actually a second generation copy of what
Speaker 1: you've imagined. It's like a vh AS copy of a
Speaker 1: copy or not a copy of a copy of the original.
Speaker 1: But the person who has a fantasiation and imagines a
Speaker 1: scene in words to begin with, the reader is actually
Speaker 1: getting the original copy of the imagination. Yeah, it really
Speaker 1: turns everything on its head. Yeah. No. One more thing
Speaker 1: I want to mention before we move on to the
Speaker 1: next email is that, obviously Lindsay is expressing what a
Speaker 1: lot of people express, which is uncertainty. Right, do I
Speaker 1: meet the criteria for having face blindness? And do do
Speaker 1: I really have face blindness? Or am I just sort
Speaker 1: of at the lower end of the normal spectrum for
Speaker 1: recognizing faces. Obviously, we're not psychiatrists or neurologists. We can't
Speaker 1: diagnose you for you, but there are tests that you
Speaker 1: can just take on the internet that give you some
Speaker 1: indication of whether you might have a clinical case of
Speaker 1: face blindness now or Again. Absolutely not suggesting that you
Speaker 1: come to a conclusion about this just based on a
Speaker 1: test on the internet. You should talk to a medical professional.
Speaker 1: You should see a psychiatrist or neurologist. But I think
Speaker 1: these tests can at least give you a better starting
Speaker 1: place for considering whether it's worth bringing up. One example
Speaker 1: would be the twenty item Prosopagnosia Index, which is by Shaw, Gall, Sodan, Bird,
Speaker 1: and Cook. It was published on a domain called Trouble
Speaker 1: with Faces dot org, and you can look this up
Speaker 1: if you want, the twenty item Prosopagnosia Index, and it
Speaker 1: includes questions like the following. Do you find it noticeably
Speaker 1: easier to recognize people who have distinctive facial features? This
Speaker 1: came up in the last episode, you know, the distinctive
Speaker 1: mustache or the mole or something like that. Do you
Speaker 1: often mistake people you've met for strangers when people change
Speaker 1: their hairstyle or wear hats. Do you have problems recognizing
Speaker 1: them without hearing people's voices? Do you struggle to recognize them?
Speaker 1: Do you have anxiety about face recognition that has led
Speaker 1: you to avoid certain social or professional situations? Here's a
Speaker 1: key one we've seen reported a lot. Do you ever
Speaker 1: find it hard to follow movies because of difficulties recognizing characters?
Speaker 1: Is it hard to recognize familiar people when you meet
Speaker 1: them out of context? For example, meeting a work colleague
Speaker 1: while shopping and then another really interesting one, is it
Speaker 1: sometimes hard to recognize yourself in a photograph? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think those are. That's a great starting place for some
Speaker 1: degree of self diagnosis, um be, because if you're like me,
Speaker 1: you probably match up with at least one or two
Speaker 1: of those things. You can say, oh yeah, when I
Speaker 1: encounter people out of context, if I don't know them
Speaker 1: very well and they just completely blank on who they are,
Speaker 1: I wonder to what extent you can have maybe not
Speaker 1: a clinical case of face blindness, but but have face
Speaker 1: recognition expertise significantly increase or decrease throughout life. Because I
Speaker 1: feel like I can look at items on this list
Speaker 1: and think these used to be much more true of
Speaker 1: me than they are today. I remember when I was younger,
Speaker 1: like when I was a kid, I would sometimes watch
Speaker 1: movies and have a lot of trouble following who the
Speaker 1: characters were. I'd get people mixed up, not be able
Speaker 1: to recognize people from one scene to another. And for
Speaker 1: some reason, as I got older, that stopped being a problem.
Speaker 1: But I wonder, I wonder how that would have Do
Speaker 1: you think that might have occurred just through obsession? Through
Speaker 1: because I have session with movies? Yeah, Because I feel
Speaker 1: like like like like you and I have this in
Speaker 1: common where we we we probably devote far too much
Speaker 1: a space in our minds to cataloging character actors in
Speaker 1: in uh in B movies. Um, but you know that's
Speaker 1: not something that just occurred overnight. Like that is the
Speaker 1: accumulation of years upon years of you know, wasting our
Speaker 1: time on intermittent movie database and seeing these films. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like it's the case even for
Speaker 1: unfamiliar actors. But I don't know that is a good question.
Speaker 1: I again, I'm I'm not suggesting that any point I
Speaker 1: had anything like a diagnosable case of face blindness, because
Speaker 1: a lot of these other criteria don't ring true to
Speaker 1: me at all. But I remember it being the case
Speaker 1: in movies in the past for me, and not the
Speaker 1: case anymore. So. One takeaway from that is, even though
Speaker 1: you shouldn't diagnose yourself on an internet test alone without
Speaker 1: seeing a medical professional, you definitely shouldn't diagnose yourself just
Speaker 1: based on the answer to one question. All right, here's
Speaker 1: one for us. This comes to us from Theodore. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I saw today's episode and knew it was gonna be awesome.
Speaker 1: I have a mild sort of face blindness that works
Speaker 1: in some weird ways. I was actually surprised to you
Speaker 1: guys didn't reference your episode on the Theater of the Mind.
Speaker 1: That would be the A Fantasia episode um more, because
Speaker 1: I have always felt my own version of face blindness
Speaker 1: is very similar to that. When I see people I know,
Speaker 1: I actually do not struggle to recognize them too much,
Speaker 1: but my ability to picture people's faces is what is impaired. Strangely,
Speaker 1: I have also noticed that I have an inverse relaationship
Speaker 1: between how well I know someone and how well I
Speaker 1: can picture their face. For example, Robert, I have seen
Speaker 1: you in some YouTube videos and online. Your face I
Speaker 1: can pull up fairly easily. However, my mother, who I
Speaker 1: have known my whole life, I really struggle to picture
Speaker 1: her face. That's interesting. I work as a parker coach
Speaker 1: and personal trainer in my career. The face blindness has
Speaker 1: I think actually helped me. Since I do not naturally
Speaker 1: use facial clues as much, I have developed a natural
Speaker 1: affinity to pick up on people's body movements. This makes
Speaker 1: recognizing various movement patterns very easy. I can identify a
Speaker 1: person by their collapsed arch long before their nose shape.
