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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow

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Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe

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Speaker 1: McCormick and Robert. I got a point of etiquette question

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Speaker 1: for you. All right, hit me. Do you think it

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Speaker 1: is polite to show up to work wearing a ski mask,

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Speaker 1: m a full ski mask, assuming you don't have a reason,

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Speaker 1: like you don't you don't have burns or something like that,

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Speaker 1: or if you know, if you maybe if you work

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Speaker 1: at a you know, an antarctic receipt research facility and

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Speaker 1: you have to walk across you know, the barren waste lands, No,

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Speaker 1: I can think that would be okay, I'm saying more

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Speaker 1: like you work in an office, or maybe you know,

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Speaker 1: you work at Walmart. Um, yeah, I'd say that this

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Speaker 1: is a terrible idea. You should not wear that full

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Speaker 1: scheme ask to work because people are going to assume

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Speaker 1: that you're hiding your identity and possibly about to rob

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Speaker 1: the place. Yeah, that seems pretty obvious. But do you

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Speaker 1: ever stop to think, Wait a minute, why biologically is

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Speaker 1: that the case? Why is it that hiding your face

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Speaker 1: is an extreme social taboo? Whereas hiding other parts of

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Speaker 1: your body is not like it's not taboo to wear

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Speaker 1: a shirt to work or to wear gloves to work.

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Speaker 1: I mean you, you would expect certain parts of the

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Speaker 1: body to be covered, and people could potentially identify you

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Speaker 1: by other parts of your body than your face. But

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Speaker 1: that just seems like like ridiculous to us. Of course

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Speaker 1: it's the face we would identify you by. Well, I

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Speaker 1: think identity is key here because a mask gives one

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Speaker 1: the ability to, i mean certainly to change inter identity

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Speaker 1: to a certain extent, because we've we've discussed this before

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Speaker 1: and with clothed cognition, but a mask changes outer identity. Um,

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Speaker 1: you look to all the various great mass traditions and

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Speaker 1: human history, you know, from from very very old, very

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Speaker 1: ancient practices to even more recent creations such as lucid

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Speaker 1: libray masks, like the mask changes. It transforms the individual

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Speaker 1: into something else. Putting on a mask inherently suggests a

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Speaker 1: kind of performance, right yeah, yeah, you are becoming something

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Speaker 1: other than your you know, baseline identity. And on the

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Speaker 1: Lucha liber note, I do recommend anyone who hasn't watched

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Speaker 1: one of these matches check out a mask versus mask

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Speaker 1: match like a big one, and then watch the ending,

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Speaker 1: in which generally like an older luchador will unmask and

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Speaker 1: in doing so they will cease to be this fabulous

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Speaker 1: panther person or you know, or some other kind of

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Speaker 1: exotic semi as tech creation, and they become this older

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Speaker 1: man and and and he'll and he'll be in tears,

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Speaker 1: and sometimes family members will be there in tears. And

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Speaker 1: even though it is all performance, uh and it is

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Speaker 1: uh there, there is still this like there's a passion there,

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Speaker 1: there's a true transformation. There's a loss of an established identity.

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Speaker 1: Why is that the thing that's so emotional? I mean,

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Speaker 1: it's silly to ask. It's so obvious to us that

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Speaker 1: faces are the things that are the visual marker of

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Speaker 1: the identity of a person. But yet again I insist

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Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be that way. That's just how

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Speaker 1: it is. Biologically. For some reason, we are incredibly compelled

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Speaker 1: by the image of the human face. And it's the

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Speaker 1: thing that most people tend to most associate with the

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Speaker 1: humans identity. Right, We're we're just strongly wired for faces. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: A fun note that I believe I've probably mentioned on

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Speaker 1: the show before is that the human face is a

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Speaker 1: communications array input output, right, Yeah, so it's not only

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Speaker 1: for purposes of receiving communication via the organs positioned on it,

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Speaker 1: but it also conveys. So yeah, we've heard for instance, uh,

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Speaker 1: there's a two thousand eight check study that found that

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Speaker 1: facial expressions alone speak a thousand words. We've discussed micro

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Speaker 1: expressions on the show before as well, but I always

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Speaker 1: come back to an interesting point raised in a two

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Speaker 1: thousand twelve U c l A primate study. The more

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Speaker 1: solitary is species, the more wild and colorful. Meanwhile, the

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Speaker 1: more social primates are more plain faced, because this theoretically

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Speaker 1: allows us to see facial expressions more easily. So yeah,

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Speaker 1: you don't want to like a bunch of wild colors.

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Speaker 1: You want something kind of plain that you can in

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Speaker 1: which you can see all the variants nuances of communication.

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Speaker 1: Almost makes me think of that in a time when

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Speaker 1: written manuscripts were rare, there was a lot of adornment

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Speaker 1: and calligraphy and illumination of them, and now now that

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Speaker 1: they're much more common, they tend to be more utility oriented.

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Speaker 1: You just want to be able to clearly read what's

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Speaker 1: on the page, right, and of course, you still need

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Speaker 1: to be able to identify individual faces, because that's part

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Speaker 1: of knowing who's who within a social order. Incidentally, research

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Speaker 1: shows that chimps can also recall the specific butts of

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Speaker 1: other chimps as readily as we recognize specific faces. And

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Speaker 1: of course this this I can't help, since we're talking

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Speaker 1: about face blindness today, I can't have help, But wonder

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Speaker 1: if it's possible for a chimp to experience butt blindness.

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Speaker 1: I would venture a guest that, say, standard neurological deviation

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Speaker 1: from what what chimp brains normally do. There are but

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Speaker 1: blind chimps. But yeah, so we are going to be

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Speaker 1: talking about this concept of face blindness today, and this

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Speaker 1: is a topic that's come up tangentially on the show before,

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Speaker 1: but today people have asked for it, and we've decided

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Speaker 1: to devote an entire episode to it. If you've never

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Speaker 1: heard otherwise, you might just assume that everybody has roughly

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Speaker 1: the same ability to instantly process and recognize visual face data.

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Speaker 1: Maybe you assume that there's like a normal range of

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Speaker 1: ability at recognizing faces. Some people are a little better

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Speaker 1: at it, some people are a little worse at it.

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Speaker 1: You probably know some people who recognize every actor in

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Speaker 1: a movie. Some people who don't recognize people quite as easily.

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Speaker 1: But you might just assume there's a standard range. Pretty

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Speaker 1: much everybody reads faces, and that's just how it is, right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: chances are, unless you've come to believe you you are

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Speaker 1: are better or less able than other individuals, you doably

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Speaker 1: think that your facial recognition is the normal level of

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Speaker 1: facial recognition, and it's important to recognize that for most people.

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Speaker 1: I think that normal level of facial recognition is incredibly powerful.

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Speaker 1: Like it's a highly tuned neural instrument that is able

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Speaker 1: to read tiny variations in visual data and match that

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Speaker 1: to extremely detailed amounts of mental concepts and associations and memories.

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Speaker 1: Like it's a truly remarkable process. How easily and quickly

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Speaker 1: most people are able to match faces to other information. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I I would uh, I would certainly encourage everyone after

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Speaker 1: this episode to to think about it as you're recognizing faces,

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Speaker 1: as you're you know, glimpsing someone you know for the

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Speaker 1: first time, or that fabulous experience when you glimpse somebody

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Speaker 1: that you think you know and then realize that you

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Speaker 1: don't know them, Like it it passes the initial UH

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Speaker 1: tests of facial recognition before it's ruled that no, this

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Speaker 1: is a stranger who just has a very similar nose

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Speaker 1: to your friend. But the truth is, in fact that

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Speaker 1: everybody is within this normal range of facial recognition ability.