Speaker 1: I have never experienced the problems of spatial awareness, you
Speaker 1: guys that also mentioned I have always had a pretty
Speaker 1: good sense of direction. Training Parker for seven years has
Speaker 1: only enhanced that I can look at a space for
Speaker 1: a few minutes and later recall it in exacting detail.
Speaker 1: Thanks for another great episode THEO. Now, as we talked
Speaker 1: about originally, these associated condition such as like having a
Speaker 1: difficulty with identifying geographical locations or spatial topography, that's not
Speaker 1: always associated with face blindness, but it does seem to
Speaker 1: be somewhat covariant, you know. And I also can't help
Speaker 1: but wonder about the difference between saying, say, seeing my
Speaker 1: face online for seeing his mother, mother's face, like the
Speaker 1: face of one's mother or another close family member. Is like,
Speaker 1: there's just so much more data there, so much more
Speaker 1: situational data, uh changing data over time. Is that individual
Speaker 1: ages and goes through various uh you know styles even
Speaker 1: but for like the host of a podcast, like, how
Speaker 1: much visual data is there? Really? And it's there and
Speaker 1: it's limited. It's not personal data. It's what a few
Speaker 1: varying headshots over the course of a decade, a few
Speaker 1: videos you've caught here and there with very similar lighting.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't sound that surprising to me. I mean,
Speaker 1: I must say I'm surprised by it is really interesting. Um,
Speaker 1: I see what you're saying, though, Like you might have
Speaker 1: an easier time picturing something that there is a more
Speaker 1: uniquely identifiable source for if you've just seen it once,
Speaker 1: then something that you've got a lot of data you're
Speaker 1: trying to average. Though that sounds like that would not
Speaker 1: fall under like normal face processing. That does sound unusual
Speaker 1: to me. But I wonder if there is a distinctive
Speaker 1: difference between essentially remembering a photo of a person and
Speaker 1: remembering that person's face, you know, because because like when
Speaker 1: I when I think back on say, people I've known
Speaker 1: that that have passed on, um, you know, I can
Speaker 1: recall their face pretty clearly, But I I second guess
Speaker 1: myself more sometimes about the details, uh, as opposed to
Speaker 1: say a picture, say a famous Hollywood actor from you know,
Speaker 1: the ninety forties or something I can picture. I can
Speaker 1: picture Clark Gable like that, and I really don't have
Speaker 1: any difficult culty in bringing to mind, at least the
Speaker 1: most prominent headshot of Clark Gable in my mind. But
Speaker 1: would you recognize Clark Gable without a mustache? I might not,
Speaker 1: that's the thing, But I but that, Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: have so much there's just so much less data than
Speaker 1: I'm calling upon. I'm basically remembering probably I'm probably remembering
Speaker 1: his IMDb or Wicked profile picture. You know. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: does make you wonder if they're actually different sort of
Speaker 1: subsets of categorization pathways within the brain for different classes
Speaker 1: of faces. Do do we class famous faces any different
Speaker 1: than we class personally familiar faces? Do those operate differently
Speaker 1: or do we use the same architecture for both? Take
Speaker 1: Michael Fassbinder for instance. Alright, always an interesting face to
Speaker 1: look at, always a joy to watch him act, or
Speaker 1: an agony, depending on the part. But he rarely looks
Speaker 1: me in the eyes. And when he does look me
Speaker 1: in the eye, when he does look at the camera, uh,
Speaker 1: I know that I am looking at essentially an object.
Speaker 1: He cannot he cannot view me back. There's no social
Speaker 1: exchange there. Not just because he's playing a robot. Not
Speaker 1: just because he's playing a robot and it's maybe a
Speaker 1: pie zombie, but no, but because I mean, obviously this
Speaker 1: is an overstatement of the obvious, but he cannot see me.
Speaker 1: This is not I am. I am observing him as
Speaker 1: a voyeur. This is only tangentially related to the subject.
Speaker 1: But it does make me think of a study on
Speaker 1: the Thatcher illusion. Uh So, Robert I included some images
Speaker 1: here of this wonderful thing. If you never heard about
Speaker 1: the Thatcher illusion before, you can't just listen to us
Speaker 1: describe it. You have to, whenever you get the opportunity,
Speaker 1: go and look up what this looks like. The Thatcher
Speaker 1: illusion is this principle first detective by Thompson in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty and it's defined by the authors of a studio
Speaker 1: and I mentioned just briefly and plos one from sixteen
Speaker 1: by Huts and Carbon, And it's defined by these authors
Speaker 1: as the case where quote participants instantly perceive an upright
Speaker 1: face with inverted eyes and mouth as gre task, but
Speaker 1: fail to do so when the face is inverted. So
Speaker 1: if you take a normal face you flip the eyes
Speaker 1: and the mouth upside down on it. It is incredibly revolting.
Speaker 1: And that we're not just talking about the eyeballs themselves,
Speaker 1: but this also involves the eyebrows and the eyelashes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but if you do the exact same So if you
Speaker 1: turn a do the exact same thing, but with the
Speaker 1: face upside down. So you turn the face upside down
Speaker 1: and then again rotate the eyes and the mouth upside
Speaker 1: down relative to the face. You can't tell any difference
Speaker 1: between that and a normal face, So they look almost
Speaker 1: exactly the same unless you really study hard. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you're just if you're just inverting the the eyes and
Speaker 1: the mouth, the character looks like a demon. Otherwise you're
Speaker 1: just like, oh yeah, now that same faces upside down.
Speaker 1: You have to really look at it to notice that
Speaker 1: there's something altered altered there. But this study in particular
Speaker 1: was trying to see how does this work with familiar faces,
Speaker 1: And the example they used was famous faces, because you
Speaker 1: can general account on people to be familiar with very
Speaker 1: famous faces. But they were trying to see if familiarity
Speaker 1: with faces might play a role in the speed of
Speaker 1: processing these types of images, and they found what they
Speaker 1: were looking for did not hold. Participants in this study
Speaker 1: were not any faster at processing grotesque inverted eyes and
Speaker 1: mouth on famous faces, though the authors say it might
Speaker 1: have been different if they'd used personally familiar faces rather
Speaker 1: than famous faces. They acknowledge that that could be a
Speaker 1: flaw in their their study design. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: while not faster, participants were more accurate quote in deciding
Speaker 1: if famous faces were grotesque or not when they were inverted,
Speaker 1: probably due to better knowledge of what the people look
Speaker 1: like when presented normally. And in interpreting this, they say
Speaker 1: quote altogether, famous faces seemed to be processed in a
Speaker 1: more elaborate, more expertise based way than non famous faces,
Speaker 1: whereas non famous inverted faces seemed to cause difficulties in
Speaker 1: accurate and sensitive processing. And that's in listening to me
Speaker 1: because of the invocation of generalized expertise in the different
Speaker 1: kinds of face recognition, and it recalls the studies we
Speaker 1: mentioned in the original Face blind this episode by Isabel
Speaker 1: Gauthier and her colleagues showing that expertise in recognizing objects
Speaker 1: like birds or cars, non face objects, recruits processing from
Speaker 1: this region of the brain, the fusiform face region, which
Speaker 1: is the one we think of as the key to
Speaker 1: allowing primary facial recognition. Alright, on that note, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back we'll do
Speaker 1: some more listener mail. Thank thank you, thank you, alright,
Speaker 1: We're back. Alright. Our next listener mail comes to us
Speaker 1: from Emily. Emily writes, Hey, guys, big fan of the show,
Speaker 1: first time sending listener mail. Feel free to use my
Speaker 1: story in listener mail on the show with first name
Speaker 1: only if you find it interesting. We do, so we're
Speaker 1: using it. Emily says, I didn't realize it for many years,
Speaker 1: but I think I have had a relatively mild but
Speaker 1: still noticeable case of face blindness for my whole life.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say I have old blown face blindness, but
Speaker 1: I think my facial recognition processing software works somewhere below average.
Speaker 1: Besides taking me forever to get into TV shows because
Speaker 1: I have a hard time keeping characters straight. The first
Speaker 1: season of Game of Thrones was tough. It has caused
Speaker 1: me mild embarrassment more than a few times, a handful
Speaker 1: of which I will recount here. One I started a
Speaker 1: job in high school, working at a bustling office, and
Speaker 1: on either the first or the second day, I realized
Speaker 1: that I couldn't recognize my manager, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: she had just hired and hired me and onboarded me.
Speaker 1: People were on their feet for most of the day,
Speaker 1: so I couldn't just go back to her office and
Speaker 1: check because she wasn't there. She was a middle aged
Speaker 1: woman who looked sort of like the other middle aged
Speaker 1: women in the office, and I simply could not recognize her,
Speaker 1: no distinguishing characteristics. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone
Speaker 1: who she was because I thought it would make me
Speaker 1: look really stupid. Two during college, I came home on
Speaker 1: a break and ran into a tall, bearded man wearing
Speaker 1: a beanie while I was in own. I gave him
Speaker 1: a weird look when he came up to me and
Speaker 1: started talking to me, until I realized it was my
Speaker 1: own brother, who had not had a beard the last
Speaker 1: time I saw him a few months earlier. Three. A
Speaker 1: few months ago, I was preparing to give testimony at
Speaker 1: a hearing at the Statehouse for work. There were a
Speaker 1: few dozen people also in the audience. A man in
Speaker 1: a suit sat down next to me and started talking
Speaker 1: to me as if he knew what I was going
Speaker 1: to comment on. I was a little freaked out, and
Speaker 1: I asked him if we'd met before. Immediately he said
Speaker 1: who he was and who he worked for. It turned
Speaker 1: out he was someone who I had met several times
Speaker 1: and corresponded with regularly via email for work. I did
Speaker 1: not recognize him wearing a suit and in a situation
Speaker 1: where I wasn't expecting to see him. I was extremely
Speaker 1: embarrassed and told him I had quote some face blindness,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure if he believed me. I was
Speaker 1: nervous about the possibility that he would tell my boss
Speaker 1: about my faux PAB, but I don't think he did,
Speaker 1: and nothing ever came of it. I told several people
Speaker 1: about the last incident, and they all thought it was
Speaker 1: really weird. This makes me feel like I probably have
Speaker 1: some degree of actual face blindness rather than just being
Speaker 1: a near average level of forgetful. I have an easier
Speaker 1: time recognizing people by their voices and physicality like gate
Speaker 1: posture or gestures, so I try to rely on that
Speaker 1: as well as physical characteristics that stand out a lot,
Speaker 1: at least until I get to know people better. I
Speaker 1: need to have several face to face interactions with people
Speaker 1: before I will be able to recognize them reliably. Not
Speaker 1: sure if this qualifies as any form of prosopagnosia, but
Speaker 1: I thought you might like to hear about it. I
Speaker 1: enjoyed the episode on the topic keep up the great work. Well, Emily,
Speaker 1: I'd say again, don't take our word as a as
Speaker 1: a medical diagnosis, but it sounds like you're describing some
Speaker 1: of the classic indicators that are included on these inventories. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I found a tidbit about Game of Thrones particularly interesting
Speaker 1: because I could see where that would be confusing because
Speaker 1: it's essentially, uh, just a whole bunch of scruffy white
Speaker 1: dudes that you have to keep track hop right, Um,
Speaker 1: and they're they're not necessarily like dressing in ways that
Speaker 1: Q is all that distinctive to us, right, A lot
Speaker 1: of them are just wearing furs and leather and stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: one uh television series mini series slash movie that that
Speaker 1: I would be very interested to hear someone with face
Speaker 1: blind this comment on is the adaptation of the Mahabarata
Speaker 1: that came out in nine nine from Peter Brooks. This
Speaker 1: is an excellent retelling of the of the Hindu epic. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he did an interesting thing with the casting and
Speaker 1: said he cast each key character in the saga with
Speaker 1: a different international actor, So all their characters are from
Speaker 1: different races, they have different accents, uh And and of
Speaker 1: course they're all um outstanding stage actors, so they have.