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Speaker 1: So the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote memorably about

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Speaker 1: the many ways that our brains can behave abnormally in

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Speaker 1: books like The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,

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Speaker 1: which was published in nineteen eighty five. He wrote about

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Speaker 1: his own problems with recognizing faces in a truly excellent

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Speaker 1: two thousand ten article for The New Yorkers. So he

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Speaker 1: starts by talking about his childhood and he writes about

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Speaker 1: how as long as he could remember, he had a

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Speaker 1: hard time identifying a person by their face, like when

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Speaker 1: he was a kid. He didn't think of this as

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Speaker 1: a particular neurological disorder. He just thought he was quote

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Speaker 1: bad with faces. And you know, as you can imagine,

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Speaker 1: this would be embarrassing because he would see people he

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Speaker 1: knew intimately and not recognize them on site. What comes

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Speaker 1: naturally to most people, like picking a familiar face out

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Speaker 1: of a crowd, would become a difficult and laborious process,

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Speaker 1: and he found he had to carefully and intentionally memorize

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Speaker 1: particular features and characteristics to remember what people look to like.

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Speaker 1: So somebody might have, Okay, that guy's got heavy eyebrows

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Speaker 1: and thick glasses and red hair, so I can log

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Speaker 1: that and remember it for next time. Most of the

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Speaker 1: time people don't have to uh use this kind of

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Speaker 1: conscious effort to remember facial characteristics of people. But even then,

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Speaker 1: Sacks says it often didn't work. Like after his graduation,

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Speaker 1: he had high school friends who could go back and

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Speaker 1: look at photos of old classmates and recognize hundreds of them,

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Speaker 1: and Sacks himself could not recognize a single person from

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Speaker 1: his high school by their face, not one. And you

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Speaker 1: might think, well, at least he be able to recognize

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Speaker 1: his own picture right, not necessarily. Later in this piece,

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Speaker 1: Sacks writes, quote, on several occasions, I have apologized for

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Speaker 1: almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize

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Speaker 1: that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.

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Speaker 1: The opposite situation once occurred at a restaurant. Sitting at

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Speaker 1: a sidewalk table, I turned towards the restaurant window and

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Speaker 1: began grooming my beard as I often do. I then

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Speaker 1: real is that what I had taken to be my

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Speaker 1: reflection was not grooming himself but looking at me oddly. Huh,

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Speaker 1: you know this, this does remind me. We uh, we

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Speaker 1: touched on self facial recognition a little bit in our

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Speaker 1: most recent Ignoble Prizes episode of study with twins, but

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Speaker 1: with the inverted ones. Yeah, but it does make one

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Speaker 1: realize here talking about Oliver Sax seeing himself in the mirror,

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Speaker 1: that for the vast majority of a human history, like

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Speaker 1: self facial recognition, like what is what is that for?

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Speaker 1: When would you ever see your own face? I guess

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Speaker 1: only when looking into maybe into a body of water, right, yeah,

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Speaker 1: but then only faintly, maybe seeing aspects of your own

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Speaker 1: face in um, you know, in biological children or in

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Speaker 1: your parents. But even then you you kind of need

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Speaker 1: some sort of clear reflection that you're going off of.

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Speaker 1: For all that, I'm just gonna earmark that one for later.

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Speaker 1: Maybe we'll come back to considerations of self facial recognition.

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Speaker 1: No, no no, no, that that is actually really interesting because

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Speaker 1: we Yeah, you're right, for most of human history, there

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Speaker 1: wouldn't have been a whole lot of opportunities to see

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Speaker 1: reflections of oneself, except maybe when over a body of water,

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Speaker 1: and one could potentially pose it that modern humans who

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Speaker 1: are constantly looking into reflective surfaces or looking at photos

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Speaker 1: of themselves are having in fact their minds warped from

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Speaker 1: from this constant exposure to the image of the self,

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Speaker 1: Whereas that's not something you would actually see maybe more

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Speaker 1: than a couple of times a day normally when you

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Speaker 1: go to drink from a pool. Now you see it

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Speaker 1: every time you go to the bathroom, every time you

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Speaker 1: get up in the morning, probably more times than that.

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Speaker 1: You're taking selfies all day. A bet, maybe we'll have

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Speaker 1: to come back and do an episode on Narcissus. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: But anyway, So I want to zero in on some

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Speaker 1: of the particulars that Oliver Sacks talks about in his

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Speaker 1: own case of face blindness, because it's not just that

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Speaker 1: he has trouble recognizing faces. There's some interesting characteristics to

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Speaker 1: this condition he has. One of the things he talks

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Speaker 1: about is that he has a lot more difficulty recognizing

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Speaker 1: people when he sees them out of context. And an

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Speaker 1: example of that might be Okay, so you have an

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Speaker 1: appointment to meet a certain person at a certain place

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Speaker 1: at a certain time every week, and you go and

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Speaker 1: when you see that person in the time and place

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Speaker 1: you expect to meet them, you're pretty sure you recognize them,

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Speaker 1: this is the right person. But then you could see

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Speaker 1: the same person a few minutes later in a place

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Speaker 1: where you don't expect to see them, maybe you know,

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Speaker 1: downstairs and around the corner, and not recognize them at all. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I think how jarring it can be to

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Speaker 1: run into someone in the wrong place, you know, out

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Speaker 1: of place. I'm not supposed to see a co worker

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Speaker 1: at the grocery store. But it throws you. It throws

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Speaker 1: you completely off. But if you had a problem with

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Speaker 1: facial problem, a problem with facial recognition on top of that,

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Speaker 1: it could be even worse, because then you'd have someone

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Speaker 1: who looks mostly like a stranger to you saying like,

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Speaker 1: oh hie, and you don't know how to respond. So,

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Speaker 1: for Sax, the inability to recognize faces is also paired

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Speaker 1: with an equally frustrating inability to recognize places. He reports

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Speaker 1: that he would get lost extremely easily, even in familiar neighborhoods,

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Speaker 1: and he tells a story about how one time he

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Speaker 1: was trying to walk home in the rain, and he

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Speaker 1: walked past his own house, his own place of residence,

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Speaker 1: several times in the rain, before somebody yelled at him

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Speaker 1: and is like, what are you doing. He thought he

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Speaker 1: was lost and didn't realize he'd made it home. And

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Speaker 1: this isn't just for Sacks. The environmental blindness is apparently

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Speaker 1: something that a not not all by any means, but

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Speaker 1: a significant subset of people with face blindness also experience.

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Speaker 1: Another a few other things about Sacks. He reports that

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Speaker 1: members of his own family seem to have the same condition,

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Speaker 1: implying that there may be some kind of genetic component. Uh.

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Speaker 1: He notes that he can actually recognize caricatures of people

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Speaker 1: better than photos or realistic drawings of them. Yeah, because

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Speaker 1: it's probably drawing attention to the sort of like notable

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Speaker 1: features that you would need a queue into to circumvent

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Speaker 1: um facial blindness. Yeah, exactly, Like, Okay, this person has

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Speaker 1: enormous eyebrows, and then that the first thing that a

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Speaker 1: character sure artist is going to draw just outrageous eyebrows.

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Speaker 1: It makes me wonder if there are face blind caricature artists. Interesting. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Another thing he says is that he's better at recognizing

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Speaker 1: people by the way they move or what he calls

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Speaker 1: quote their motor style, than by their face. So try

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Speaker 1: to imagine that if, like you were better at identifying

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Speaker 1: a person by their gait and their posture and you know,

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Speaker 1: the way they move their arms, then by the stuff

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Speaker 1: that's on the front of their head. But this last

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Speaker 1: point is something that I think is really interesting, and

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Speaker 1: I do want to emphasize it's been true about a

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Speaker 1: lot of what I've read about face blindness, or as

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Speaker 1: the proper name for face blindness is prosopagnosia, And we'll

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Speaker 1: get more into the general idea of agnosia in a minute.