Speaker 1: They tend to have very distinctive facial features as well.
Speaker 1: But I wonder how someone who has difficulty with faces
Speaker 1: and has difficulty with something like Game of Thrones would
Speaker 1: process something like this adaptation. Well, yeah, it seems like
Speaker 1: if you have a more diverse cast that would help
Speaker 1: with like keeping the characters straight. I should also say,
Speaker 1: don't be afraid to have every character in your film
Speaker 1: or TV show, uh, feature a different hair color. Don't
Speaker 1: stop it just the usuals either, Like just throwout some pink,
Speaker 1: some some blue, whatever you need to do to get
Speaker 1: the job done. Have a space turn and everything. All right.
Speaker 1: Here's another one. This one comes to us from Ben
Speaker 1: Hi Rob and Joe big Fan here from London, UK.
Speaker 1: I just finished listening to the episode on prosopagnosia and
Speaker 1: felt compelled to write in as it happens, my sister
Speaker 1: has prosopagnosia and didn't even realize it until a few
Speaker 1: years back. It's funny you mentioned Jane Goodall in the
Speaker 1: episode two, because I met her once when living in
Speaker 1: Beijing and brought it brought up her prosopagnosia with my
Speaker 1: sister and it was then that something clicked for her.
Speaker 1: We both completed a series of facial recognition tests online,
Speaker 1: where I scored about average thirty two out of fifty
Speaker 1: or thereabouts, while my sister scored precisely zero. She says
Speaker 1: she's had it forever but didn't realize it was an
Speaker 1: actual condition. She can always recognize myself and other close
Speaker 1: family members, but she says she remembers other people by
Speaker 1: their hairstyle or other defining features. If these features change,
Speaker 1: such as suddenly shaving your head, she won't recognize them
Speaker 1: next time they meet, especially if they meet accidentally somewhere. Also,
Speaker 1: her job means she has to continually travel around while
Speaker 1: holding events, and she always has people coming up to
Speaker 1: her and addressing her by name. Her cheats for dealing
Speaker 1: with this is to just reply hey man, buddy, sir,
Speaker 1: dude with a smile and buy some time to try
Speaker 1: and work out who they are. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: prosopagnosia is on a sliding scale, but my sister hasn't
Speaker 1: had any massively detrimental consequences from having this condition. She
Speaker 1: just says faces are all the same and she's developed
Speaker 1: a killer bluffing ability in social situations. Anyway, fascinating condition
Speaker 1: and serendipitous episode. Keep up the great work. Well, thanks
Speaker 1: for getting in touch, Ben, Yeah, that's interesting. We had
Speaker 1: talked in the episode about ways that often when somebody
Speaker 1: has some kind of neurological impairment or some limited ability
Speaker 1: in one way, other neural systems will kick in to compensate. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing we talked about with people with prosopagnosia is
Speaker 1: that often if you have trouble recognizing faces, you can
Speaker 1: become hyper aware of other types of body cues Like
Speaker 1: you mentioned gate posture, all those kinds of things. You
Speaker 1: notice those far better than a person with normal facial
Speaker 1: recognition skills would. But I hadn't thought before about how
Speaker 1: other compensation skills could kick in apart from perceptive and
Speaker 1: recognition based ones like bluffing ability. I mean, that is
Speaker 1: a cognitive skill that I I know, like, I would
Speaker 1: not be good at that, But I wonder if I
Speaker 1: had had to spend my entire life honing that skill,
Speaker 1: I might be a very different person. I might be
Speaker 1: much better at, like trying to figure things out on
Speaker 1: the fly based on little conversational cues about how to
Speaker 1: get to a name Yeah, I mean it's interesting to
Speaker 1: to just think about how un adapted one would become
Speaker 1: to working around these different blockages. Yeah, by the way,
Speaker 1: fun fun at Joe. I actually cannot tell A C.
Speaker 1: D C songs apart. I like them when I hear them,
Speaker 1: but to me, it's it's all the same. It's like
Speaker 1: the faces for Ben's sister. What about the A C,
Speaker 1: D C songs that have distinctive markings. Um, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess lyrically, like if if I'm if I hear
Speaker 1: it and they hit something in the chorus, then yes,
Speaker 1: I could maybe tell by the lyrics, but I definitely
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to tell by the music. Even though
Speaker 1: again I like the music, it just all kind of
Speaker 1: sounds the same to me. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: rock songs that sound the same. I mean the same
Speaker 1: way that. Broadly speaking, there are only so many ways
Speaker 1: you can arrange a couple of eyes and nose in
Speaker 1: a mouth. There're only so many ways you can do
Speaker 1: four chords. In general. Comments on machismo, It's kind of
Speaker 1: like if you look at the hair metal bands of
Speaker 1: the eighties and nineties, certainly a lot of that music
Speaker 1: is going to sound the same UH. To really differentiate them,
Speaker 1: you do have to go on visual clues, right or
Speaker 1: but the bands all look the same. Yeah, you do
Speaker 1: run into a problem there. Then you have to look
Speaker 1: at what kind of fonts they used in their UH
Speaker 1: in their band name. Okay, there you that becomes the
Speaker 1: determining factor, all right. Our next email comes from our
Speaker 1: listener Jeff. Jeff writes, I've always had profound face blindness,
Speaker 1: but was an adult before I knew such a thing
Speaker 1: was well a thing. There's a subjective problem. Brains and
Speaker 1: perception are first person. What's it like to be Jeff?
Speaker 1: For me? As a young child, I was amazed by
Speaker 1: other kids they had this ability to instantly recognize people.
Speaker 1: As an older child, I realized with a sinking feeling,
Speaker 1: that it was not some magic they had, but a
Speaker 1: deficit I had. And I tried to recognize people. I
Speaker 1: look hard at features and try to mentally map them
Speaker 1: without avail. I recollect, feeling depressed that I just couldn't
Speaker 1: try harder. I did learn to know my friends by
Speaker 1: their particular behaviors, especially gates and profiles. I got good
Speaker 1: at this as a child. There is the help of
Speaker 1: fairly regular dress, so there was the friend who wore
Speaker 1: turtleneck shirts and one who always wore dress pants and
Speaker 1: never jeans. Red hair being uncommon in my group was
Speaker 1: a cue, but it was always hard. In context was
Speaker 1: the major aid I knew if I went to a
Speaker 1: particular house, my friend, maybe his sister, and maybe one
Speaker 1: of his friends might be there. Always when I controlled
Speaker 1: the context through meetings, I was okay. Parties were stifling,
Speaker 1: as was the quote greater world, as anyone could be anybody,
Speaker 1: it presents his social shyness introversion, or conversely as being
Speaker 1: aloof or stuck up at failing to properly greet folks
Speaker 1: strangers abound. Recognition in another person's eyes is fear, and
Speaker 1: I learned the etiquette of an enthusiastic, nameless, neutral greeting.
Speaker 1: I could go on about it, I mean, my late
Speaker 1: fifties and still deal with it. My personal doctor chided
Speaker 1: me the other day when I apparently had not greeted
Speaker 1: her as she walked her dog. Context my sister, visiting
Speaker 1: from out of town, appeared at a bookstore and says hi,
Speaker 1: with no wreck cognition from me. Context lots can be
Speaker 1: done with paying attention to characteristics other than faces, builds, hair, gait, voice,
Speaker 1: and other subtle idiosyncrasies. I like to think it's made
Speaker 1: me notice such things and have a better, if somewhat
Speaker 1: narrower attention. It doesn't bother me much these days. Here's
Speaker 1: the only message I can offer. Kids who have this
Speaker 1: don't know it. This is what it's like to be Jeff.
Speaker 1: Parents likely have no clue. It's really hard to characterize
Speaker 1: and know that there's anything odd to report. If a
Speaker 1: deficit has noticed, it may very well be misattributed to
Speaker 1: some other problem with social skills, intelligence, or even autism.
Speaker 1: I found out about it on my own as an adult,
Speaker 1: learning about it from reading about the mind and brain.
Speaker 1: It would have been nice if young Jeff could have
Speaker 1: been told that it really was a thing. I think
Speaker 1: Jeff makes some really good points here. I mean, it
Speaker 1: seems like there could be profound benefit from just increasing
Speaker 1: awareness of this. Yeah, like I could, I can see
Speaker 1: how this You could start folding this in to um
Speaker 1: to some of your educational efforts with with young kids.
Speaker 1: You know that there you could have story books about
Speaker 1: this that that people are going to process the world
Speaker 1: around them in slightly different ways. Yeah. I even I
Speaker 1: found a study about the psychosocial consequences of prosopagnosia from
Speaker 1: the Journal of Psychosomatic Research from two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: by Lucy Yardley at all and basically, this looked at
Speaker 1: the psychological and social consequences of living with developmental prosopagnosia.
Speaker 1: It consisted of telephone interviews with twenty five people who
Speaker 1: scored as face recognition impaired on the Cambridge Face Recognition Test,
Speaker 1: and the results were that all participants described recurring social
Speaker 1: problems caused by their inability to recognize faces, and this
Speaker 1: led to consequences like chronic anxiety about offending people, feelings
Speaker 1: of guilt, embarrassment, failure. Of course, there's nothing to feel
Speaker 1: guilty about, right, but people felt bad like they were
Speaker 1: doing something wrong by not being able to recognize people
Speaker 1: bill Most, but not all, reported feelings of like having
Speaker 1: avoided social situations, including work meetings and social gatherings because
Speaker 1: of fear they had about their inability to recognize faces.
Speaker 1: And this could lead to all kinds of problems in life.
Speaker 1: Right like you, you could end up dependent on help
Speaker 1: from others or with a restricted social circle, or cause
Speaker 1: problems with your opportunities and employment, or it could undermine
Speaker 1: yourself confidence. And a pretty good remedy for this is,
Speaker 1: like we're saying, increasing awareness and increasing awareness in both directions, right,
Speaker 1: Like making people aware that this is a condition that
Speaker 1: might be present in other people, and that they should
Speaker 1: try to be helpful in accommodating with somebody who doesn't
Speaker 1: recognize your face is not necessarily because they're aloof for
Speaker 1: their rude and you should judge them that this might
Speaker 1: just be something that they don't have the same ability
Speaker 1: that you have at And then the other side would
Speaker 1: be making people aware that they might have the condition
Speaker 1: and helping increase diagnoses of people who have it so
Speaker 1: they can can explain the situation to other us and
Speaker 1: avoid these kinds of misperceptions. Yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of it does come down to um to
Speaker 1: sort of informing your empathy, informing your theory of mind
Speaker 1: so that you're not just duplicating your basic mind state
Speaker 1: when you're trying to to figure out how another person
Speaker 1: is viewing the world. All right, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take another break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll hit some more listener mail than All right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So this one comes to us from Hugh. Hugh rights
Speaker 1: in and says, hey, guys, I'm a longtime listener, even
Speaker 1: if I have no idea about most of your sci
Speaker 1: fi references. Oh well, we appreciate that. Well, that's okay.
Speaker 1: We try not to include so many that it it
Speaker 1: makes it difficult for for non sci fi fans, non
Speaker 1: horror fans, or what have you to follow the episode.
Speaker 1: I hope we don't fail too hard at that. Uh.
Speaker 1: Hugh continues, I've just heard your episode on face blindness.
Speaker 1: I think I may have the opposite of this. When
Speaker 1: I see a complete stranger in the street, I think
Speaker 1: it's someone I know. I'm typing this on the train
Speaker 1: and I saw a guy who I thought was my
Speaker 1: old housemate from years ago. Of course it wasn't him.
Speaker 1: I tend to group faces into sets. The guy on
Speaker 1: the train had all the facial mannerisms of my housemate.