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Speaker 1: But but that sax says that while he has trouble

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Speaker 1: recognizing individual faces or telling them apart, he's perfectly capable

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Speaker 1: of recognizing things about faces, like the expressions they make,

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Speaker 1: or whether the face is attractive of And I think

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Speaker 1: this is a crucial distinction. It's not generally that the

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Speaker 1: prosopagnostic person can't see faces. It's not like it's just

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Speaker 1: a blur and there's nothing there, But they lack some

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Speaker 1: kind of crucial recognition, sorting and storage capability. And based

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Speaker 1: on my reading, I think I've come up with an

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Speaker 1: analogy that that sort of makes sense for people who

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Speaker 1: don't have a condition like this. Think about bushes of

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Speaker 1: the same type, like holly bushes. So imagine two different

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Speaker 1: holly bushes of roughly the same size. If you are

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Speaker 1: a neurologically typical person, you can perfectly well see both

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Speaker 1: of these bushes and describe their characteristics, and you can

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Speaker 1: see little things that might be different about them. But

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Speaker 1: would you be able to recognize the same holly bush

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Speaker 1: that you looked at a few minutes ago if it

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Speaker 1: was placed in a different context. I mean probably not right,

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Speaker 1: you see a bush? Yeah, I mean, I mean that's

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Speaker 1: certainly the way I feel. Based on my experiences with

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Speaker 1: with identifying plants, I've always had a great deal of

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Speaker 1: difficulty even even like determining something that I need to

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Speaker 1: be aware of, like poison ivy I have. I seem

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Speaker 1: to have poison ivy blindness despite being uh very susceptible

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Speaker 1: to it. Yeah. Well, because I mean a lot of

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Speaker 1: things in the plant world, your mind is not highly

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Speaker 1: attuned and noticing minute differences in so you're just seeing

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Speaker 1: a lot of leaves, right, even though you can see

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Speaker 1: them fine, there's nothing wrong with your seeing. It's a

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Speaker 1: problem with like discerning little differences and recognizing those differences. Now,

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Speaker 1: earlier you mentioned the idea could have characterture artist have

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Speaker 1: face blindness. Well, I don't know about character artists, but

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Speaker 1: we do have one very notable example of an artist

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Speaker 1: with face blindness. Yeah, Sax actually talks about this in

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Speaker 1: this article. But the artist Chuck Close is known for

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Speaker 1: having prosopagnosia, so he can't recognize people by their faces.

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Speaker 1: And yet what is the art he's most known for.

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Speaker 1: It is these huge, very detailed, sort of photo realistic

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Speaker 1: portraits of people's faces. Yeah, which is which is always

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Speaker 1: fascinating me because you do see this, this contemplation of

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Speaker 1: what it is to identify a face in his work. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think this also sort of highlights the thing I

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Speaker 1: was just saying about. The Holly Bush is right, it's

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Speaker 1: not that you don't see the face, but that it's

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Speaker 1: some kind of storage and recognition and sorting problem. Like

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Speaker 1: he apparently can see faces, great, because he does a

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Speaker 1: mate like he sees more detail in a face than

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Speaker 1: I do. But again, this comes back to the truth

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Speaker 1: that he's not It's not that he cannot see the face.

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Speaker 1: He just he processes the information of the face in

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Speaker 1: a different way. Right. Another interesting example of a famous

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Speaker 1: person with prosopagnosia is Jane Goodall. I don't think I

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Speaker 1: was aware that Jane Goodall had face blindness. Yes, Sex

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Speaker 1: writes about her, and she so she says, quote, I've

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Speaker 1: had huge problems with people with average faces. I have

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Speaker 1: to search for a mole or something. So she's saying, like,

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Speaker 1: I have to find some kind of unique identifying characteristic

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Speaker 1: to remember, you know. Yeah, when there is a uniformity

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Speaker 1: of a photo style and personal styling, it can be

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Speaker 1: rather difficult. I've, for instance, I've had this situation where

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Speaker 1: I'll go on IMDb and I'll try to figure out

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Speaker 1: who a particular actor is in a film, and and

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Speaker 1: then you start looking at the head shots. Is this

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Speaker 1: the person? Yeah, It's like sometimes there'll be five or

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Speaker 1: six people in a film that have essentially the same

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Speaker 1: head shot. Like it's this because they're all styled in

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Speaker 1: the same way. They have kind of the same facial features.

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Speaker 1: And I'm I'm not talking about your Irran Pearlman's here.

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Speaker 1: I'm talking about your your leading man, leading lady material

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Speaker 1: like sometimes there is an uncomfortable uniformity to the dimensions

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Speaker 1: of the face and the way that they are styled

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Speaker 1: and photographed. Oh yeah, I mean, I think there's no

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Speaker 1: denying that certain faces are easier to recognize than others. Right,

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Speaker 1: Some just appear more distinctive, and other people have more

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Speaker 1: generic or average types of features given a certain population.

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Speaker 1: One of the things that this makes me think about, though,

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Speaker 1: is that for people with typical face recognition skills, I

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Speaker 1: think it might not immediately be apparent how problematic this

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Speaker 1: could be. Being typical, I think sometimes leaves you in

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Speaker 1: a position where you're not prone to imagine the difficulties

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Speaker 1: that people in atypical conditions have to work through. Indeed,

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Speaker 1: we tend to think of it as a bedrock aspect

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Speaker 1: of our reality. But we're not in the world as

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Speaker 1: it is. We were in the world as we perceive it,

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Speaker 1: the world constructed via the instruments of our perception, and

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Speaker 1: if one of those instruments is out of tune, it

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Speaker 1: changes the world. Yeah, I mean. Sachs actually says that

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Speaker 1: he thinks some of what his entire life has been

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Speaker 1: interpreted as his shyness or his social ineptitude, his eccentricity,

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Speaker 1: or even his Asperger syndrome is actually a consequence of

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Speaker 1: his difficulty with recognizing people's faces. And many people over

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Speaker 1: the years contacted him with similar comments that you know, really,

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Speaker 1: what was going on with them in their lives is

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Speaker 1: they had trouble recognizing people by their faces, whereas all

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Speaker 1: the people around them did not have this trouble, and

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Speaker 1: this was interpreted by people around them as them being

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Speaker 1: rude or aloof or worse. Anyway, I guess we can

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Speaker 1: take a quick break, then when we come back, we

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Speaker 1: can talk about the condition of generalized agnosias. Thank you,

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Speaker 1: thank you. All right, we're back. So today we've been

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Speaker 1: talking about prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and prosopagnosia seems to

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Speaker 1: be a specific manifestation of a more generalized condition known

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Speaker 1: as agnosia, which is a failure to recognize something. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Agnosia is a broad category of stimuli transmission scrambling conditions,

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Speaker 1: so it's a it's a rare area of neural disorder

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Speaker 1: that disrupts the ability to process sensory information, and this

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Speaker 1: includes such specific conditions as phone agnosia or voice blindness.