Speaker 1: I instantly thought it was him. It's more specific than
Speaker 1: just crop red hair and glasses. The problem is, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty outgoing. When I see someone who has all the
Speaker 1: facial mannerisms of someone I used to know, like my
Speaker 1: friend's brother I met once, I'll go over and say hi,
Speaker 1: often to my wife's embarrassment. I guess I'm just good
Speaker 1: at spotting averagely accurate doppelgangers. Anyway, while in my eyes
Speaker 1: you both look like many other people. Uh, in my ears,
Speaker 1: nobody makes a podcast like this. Keep up the great work.
Speaker 1: Hugh from Sydney. Oh, thanks, Hugh. Uh. You know this
Speaker 1: got me thinking too about this in a number of
Speaker 1: emails about uh, the other information that one can process
Speaker 1: to identify an individual. And I wonder we did and
Speaker 1: so much on faces that I imagine other people have
Speaker 1: had the situation as well. Where you are you're almost
Speaker 1: certain you see someone you know, but their positions so
Speaker 1: that you cannot see their face. Perhaps you're in an
Speaker 1: exercise class, or you're seated formally, you know, in a
Speaker 1: theater or a restaurant, and you can't. But but you
Speaker 1: have this feeling that you cannot be for sure unless
Speaker 1: you have some unless you see their face, unless you
Speaker 1: have essentially facial confirmation of the individual. Uh. And it's
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to feel because then when they finally
Speaker 1: look your way, you're like, oh, yeah, that was of
Speaker 1: course them. I knew it was them, but I could
Speaker 1: not deal. I was sure until I actually saw them
Speaker 1: and even made eye contact with them. So we had
Speaker 1: this recently when we were in New York at the
Speaker 1: One Strange Rock Front, when I from behind was eight
Speaker 1: nine percent sure that this that this guy with the
Speaker 1: cane with the skull on the end was the magician
Speaker 1: and skeptic James Randy, but I could be positive. It
Speaker 1: took us a while to confirm. Yeah, yeah, But I
Speaker 1: have that happened with just people I know or people
Speaker 1: that I don't know super well. But say I I
Speaker 1: go to some of the same like social functions with them,
Speaker 1: and if I can't see that face, there's just like
Speaker 1: I I can't stop thinking about it, like I I
Speaker 1: have to see their face. And that's where it can
Speaker 1: get awkward if it's on the train and you're in
Speaker 1: that situation where you've just looped them more or less
Speaker 1: into the category of individuals like this, and then you're like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna go look at this person's face.
Speaker 1: And then you look at them and it's a complete stranger,
Speaker 1: and then you feel like you're a stalker. That is
Speaker 1: a bad feeling. Indeed, now, following up from what Hugh said, again,
Speaker 1: I want to be very clear that we are not
Speaker 1: trying to offer diagnoses of people based on their emails,
Speaker 1: so you should not take this as a medical diagnosis.
Speaker 1: It is not, but what you're describing does sound like
Speaker 1: it's sort of matches a known condition I think we
Speaker 1: mentioned in the original episode known as hyper familiarity for
Speaker 1: unknown faces or h FF, and just to talk about
Speaker 1: a quick study on this published in Plos one called
Speaker 1: neurofunctional signature of Hyperfamiliarity for Unknown Faces. The definition is
Speaker 1: that quote. It is a rare selective disorder that consists
Speaker 1: of the disturbing and abnormal feeling of familiarity for unknown faces,
Speaker 1: while recognition of known faces as normal. So it's not
Speaker 1: that you can't recognize people. You can recognize people normally,
Speaker 1: but you're also constantly recognizing people who are not the
Speaker 1: people you think they are. So this was a case
Speaker 1: study of g N who is a sixty eight year
Speaker 1: old woman with selective hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces, and the
Speaker 1: authors did a multimodal brain imaging study on what happened
Speaker 1: when she saw and recognized or did not recognize familiar
Speaker 1: and unfamiliar faces that use CT scanning and f m
Speaker 1: r I together with behavioral measures to to see what
Speaker 1: was going on, and behaviorally, she had essentially much lower
Speaker 1: discrimination sensitivity between familiar and unfamiliar faces and normal controls.
Speaker 1: And in light of this lower discrimination, basically her brain
Speaker 1: was biased toward classifying faces as familiar. So what was
Speaker 1: actually happening in the brain? While the authors say that
Speaker 1: there appeared to be atrophy and low functioning of the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere temporal regions, so the left side of the
Speaker 1: brain is underperforming compared to what it would normally be
Speaker 1: doing and in recognizing faces. And then at the same time,
Speaker 1: quote hyperfamiliarity feelings were selectively associated with enhanced activity in
Speaker 1: the right medial and inferior temporal cortices. So it looks
Speaker 1: like the face recognition process involves regions of both the
Speaker 1: left and the right hemisphere and that they do different
Speaker 1: things there. If the left hemisphere is underperforming, the right
Speaker 1: hemisphere takes over and contend to over bias in favor
Speaker 1: of saying, hey, I know this person now. Why would
Speaker 1: there be this hemisphere division? Well, the authors write that
Speaker 1: the temporal areas of the left hemisphere are you usually
Speaker 1: used to analyze and encode unique facial features, whereas the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere tends towards a quote more global but less
Speaker 1: efficient encoding of facial traits. So it sounds like the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere is more often used to encode and react
Speaker 1: to a kind of general impression of a face, whereas
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere tends to pick out specific identifiers and
Speaker 1: features for higher accuracy, And so the authors write that
Speaker 1: quote the greater reliance on the right hemisphere therefore facilitates
Speaker 1: spurious feelings of familiarity and misattribution of personal relevance to
Speaker 1: unknown faces. These erroneous familiarity feelings cannot be counterbalanced or
Speaker 1: corrected by more precise associations in the left hemisphere between
Speaker 1: visual facial cues and specific knowledge pertaining to a unique identity,
Speaker 1: and therefore lead to a liberal decision criterion concerning face
Speaker 1: familiarity recognition. And in addition to just being the fact
Speaker 1: that Hugh seems to be describing something to describing some
Speaker 1: degree of hyper familiarity of faces, it also goes along
Speaker 1: with what he's saying about grouping faces into sets of
Speaker 1: kinds of faces. If if what's going on in his
Speaker 1: brain is that he might be over relying on the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere uh to sort of like get these general
Speaker 1: impressions of faces and under relying on the specific unique
Speaker 1: characteristics that more accurately identify a face. All right, now,
Speaker 1: here's our next two or rather interesting because they both
Speaker 1: relate to migrains and face blindness. I found these particularly fascinating.
Speaker 1: This one comes to us from Amelia. Hi, guys, I'm
Speaker 1: just listening to your podcast about prosopagnosia or face blindness,
Speaker 1: and when you mentioned other types of agnosia, you mentioned
Speaker 1: finger agnosia, which was very interesting to me. I have
Speaker 1: suffered from migraine headache since I was a teenager, and
Speaker 1: one of the first symptoms I get of an imminent
Speaker 1: migrain is that my hands look like someone else's. You
Speaker 1: know how normally, when you're doing something, you can see
Speaker 1: your hand ends, but your brain doesn't really pay much
Speaker 1: attention to them, a bit like your brain seeing your
Speaker 1: nose all the time but ignoring it. Well, when I'm
Speaker 1: about to have a migraine and see my hands, it's
Speaker 1: like I'm seeing someone else's hands doing whatever it is
Speaker 1: they are doing. My brain is obviously still controlling them
Speaker 1: and they are doing what I'm asking them to do,
Speaker 1: but there is some kind of disconnection in the brain
Speaker 1: that doesn't recognize them as my hands. I am very
Speaker 1: interested in all the symptoms of migraines due to my
Speaker 1: own personal experience of them and the weirdness of it all.
Speaker 1: But I had never heard of anyone else having this.
Speaker 1: Hands aren't my own symptom that I get, it's all.
Speaker 1: It also doesn't seem to affect any other part of
Speaker 1: my body, just my hands. In contrast to this, I am,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell when comparing myself to friends,
Speaker 1: above average at recognizing faces. Just thought you'd be interested
Speaker 1: in this weird symptom I have with best wishes, Amelia. Now, Amelia,
Speaker 1: that is really interesting and we we will address that
Speaker 1: right after. We also read this email from our listener Ross,
Speaker 1: who also brought up my rains in migraine. Aura Ross writes, Hey,
Speaker 1: Joe and Robert, my name's Ross. I'm a new listener
Speaker 1: to your program and I found that it's perfect for
Speaker 1: working on art too. I'm an illustrator and an animator,
Speaker 1: and I love to put on your show while I'm
Speaker 1: working on projects. Here's another artist. Your last show about
Speaker 1: face blindness was super interesting and hit close to home
Speaker 1: for me. While I don't suffer from prosopagnosia in the
Speaker 1: sense that you talked about. I do, however, suffer from
Speaker 1: complex migraines. While experiencing a migraine episode, I will have
Speaker 1: a whole slew of neurological symptoms before the pain even starts.
Speaker 1: This phase of the episode, I've come to understand it's
Speaker 1: called the migraine aura, and while it's a pretty trippy experience,
Speaker 1: it's a good way to know whether I should find
Speaker 1: a dark and quiet place to lie down before the
Speaker 1: real fun stuff starts. My aura symptoms include blind spots,
Speaker 1: mental fog, numbness in my face and hands, and, strangely enough,
Speaker 1: something close to prosopagnosia. Over the years, I've noticed that
Speaker 1: while I'm having aura symptoms, I'm temporarily unable to visualize
Speaker 1: specific faces in my mind's eye, or even recognize my
Speaker 1: friends and family if they're in front of me. Though
Speaker 1: I can't see much of anything with the blind spots.
Speaker 1: It's rather disconcerting, especially since so much of my profession
Speaker 1: relies on drawing faces. However, after about an hour and
Speaker 1: a half, all the symptoms will go away and the
Speaker 1: headache will start. I thought it was interesting when you
Speaker 1: brought up the caricature artists, wondering if any have face blindness.
Speaker 1: While my face blindness is always temporary, I always regain
Speaker 1: my pretty uncanny ability to recognize faces. I'm one of
Speaker 1: those people who has a knack for recognizing actors with
Speaker 1: no lasting damage. My artistic abilities are also unimpacted by
Speaker 1: my occasional bouts with migrains, and I find that, if anything,
Speaker 1: I'm better at observing faces, knowing what it's like not
Speaker 1: having that ability. I'm nowhere near savvy enough to research
Speaker 1: why this may be. But hey, you could do a
Speaker 1: show on migrains. Loved the show and I look forward
Speaker 1: to hearing the next one. Now, that was really fascinating.
Speaker 1: I I've I don't think we've ever done a proper
Speaker 1: episode of stuff to blow your mind on migrains and effects,
Speaker 1: but we should, because I'm always amazed and new when
Speaker 1: I stumbled upon information about it. Yeah, and Amelia and Ross,
Speaker 1: you should know that the things you describe are in
Speaker 1: fact represented already in the medical literature. So I was
Speaker 1: able to find at least a couple of studies mentioning
Speaker 1: things like this. There was a study in two thousand
Speaker 1: six by sand Or at all in Cephalagia, which is
Speaker 1: a pure viewed medical journal about headaches. That was a
Speaker 1: case report of a fifty eight year old left handed
Speaker 1: man who reported prosopagnosia in association with migraine aura, so
Speaker 1: he'd get the migraine aura and he'd lose his ability
Speaker 1: to recognize faces. There was another study from two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: also in Cephalagia, by Vincent and Haji Khani, and this
Speaker 1: was about how migraines have the power to in fact
Speaker 1: affect all kinds of cortical physiology and induce all kinds
Speaker 1: of dysfunctions. So the authors questioned people who had migraine
Speaker 1: with aura and migraine without aura, and they found that
Speaker 1: seventy two point two percent of migraine with aura patients
Speaker 1: and forty eight point six percent of migraine without or
Speaker 1: A patients had symptoms including at least some of the
Speaker 1: following prosopagnosia, dis chromatopsia, which is the inability to see
Speaker 1: some colors or some general impairment of color vision, and
Speaker 1: then also ideational apraxia, which is defined as quote loss
Speaker 1: of ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute motor actions involving
Speaker 1: the use of tools or objects, so suddenly like you
Speaker 1: couldn't use a screwdriver or a knife for something. This
Speaker 1: next one might be very applicable to Amelia alien hand syndrome.