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Speaker 1: As well as, of course, UH prosopagnosia face blindness, which

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Speaker 1: we're focusing on today, and there are a number of

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Speaker 1: other varieties as well. I actually ran across a really

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Speaker 1: interesting one when I when I was trying to figure

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Speaker 1: out these characters that pop up in our Scott Baker's

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Speaker 1: Second Apocalypse saga, These these non men, essentially the that

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Speaker 1: the l of his world. I remember you talking to

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Speaker 1: Scott about those and you were saying, I think that

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Speaker 1: they couldn't see art, right, Well, they couldn't see paintings. Uh,

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Speaker 1: it's and this is something that a human character says

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Speaker 1: of the non men. So I was curious. I was like, well,

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Speaker 1: what could that consist of? What could make someone be

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Speaker 1: enabled to to see uh, two dimensional art? That would

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Speaker 1: make you have to rely on three dimensional art? Of course,

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Speaker 1: this brought me to the realm of agnosia. Uh. There

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Speaker 1: are a number of cases that relate directly to the

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Speaker 1: cognitive experience of music, as well as various forms of

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Speaker 1: visual community visual information and UH I actually ran across

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Speaker 1: the case of an artist who, following an accident, developed

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Speaker 1: an inability quote to identify single objects on visual presentation

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Speaker 1: and displayed marked difficulty in interpreting complex objects, depicted scenes,

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Speaker 1: and partially occluded figures, so he could still recognize geometric forms,

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Speaker 1: perceive optical illusions, and copy designs. He could, in fact,

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Speaker 1: he could in fact ualize many of his artistic skills,

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Speaker 1: but his post injury work exhibited quote an over elaboration

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Speaker 1: of detail. Yeah. I think it's interesting that you mentioned

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Speaker 1: he could copy designs. So this tells you there's not

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Speaker 1: really a problem with the seeing aspect if he's just

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Speaker 1: trying to copy like lines and shading and stuff like that.

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Speaker 1: But it's a problem with the recognizing aspect of the brain.

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Speaker 1: What the brain does with the visual information once it

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Speaker 1: comes in. Now, as you mentioned, I did give the

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Speaker 1: chance to actually ask Scott about the non men and

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Speaker 1: their inability to see paintings in one of our two

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Speaker 1: thousands seventeen interviews with him. Uh, And so I thought

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Speaker 1: I would just cut out his answer here and uh

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Speaker 1: and read it for everyone. Uh. He says, quote, you

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Speaker 1: always want to distinguish your various races and species you

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Speaker 1: create in speca to fiction, and this notion of non

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Speaker 1: men not being able to see two dimensional visual representations

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Speaker 1: is a textual detail along those lines, but it actually

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Speaker 1: does have a rationale. Just think of the caveman in

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Speaker 1: Chevet and France. They dragged their charcoal stains across the

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Speaker 1: cave walls for the first time and realizing they could

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Speaker 1: see a shape in that, they experimented. It turns out

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Speaker 1: for humans that we can actually see horses and bison

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Speaker 1: and figures of humans given a very very small amount

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Speaker 1: of visual information. A finger covered in charcoal dragged across

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Speaker 1: a cave wall is enough for us to be able

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Speaker 1: to recognize a lion or a horse. The famous horses

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Speaker 1: of Cheves are a wonderful example of this. For non men,

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Speaker 1: their ability to cue cognition of scenes simply requires a

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Speaker 1: bit more information, and particularly requires depth information, so they

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Speaker 1: can see representations the way we can. They just have

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Speaker 1: difficulty with two dimensional representations, just simply because the amount

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Speaker 1: of information that is given in two dimensional representation isn't

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Speaker 1: enough to actually cue the cognitive systems involved in recognizing

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Speaker 1: horses and tigers and what have you. So it's just

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Speaker 1: one of many ways in which my blind brain theory

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Speaker 1: has sort of nuanced the background and the landscape of

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Speaker 1: the novels. So there are scots referring to his idea

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Speaker 1: that like the brain doesn't understand and the mechanisms by

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Speaker 1: which it generates the recognitions or sensations or perceptions. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and I should also just add in passing that his

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Speaker 1: two thousand eight novel Neuropath actually has a character in

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Speaker 1: it that that that has face blindness, and it pops

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Speaker 1: up as a minor plot point. Now, I mentioned music earlier,

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Speaker 1: and I should mention that that we do have an

430
00:23:23,680 --> 00:23:26,639
Speaker 1: earlier episode of Stuff to Blow your mind title Minds

431
00:23:26,680 --> 00:23:29,880
Speaker 1: of Musical Emptiness that explores the conditions of a musia

432
00:23:30,000 --> 00:23:35,040
Speaker 1: and auditory agnosia. Auditory agnosia basically breaks down into two

433
00:23:35,040 --> 00:23:39,040
Speaker 1: different forms. Uh. There's the classical form, which entails environmental sound,

434
00:23:39,440 --> 00:23:41,680
Speaker 1: so you hear a bird or a car, but you're

435
00:23:41,720 --> 00:23:44,639
Speaker 1: unable to process the sound. And then there's also interpretive

436
00:23:44,920 --> 00:23:50,760
Speaker 1: or receptive agnosia, which entails music. So basically what I'm

437
00:23:50,760 --> 00:23:52,560
Speaker 1: trying to drive home here is that, like you see

438
00:23:52,640 --> 00:23:55,720
Speaker 1: some version of this with various forms of stimuli. Uh,

439
00:23:55,760 --> 00:24:00,920
Speaker 1: there's finger agnosia, inability to recognize the fingers of the hand. Um,

440
00:24:00,960 --> 00:24:03,959
Speaker 1: there's a time agnosia and ability to interpret the passing

441
00:24:03,960 --> 00:24:07,440
Speaker 1: of time. And then semantic agnosia, which has is essentially

442
00:24:07,520 --> 00:24:10,280
Speaker 1: object blindness, so like you can see an object, but

443
00:24:10,359 --> 00:24:14,719
Speaker 1: it doesn't it doesn't register to you what that object is. Yeah. Yeah, So,

444
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:18,600
Speaker 1: and again I think all of this underlies just what

445
00:24:18,800 --> 00:24:22,520
Speaker 1: are perceived reality really is. That it is very much

446
00:24:22,560 --> 00:24:25,720
Speaker 1: this perceived reality, and it is not this bedrock reality

447
00:24:25,800 --> 00:24:27,720
Speaker 1: that so many of us assume that it is. Yeah.

448
00:24:27,760 --> 00:24:30,560
Speaker 1: And as we've been hammering on, it's not just when

449
00:24:30,560 --> 00:24:33,720
Speaker 1: it's visual information. It's not just site it's not just

450
00:24:33,920 --> 00:24:37,320
Speaker 1: normal visual recognition. A lot of the things we do

451
00:24:37,400 --> 00:24:42,560
Speaker 1: require kind of specialized evolved superpowers, which most people have.

452
00:24:42,760 --> 00:24:47,439
Speaker 1: Most people have this superpower for recognizing and categorizing thousands

453
00:24:47,440 --> 00:24:50,280
Speaker 1: of faces. But how does it happen that some of

454
00:24:50,359 --> 00:24:54,000
Speaker 1: us don't have this superpower? Before we, uh, we go

455
00:24:54,400 --> 00:24:57,040
Speaker 1: any further here, I do want to point out that

456
00:24:57,080 --> 00:25:01,320
Speaker 1: there there is an episode of the hand Nible television series,

457
00:25:01,640 --> 00:25:04,720
Speaker 1: season one, episode ten. Actually this is the Eating People

458
00:25:04,720 --> 00:25:08,080
Speaker 1: one Yes, yeah, which is a very fun series about

459
00:25:08,080 --> 00:25:12,320
Speaker 1: Hannibal lecter Um, basically the based on the Red Dragon

460
00:25:12,359 --> 00:25:14,560
Speaker 1: novel and they kind of roll that out and bring

461
00:25:14,560 --> 00:25:17,919
Speaker 1: in characters in situations from other books while also just

462
00:25:18,040 --> 00:25:22,840
Speaker 1: creating this universe of crazy dramatic serial killers. So is

463
00:25:22,840 --> 00:25:26,200
Speaker 1: it kind of like an Oliver Sacks book but they

464
00:25:26,240 --> 00:25:31,000
Speaker 1: eat the person at the end of each chapter sort of. Yeah,

465
00:25:31,080 --> 00:25:35,000
Speaker 1: But this particular episode was is notable because again there's

466
00:25:35,000 --> 00:25:37,960
Speaker 1: a character with face blindness, and so when Hannibal walks

467
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:41,320
Speaker 1: into the room, we get their p o V view

468
00:25:41,800 --> 00:25:44,399
Speaker 1: and all they see is like a Hannibal with a

469
00:25:44,560 --> 00:25:47,920
Speaker 1: featureless face, just like a skin face. And it's very

470
00:25:47,960 --> 00:25:52,240
Speaker 1: creepy and effective in the television episode. But based on

471
00:25:52,280 --> 00:25:55,080
Speaker 1: everything we've discussed here, this does not seem to be

472
00:25:55,160 --> 00:25:58,600
Speaker 1: what facial blindness actually is, at least in most cases

473
00:25:58,600 --> 00:26:01,399
Speaker 1: we've read about. Everybody's different there. There may actually be

474
00:26:01,520 --> 00:26:06,200
Speaker 1: perception problems and how some people process faces, but most

475
00:26:06,200 --> 00:26:07,920
Speaker 1: of the cases that I've read about don't seem to

476
00:26:07,960 --> 00:26:12,320
Speaker 1: be perception problems there, recognition problems. Yeah. Yeah. I should

477
00:26:12,359 --> 00:26:15,600
Speaker 1: also add that the character that has face blindness in

478
00:26:15,600 --> 00:26:19,040
Speaker 1: that episode also suffers from Cotard syndrome, which we did

479
00:26:19,080 --> 00:26:20,879
Speaker 1: an episode on. This is when you believe that you

480
00:26:20,920 --> 00:26:24,119
Speaker 1: were a corpse, yeah, or believe in some other sense

481
00:26:24,160 --> 00:26:27,840
Speaker 1: that you sort of don't exist, right, So, uh, you know,

482
00:26:27,960 --> 00:26:31,040
Speaker 1: Hannibal is was a fun television series, and that it

483
00:26:31,080 --> 00:26:35,000
Speaker 1: trotted out a lot a number of these ideas, but sometimes,

484
00:26:35,040 --> 00:26:39,240
Speaker 1: as one might expect from a network television horror drama, Uh,

485
00:26:39,400 --> 00:26:42,879
Speaker 1: they're not going to maybe utilize those ideas to a

486
00:26:43,040 --> 00:26:46,760
Speaker 1: depth that fully illuminates what they are. Yeah, you get

487
00:26:46,800 --> 00:26:50,920
Speaker 1: a kind of sensationalized version that's more towards fulfilling the plot. Now,

488
00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:53,360
Speaker 1: I was reading one. I don't know about you, Joe,

489
00:26:53,359 --> 00:26:56,360
Speaker 1: but when when I was reading about face blindness, it's

490
00:26:56,400 --> 00:27:02,680
Speaker 1: frequently mentioned that cases of order observation of face blindness. Uh,

491
00:27:02,840 --> 00:27:05,520
Speaker 1: did they date back to antiquity? Yeah, though maybe not

492
00:27:05,640 --> 00:27:08,679
Speaker 1: recognized as a neurological condition. But yeah, I mean I

493
00:27:08,720 --> 00:27:11,920
Speaker 1: think about there's a story I believe if I'm remembering

494
00:27:12,000 --> 00:27:15,720
Speaker 1: right in the Gospel of Luke, where where after Jesus

495
00:27:15,760 --> 00:27:18,360
Speaker 1: has died and then resurrected, some people walk with him

496
00:27:18,400 --> 00:27:21,439
Speaker 1: for a while on the road, and then after he

497
00:27:21,520 --> 00:27:24,480
Speaker 1: leaves there like, wait a minute, that was Jesus. It's like,

498
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:26,520
Speaker 1: wait a minute, why didn't they recognize him? And you

499
00:27:26,600 --> 00:27:28,520
Speaker 1: gotta wonder, like, wait, was this supposed to be a

500
00:27:28,520 --> 00:27:32,480
Speaker 1: person with face blindness? Huh? Well, I didn't run across

501
00:27:32,480 --> 00:27:35,320
Speaker 1: any commentary on that. But I did find a two

502
00:27:35,359 --> 00:27:38,480
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen paper from the Journal for the Study of

503
00:27:38,520 --> 00:27:42,240
Speaker 1: the New Testament that mentions face blindness. This is from

504
00:27:42,400 --> 00:27:46,919
Speaker 1: author Brian R. Glennie, who ponders the implications of Mark

505
00:27:47,320 --> 00:27:51,840
Speaker 1: eight versus twenty two through So this is a this

506
00:27:51,920 --> 00:27:54,359
Speaker 1: is a reading from that. I believe this is the

507
00:27:54,480 --> 00:27:57,640
Speaker 1: King James version. And he cometh to Bethseda, and they

508
00:27:57,720 --> 00:28:00,440
Speaker 1: bring a blind man unto him, and this ought him

509
00:28:00,440 --> 00:28:02,680
Speaker 1: to touch him. And he took the blind man by

510
00:28:02,720 --> 00:28:04,399
Speaker 1: the hand and led him out of the town. And

511
00:28:04,440 --> 00:28:07,080
Speaker 1: when he had spit on his eyes and put his

512
00:28:07,160 --> 00:28:10,640
Speaker 1: hands upon him, he asked him if he has if

513
00:28:10,680 --> 00:28:13,600
Speaker 1: he saw aught, And he looked up and said, I

514
00:28:13,720 --> 00:28:16,560
Speaker 1: seem in his trees walking. After that he put his

515
00:28:16,600 --> 00:28:19,280
Speaker 1: hands to again upon his eyes and made him look up,

516
00:28:19,760 --> 00:28:23,040
Speaker 1: and he was restored and saw every man clearly. And

517
00:28:23,080 --> 00:28:25,320
Speaker 1: he sent him away to his house, saying, neither go

518
00:28:25,400 --> 00:28:28,560
Speaker 1: into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.

519
00:28:29,480 --> 00:28:33,679
Speaker 1: So in in this Glenny ponders this double he healing

520
00:28:33,720 --> 00:28:37,600
Speaker 1: here in which Jesus first appears to heal the optical

521
00:28:37,760 --> 00:28:40,720
Speaker 1: and then the cognitive blindness in the individual. Okay, so

522
00:28:40,840 --> 00:28:43,920
Speaker 1: first he makes him able to see and then makes

523
00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:47,840
Speaker 1: him able to recognize. Right, so he says quote without

524
00:28:47,920 --> 00:28:52,640
Speaker 1: facial recognition. However, many people appear tree like because trees

525
00:28:52,680 --> 00:28:56,280
Speaker 1: closely resemble the human body without facial features. Thus, the

526
00:28:56,320 --> 00:29:00,280
Speaker 1: blind man's own report provides suggestive evidence that the first

527
00:29:00,320 --> 00:29:04,600
Speaker 1: healing clears away cataracts, providing full optical sight, but it

528
00:29:04,720 --> 00:29:08,800
Speaker 1: fails to enable him cognitively to identify the faces of people,

529
00:29:08,880 --> 00:29:14,240
Speaker 1: thus leaving the middle blind man in the condition of prosopagnosia.

530
00:29:14,560 --> 00:29:17,000
Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting interpretation on the verse.

531
00:29:17,040 --> 00:29:19,840
Speaker 1: Another way you could interpret it is that he's more

532
00:29:19,880 --> 00:29:22,960
Speaker 1: like in the middle position that Hans Solos in the

533
00:29:23,040 --> 00:29:26,240
Speaker 1: Big Fight in Return of the Jedi, where he says, like,

534
00:29:26,280 --> 00:29:28,200
Speaker 1: you know, I see a big light spot or a

535
00:29:28,200 --> 00:29:31,360
Speaker 1: big dark spot or something. Yes, yes, so yeah, maybe

536
00:29:31,360 --> 00:29:33,520
Speaker 1: that's what's going on. Like he's like, I don't see

537
00:29:33,520 --> 00:29:37,280
Speaker 1: detail yet. I just see like shapes moving around, pointy shapes.