Speaker 1: Multiple people report alien hand syndrome as a result of
Speaker 1: migraine aura or migraine without aura, and this would, uh,
Speaker 1: this would be basically what Amelia is describing, the feeling
Speaker 1: that a hand you have is not in fact your
Speaker 1: own hand. And also difficulty recognized, recognizing and and calling
Speaker 1: to mind proper names. So this to me also really
Speaker 1: makes it seem like it would be worthwhile to cover
Speaker 1: migraines and migraine aura in general in an episode that
Speaker 1: they can have such why ranging effects throughout the brain. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: I think we should definitely come back to it. And
Speaker 1: also I mean we we know we're going to have
Speaker 1: a large selection of listeners who have stories about about
Speaker 1: migraines and migraine auras to report. Uh, in fact, you
Speaker 1: can maybe we should just ask people to go ahead
Speaker 1: and emails about those migraines and symptoms that you encounter
Speaker 1: so that we can have those ahead of the episode
Speaker 1: we wind up doing on it. All Right, we have
Speaker 1: one last bit of listener mail to hit before we
Speaker 1: sign off for today. Uh doesn't mean that these will
Speaker 1: be the only face blindness emails that we read. When
Speaker 1: we get around to doing our next listener mail episode,
Speaker 1: we may have some more that we roll out as well,
Speaker 1: in addition to unrelated emails. But this one comes to
Speaker 1: us from Kyle. Kyle says, Hey, guys, big fans, Stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind is my favorite of your podcast selection.
Speaker 1: Keep up the awesome work. So this is kind of odd,
Speaker 1: but after listening to your episode on face blindness, you
Speaker 1: would have mentioned other agnosis such as finger and hand
Speaker 1: blind no, and thought this would be a funny story.
Speaker 1: I've recently been getting into virtual reality with the HTC Vibe,
Speaker 1: which is in itself incredibly mind blowing. But after my
Speaker 1: first month with the headset, and it's a convincing replacement
Speaker 1: of reality, I completely lost awareness of my hands. I
Speaker 1: was spending so much time and environments where your hands
Speaker 1: were invisible that my brain retrained itself. Apparently, for maybe
Speaker 1: a month, I couldn't associate my hands in the real
Speaker 1: world with my own. I felt like someone else's hands
Speaker 1: waving in front of my face. I guess this maybe
Speaker 1: falls under body dysmorphia or phantom limb phenomenon, but possibly
Speaker 1: but it may relate to finger agnosia. Anyways, it was
Speaker 1: a crazy experience. It apparently happens to a lot of people.
Speaker 1: I was worried for so long, but it eventually wore off.
Speaker 1: Take care of guys. Kyle, Well, that is interesting. I
Speaker 1: had not heard anything of this before, and I know
Speaker 1: we have a number of listeners who are really into
Speaker 1: virtual reality these days, so I would love to hear
Speaker 1: from other folks who have had strange occurrences with invisible hands.
Speaker 1: I have seen four demonstrations of the way that perception
Speaker 1: and just general perceptual stimuli can change your relationship with
Speaker 1: a part of your body. One example would be this experiment.
Speaker 1: If you've never seen it done before, I think I've
Speaker 1: mentioned it in the podcast before that um, someone can
Speaker 1: replace your hand, Like you put your hands on the
Speaker 1: table and one of your hands is behind a wall
Speaker 1: where you can't see it, and instead the person performing
Speaker 1: the experiment puts a rubber hand on table, uh that
Speaker 1: looks like it could be your hand, and they train
Speaker 1: you to think of it as your hand by touching
Speaker 1: or stimulating your real hand while also giving you the
Speaker 1: visual cues that they're touching or stimulating the fake hand,
Speaker 1: like like the rubber hand and the real hand that
Speaker 1: is out of sight or both rubbed with a feather
Speaker 1: at the same time at the same time. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then after a minute or so of this, if somebody
Speaker 1: hit it's the rubber hand with a hammer, you will
Speaker 1: freak out like you think like your hand has just
Speaker 1: been hit and it you. You can essentially quite quickly
Speaker 1: train your brain to recalibrate its own sense of where
Speaker 1: and what its body is. It's crazy. It's just another
Speaker 1: one of those experiments that really drives home the true
Speaker 1: nature of our perception, uh and our our understanding of reality.
Speaker 1: All right, So there you have it. UH. An entire
Speaker 1: listener Mail episode devoted the face blindness. Again, these were
Speaker 1: not all of the emails we received. Now, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of good stuff we couldn't get to, and we'll
Speaker 1: and we'll likely receive some some additional emails. So again,
Speaker 1: the next time we do a listener mail, we're averaging
Speaker 1: about one a month. Really, that seems like a good
Speaker 1: way to tackle and stay ahead of the wonderful um
Speaker 1: emails that that that all of you send. Us the
Speaker 1: next time we'll we'll try and hit some more of these.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That is our mothership. That's where
Speaker 1: we will find all of the podcast episodes, as well
Speaker 1: as links out to our various social media accounts to
Speaker 1: also find all the podcast episodes. Wherever you get your
Speaker 1: podcasts and wherever that is, we always encourage you, Hey,
Speaker 1: give us a strong rating, give us as many stars
Speaker 1: as possible, give us a glowing review. Uh. It doesn't
Speaker 1: take much time on your part and it really helps
Speaker 1: us out in the end. Big thanks as always to
Speaker 1: our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and try Harrison. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us directly
Speaker 1: to give us feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to let us know your thoughts about any of the
Speaker 1: stuff we talked about today, or just to say hi,
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com?
Speaker 1: Think it doesn't, It doesn't. Foo