538
00:29:37,600 --> 00:29:41,000
Speaker 1: But no. I like the prosopagnosia interpretation. That's interesting, but

539
00:29:41,040 --> 00:29:42,800
Speaker 1: that's all I was really able to find in terms

540
00:29:42,880 --> 00:29:46,080
Speaker 1: of cases of face blindness and antiquity. So there are

541
00:29:46,080 --> 00:29:48,480
Speaker 1: better examples out there that listeners are aware of, let

542
00:29:48,600 --> 00:29:50,720
Speaker 1: us know, we would love to hear them. Well, we

543
00:29:50,760 --> 00:29:53,680
Speaker 1: should look at a little bit about the history of prosopagnosia.

544
00:29:53,800 --> 00:29:56,520
Speaker 1: So it was extensively studied, I think first, and it's

545
00:29:56,560 --> 00:29:59,880
Speaker 1: acquired form, which in which it's believed to be pretty rare,

546
00:30:00,360 --> 00:30:03,640
Speaker 1: right like, people with acquired prosopagnosia aren't all that common.

547
00:30:04,080 --> 00:30:06,960
Speaker 1: But more recently it's become clear that there is an

548
00:30:06,960 --> 00:30:11,720
Speaker 1: inherited or developmental form of prosopagnosia which exists from birth

549
00:30:11,880 --> 00:30:15,120
Speaker 1: or early childhood and is not caused by injury or disease,

550
00:30:15,160 --> 00:30:17,600
Speaker 1: and this can be spread from parents to children and

551
00:30:17,720 --> 00:30:20,920
Speaker 1: is much more common than the acquired version, right because

552
00:30:20,960 --> 00:30:23,120
Speaker 1: the acquired version, again is going to depend upon a

553
00:30:23,120 --> 00:30:28,240
Speaker 1: particular injury or disease damaging the brain and affecting cognition. Uh.

554
00:30:28,240 --> 00:30:30,600
Speaker 1: And of course we see we see plenty of examples

555
00:30:30,600 --> 00:30:32,720
Speaker 1: of studies to deal with individuals that you know, they've

556
00:30:32,760 --> 00:30:34,640
Speaker 1: sustained some sort of damage has changed the way their

557
00:30:34,680 --> 00:30:38,160
Speaker 1: brain works, and the study of that change illuminates how

558
00:30:38,240 --> 00:30:42,680
Speaker 1: healthy brain works. Now, generalized visual agnosia was medically recognized

559
00:30:42,720 --> 00:30:45,920
Speaker 1: at least as far back as the eighteen nineties, but

560
00:30:46,280 --> 00:30:50,560
Speaker 1: specific types of visual agnosia for specific classes of images

561
00:30:50,680 --> 00:30:54,840
Speaker 1: like faces or places. That wasn't really recognized until later,

562
00:30:55,000 --> 00:30:57,920
Speaker 1: in like the late nineteen forties, when the German neurologist

563
00:30:58,000 --> 00:31:01,680
Speaker 1: Joachim bodomer Uh disc gcribed three patients who were unable

564
00:31:01,720 --> 00:31:05,600
Speaker 1: to recognize faces but had no other neurological problems with

565
00:31:05,680 --> 00:31:09,920
Speaker 1: recognition just faces. So if you've got many people who

566
00:31:09,960 --> 00:31:13,920
Speaker 1: independently report a condition in which the only thing wrong

567
00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:16,640
Speaker 1: with you is that you can't recognize faces, but you

568
00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:20,280
Speaker 1: can recognize everything else, that seems to indicate there's probably

569
00:31:20,320 --> 00:31:25,160
Speaker 1: a discrete, specialized function in the brain for face recognition

570
00:31:25,200 --> 00:31:27,240
Speaker 1: that can be impaired. Right, that was going to be

571
00:31:27,240 --> 00:31:30,280
Speaker 1: the case, And so autopsies on people who died with

572
00:31:30,360 --> 00:31:34,680
Speaker 1: acquired prosopagnosia, which was the more studied version first, were

573
00:31:34,760 --> 00:31:39,480
Speaker 1: amazingly consistent. They almost all show lesions on the same

574
00:31:39,560 --> 00:31:42,880
Speaker 1: region of the brain, which is the right hemisphere, which

575
00:31:42,920 --> 00:31:46,080
Speaker 1: is often thought of as the visual hemisphere, the right

576
00:31:46,120 --> 00:31:49,960
Speaker 1: hemisphere of visual association cortex, which is down on the

577
00:31:49,960 --> 00:31:54,600
Speaker 1: bottom of the occipito temporal cortex and specifically in a

578
00:31:54,640 --> 00:31:58,920
Speaker 1: place called the fusiform gyrus. So that's a lot of terminology,

579
00:31:58,960 --> 00:32:01,200
Speaker 1: but generally, if your picture in the brain, it's going

580
00:32:01,280 --> 00:32:04,480
Speaker 1: to be down near the bottom, sort of between the

581
00:32:04,480 --> 00:32:07,360
Speaker 1: back and the middle of the brain. And so that

582
00:32:07,440 --> 00:32:10,520
Speaker 1: was established in autopsies, but CT scanning an m r

583
00:32:10,600 --> 00:32:13,600
Speaker 1: I on live patients actually revealed the same thing. While

584
00:32:13,600 --> 00:32:16,840
Speaker 1: people were still alive, they if they had face blindness,

585
00:32:16,880 --> 00:32:19,280
Speaker 1: they tended to have lesions on the right hemisphere of

586
00:32:19,360 --> 00:32:23,000
Speaker 1: visual association cortex, which eventually came to be known as

587
00:32:23,040 --> 00:32:26,120
Speaker 1: the fusiform face area. And then in the ninety nine

588
00:32:26,440 --> 00:32:29,280
Speaker 1: fMRI I studies showed that when people were actively looking

589
00:32:29,280 --> 00:32:32,000
Speaker 1: at pictures of faces as opposed to pictures of other

590
00:32:32,080 --> 00:32:37,360
Speaker 1: things like inanimate objects, this fusiform face region showed increased activity.

591
00:32:37,640 --> 00:32:41,680
Speaker 1: Now here's a question about underlying causes. Why do many

592
00:32:41,760 --> 00:32:46,360
Speaker 1: people with face blindness also seemed to have location blindness

593
00:32:46,440 --> 00:32:50,680
Speaker 1: difficulty recognizing physical locations, like Oliver Sacks described in himself

594
00:32:50,720 --> 00:32:53,160
Speaker 1: and many of many of the other people he talked

595
00:32:53,160 --> 00:32:57,320
Speaker 1: to with this condition, Like, are these processes maybe mediated

596
00:32:57,360 --> 00:33:01,160
Speaker 1: by the same brain region being turned to different tasks

597
00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:05,080
Speaker 1: or is it merely adjacent brain regions where allusion in

598
00:33:05,160 --> 00:33:08,400
Speaker 1: one region or or some other abnormality in one region

599
00:33:08,640 --> 00:33:11,880
Speaker 1: could easily stretch over into the other. This leads us

600
00:33:11,880 --> 00:33:15,520
Speaker 1: to the idea that some researchers think maybe prosopagnosia is

601
00:33:15,560 --> 00:33:19,719
Speaker 1: not so inherently a problem with faces, but a specific

602
00:33:19,800 --> 00:33:22,640
Speaker 1: example of a more generalized problem in which people have

603
00:33:22,760 --> 00:33:27,560
Speaker 1: difficulty telling items within a specific category apart, and that

604
00:33:27,640 --> 00:33:32,720
Speaker 1: category has something to do with expert knowledge expert visual recognition.

605
00:33:33,240 --> 00:33:36,760
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the Vanderbilt cognitive neuroscientist Isabel

606
00:33:36,880 --> 00:33:42,160
Speaker 1: Gauthier so in a paper in Nature Neuroscience called activation

607
00:33:42,200 --> 00:33:45,600
Speaker 1: of the middle fusiform face area increases with expertise in

608
00:33:45,680 --> 00:33:50,400
Speaker 1: recognizing novel objects. Gauthier and colleagues start by pointing out

609
00:33:50,440 --> 00:33:54,000
Speaker 1: that there's a section of the ventral temporal lobe or

610
00:33:54,040 --> 00:33:56,960
Speaker 1: what we were talking about before, the occipitotin poral cortex

611
00:33:57,480 --> 00:34:01,360
Speaker 1: that both brain imaging studies and neuro psiological studies, as

612
00:34:01,360 --> 00:34:04,960
Speaker 1: we mentioned, have shown is crucial for processing human faces.

613
00:34:05,560 --> 00:34:08,000
Speaker 1: And there have been some other curious findings up to

614
00:34:08,040 --> 00:34:11,399
Speaker 1: this point preceding their research in and they found out

615
00:34:11,440 --> 00:34:15,839
Speaker 1: that inversion of the images, so inversion like flipping upside down,

616
00:34:16,320 --> 00:34:19,480
Speaker 1: is more detrimental to the recognition of faces than to

617
00:34:19,640 --> 00:34:23,360
Speaker 1: other types of objects, and they also recognized that upright

618
00:34:23,400 --> 00:34:28,560
Speaker 1: faces are recognized more holistically than other objects. However, more

619
00:34:28,600 --> 00:34:32,239
Speaker 1: research showed that these conditions were also true about non

620
00:34:32,280 --> 00:34:35,719
Speaker 1: face objects for people who had expertise in those objects,

621
00:34:35,719 --> 00:34:39,200
Speaker 1: Like if you are a dog show judge and you

622
00:34:39,239 --> 00:34:42,040
Speaker 1: look at pictures of dogs, they seemed to for some

623
00:34:42,120 --> 00:34:46,120
Speaker 1: reason obey these same inversion rules that other people showed

624
00:34:46,160 --> 00:34:48,839
Speaker 1: with looking at pictures of faces. It was like, if

625
00:34:49,000 --> 00:34:51,880
Speaker 1: if you're a dog show expert, then looking at a

626
00:34:51,960 --> 00:34:54,920
Speaker 1: dog is kind of like a normal person looking at

627
00:34:54,920 --> 00:34:58,200
Speaker 1: a face. So is this area of the brain really

628
00:34:58,239 --> 00:35:01,719
Speaker 1: dedicated solely to faces or that have other potential? Could

629
00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,160
Speaker 1: the fusiform face area actually be a more general visual

630
00:35:05,320 --> 00:35:08,680
Speaker 1: expertise area and the fact is that most people are

631
00:35:08,719 --> 00:35:13,000
Speaker 1: just primarily experts at faces. Well, the well, Gautier in

632
00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:15,359
Speaker 1: her colleagues came up with an interesting way of testing this.

633
00:35:15,480 --> 00:35:19,440
Speaker 1: They made some greebeless Greebel's Robert, I think I've got

634
00:35:19,520 --> 00:35:21,759
Speaker 1: a picture of Greebel's for you to look at. This

635
00:35:21,840 --> 00:35:24,680
Speaker 1: is not Greebel's in the in the Imperial Star Destroyer.

636
00:35:24,800 --> 00:35:29,920
Speaker 1: Since al right, well these look like abstract goblins. That's

637
00:35:29,960 --> 00:35:31,400
Speaker 1: kind of what I get from him. Yeah, what do

638
00:35:31,640 --> 00:35:34,480
Speaker 1: They remind me of a very specific abstract goblin actually,

639
00:35:34,480 --> 00:35:37,640
Speaker 1: but I can't recall exactly what it is. Well, they

640
00:35:37,680 --> 00:35:40,040
Speaker 1: also kind of look like the They look like something

641
00:35:40,160 --> 00:35:42,800
Speaker 1: Jim Hinson would create. They also remind me of that

642
00:35:42,800 --> 00:35:46,000
Speaker 1: that squeezy doll that would will you squeeze in its

643
00:35:46,040 --> 00:35:49,840
Speaker 1: eyeballs pop out forget what that toy was was called

644
00:35:50,040 --> 00:35:53,120
Speaker 1: classic American toy. You're exactly right, Nedri had one in

645
00:35:53,200 --> 00:35:57,080
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park that he was squeezing. Yeah. So Greebel's are

646
00:35:57,680 --> 00:36:01,440
Speaker 1: novel objects with weird d tales that people could be

647
00:36:01,480 --> 00:36:06,480
Speaker 1: trained over time to have expertise in in categorizing and recognizing.

648
00:36:06,480 --> 00:36:11,319
Speaker 1: And they're not faces. They're just things with arrangements of details,

649
00:36:11,480 --> 00:36:15,320
Speaker 1: right though they do kind of look like noses and horns.

650
00:36:15,320 --> 00:36:17,160
Speaker 1: Some of them look more like noses than horns. Some

651
00:36:17,200 --> 00:36:19,480
Speaker 1: of them just look kind of like spiky totem poles.

652
00:36:19,960 --> 00:36:23,080
Speaker 1: So the researchers they made these Greeble images that were

653
00:36:23,120 --> 00:36:25,879
Speaker 1: these weird spiky totem pole things, and then they used

654
00:36:25,960 --> 00:36:28,279
Speaker 1: fMRI I to scan the brains of test subjects who

655
00:36:28,280 --> 00:36:32,920
Speaker 1: had variable expertise in Greeble's While viewing Greeble's passively and

656
00:36:33,080 --> 00:36:37,680
Speaker 1: in a categorization task, and the results were quote acquisition

657
00:36:37,719 --> 00:36:41,840
Speaker 1: of expertise with novel objects, meaning Greebles, led to increased

658
00:36:41,880 --> 00:36:45,040
Speaker 1: activation of the right hemisphere face areas for matching of

659
00:36:45,160 --> 00:36:49,080
Speaker 1: upright greebles as compared to matching inverted greebles. The same

660
00:36:49,120 --> 00:36:52,400
Speaker 1: areas were also more activated in experts than in novices

661
00:36:52,520 --> 00:36:56,440
Speaker 1: during passive viewing of Greeble's, So expertise seems to be

662
00:36:56,520 --> 00:37:00,200
Speaker 1: one factor that leads to specialization in the face area.

663
00:37:00,280 --> 00:37:04,600
Speaker 1: So they use this to suggest that visual expertise recruits

664
00:37:04,680 --> 00:37:08,200
Speaker 1: the fusiform gyros or the face area. And then there

665
00:37:08,239 --> 00:37:11,120
Speaker 1: was another interesting study by Gauthier and colleagues in Nature

666
00:37:11,160 --> 00:37:13,920
Speaker 1: Neuroscience in two thousand where they did a kind of

667
00:37:13,960 --> 00:37:17,080
Speaker 1: similar experiment. They tested the brains of people who had

668
00:37:17,160 --> 00:37:21,360
Speaker 1: visual expertise in subjects like cars and birds compared to

669
00:37:21,400 --> 00:37:23,719
Speaker 1: people who did not, and what they found was that

670
00:37:23,840 --> 00:37:28,520
Speaker 1: car experts, bird experts, and regular subjects all showed activation

671
00:37:28,600 --> 00:37:31,800
Speaker 1: of the fusiform face area when looking at human faces,

672
00:37:31,840 --> 00:37:35,680
Speaker 1: but car experts also showed activation of the same region

673
00:37:35,680 --> 00:37:39,000
Speaker 1: when looking at cars, and bird watchers showed the same

674
00:37:39,080 --> 00:37:42,279
Speaker 1: when looking at birds. So it looks like what's going

675
00:37:42,360 --> 00:37:45,600
Speaker 1: on according to these results is that everybody uses this

676
00:37:45,680 --> 00:37:49,759
Speaker 1: fusiform face area to see faces and immediately recognize them.

677
00:37:50,040 --> 00:37:52,719
Speaker 1: But if you are really good at picking out details

678
00:37:52,760 --> 00:37:55,480
Speaker 1: and differences of objects in a certain category, maybe you're

679
00:37:55,520 --> 00:37:57,759
Speaker 1: an expert in the different kinds of troll dolls or

680
00:37:57,800 --> 00:37:59,839
Speaker 1: something like that. When you look at the troll doll,

681
00:38:00,160 --> 00:38:04,160
Speaker 1: then you recruit the special face processing center of the

682
00:38:04,200 --> 00:38:08,040
Speaker 1: brain to take take advantage of its expertise and say,

683
00:38:08,080 --> 00:38:10,120
Speaker 1: I want to see as much detail in the differences

684
00:38:10,160 --> 00:38:12,600
Speaker 1: between troll dolls as I would normally see in the

685
00:38:12,640 --> 00:38:17,239
Speaker 1: differences between human faces. Interesting, and there's an interesting corollarya

686
00:38:17,280 --> 00:38:19,720
Speaker 1: of this that Sax points out in his New Yorker article.

687
00:38:20,480 --> 00:38:23,360
Speaker 1: If an expert bird spotter gets an injury leading to

688
00:38:23,400 --> 00:38:27,799
Speaker 1: acquired prosopagnosia, they will probably also lose their ability to

689
00:38:27,880 --> 00:38:31,399
Speaker 1: recognize birds. Oh Man, But I think it's also worth

690
00:38:31,440 --> 00:38:34,640
Speaker 1: stressing that the fusiform face region doesn't work alone, because

691
00:38:34,640 --> 00:38:38,280
Speaker 1: other findings have shown that this face area is basically

692
00:38:38,280 --> 00:38:41,480
Speaker 1: it's a vital part of the face recognition system, but

693
00:38:41,560 --> 00:38:44,840
Speaker 1: it's not the whole system. It's part of a chain

694
00:38:44,960 --> 00:38:48,080
Speaker 1: of neural activity passing between different brain regions, from the

695
00:38:48,120 --> 00:38:52,239
Speaker 1: occipital cortex to the prefrontal cortex and through through the

696
00:38:52,280 --> 00:38:56,719
Speaker 1: whole process of seeing someone associating the face with information

697
00:38:56,719 --> 00:39:01,120
Speaker 1: and memory, generating a feeling of familiarity. So another takeaway

698
00:39:01,160 --> 00:39:03,359
Speaker 1: from this would be that it's possible you could have

699
00:39:03,480 --> 00:39:07,000
Speaker 1: other forms or variants of face blindness without damage to

700
00:39:07,040 --> 00:39:10,080
Speaker 1: the fusiform face area if some other part of the

701
00:39:10,120 --> 00:39:13,120
Speaker 1: face recognition pathway is failing. But again we come back

702
00:39:13,120 --> 00:39:16,160
Speaker 1: to the realization the brain is a complex, integrated system,

703
00:39:16,320 --> 00:39:20,880
Speaker 1: and uh, it's very difficult to isolate just one area

704
00:39:20,960 --> 00:39:23,080
Speaker 1: that is involved in some sort of uh, you know,

705
00:39:23,200 --> 00:39:27,280
Speaker 1: complex sensory computation. Yeah, you can very often identify areas

706
00:39:27,320 --> 00:39:31,239
Speaker 1: that are vital for something but also peripherally depend on

707
00:39:31,320 --> 00:39:33,879
Speaker 1: other areas. All right, well, on that note, let's take

708
00:39:33,880 --> 00:39:35,960
Speaker 1: a break, and when we come back, we will discuss

709
00:39:36,320 --> 00:39:39,839
Speaker 1: the issue of treatment and potential treatment for individuals with

710
00:39:39,920 --> 00:39:45,480
Speaker 1: face blindness. Thank you, thank alright, we're back. So a

711
00:39:45,520 --> 00:39:51,000
Speaker 1: team of researchers published a review called Face Processing Improvements

712
00:39:51,080 --> 00:39:54,920
Speaker 1: in Prosopagnosias Successes and Failures over the Last fifty Years,

713
00:39:54,960 --> 00:39:57,680
Speaker 1: in which they tried to look into. What what have

714
00:39:57,760 --> 00:40:01,879
Speaker 1: we turned up in terms of possible treatments for prosopagnosia. Yeah,

715
00:40:01,960 --> 00:40:05,279
Speaker 1: and basically, the one of the big take homes is

716
00:40:05,320 --> 00:40:07,919
Speaker 1: that there are no hard and fast cures. Yeah, there's

717
00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:10,759
Speaker 1: no there's no real total cure yot. Yeah, there's not

718
00:40:10,800 --> 00:40:12,440
Speaker 1: a there's not a pill you can take, there's not

719
00:40:12,480 --> 00:40:16,040
Speaker 1: a procedure that can be performed. But according to the study,

720
00:40:16,160 --> 00:40:20,000
Speaker 1: some methods and training techniques do seem to help. So

721
00:40:20,160 --> 00:40:25,600
Speaker 1: for acquired postopagnosia, quote, strategic compensatory training such as verbalizing

722
00:40:25,600 --> 00:40:29,359
Speaker 1: distinctive facial features unquote is effective. Okay, So that would

723
00:40:29,400 --> 00:40:32,160
Speaker 1: be like saying, I want to remember what Robert looks like,

724
00:40:32,200 --> 00:40:35,560
Speaker 1: so I remember he has and you start naming things

725
00:40:35,640 --> 00:40:38,799
Speaker 1: out loud about your face right right. For instance, with me,

726
00:40:39,000 --> 00:40:41,440
Speaker 1: sideburns would probably be a key indicator. You know, what

727
00:40:41,560 --> 00:40:43,720
Speaker 1: is the thing about this person that I can latch

728
00:40:43,760 --> 00:40:46,680
Speaker 1: onto to help me remember them. Another example from the

729
00:40:46,680 --> 00:40:49,520
Speaker 1: paper is encoding the faces in conjunction with details about

730
00:40:49,520 --> 00:40:52,920
Speaker 1: the profession. Okay, like this this person is a doctor,

731
00:40:52,960 --> 00:40:55,719
Speaker 1: and that is a doctor's nose, I suppose. Okay, Yeah,

732
00:40:55,719 --> 00:40:58,879
Speaker 1: so you're you're like creating associate of helpers. Yeah, yeah,

733
00:40:58,920 --> 00:41:02,719
Speaker 1: you're you're sort of weaking the informational system, uh, so

734
00:41:02,800 --> 00:41:05,000
Speaker 1: that you can better remember who this person is and

735
00:41:05,040 --> 00:41:07,640
Speaker 1: how they fit into your life. Now. Though there is

736
00:41:07,680 --> 00:41:12,879
Speaker 1: no known reliable cure, people have recovered from prosopagnosia before. Yeah. Yeah,

737
00:41:13,480 --> 00:41:17,200
Speaker 1: we have seen spontaneous, full and partial recovery. Uh. And

738
00:41:17,400 --> 00:41:20,360
Speaker 1: this is a major area of consideration for researchers. Obviously,

739
00:41:20,520 --> 00:41:22,919
Speaker 1: what happened there? Yeah, what happened? What can we learn

740
00:41:23,040 --> 00:41:27,000
Speaker 1: from this this recovery? Um. For the most part, however,

741
00:41:27,080 --> 00:41:31,120
Speaker 1: it seems clear that quote the face processing system once

742
00:41:31,200 --> 00:41:37,000
Speaker 1: damage is not easily remediated, even in a young plastic brain. Uh,

743
00:41:37,320 --> 00:41:40,279
Speaker 1: that being one of the major findings of Ellis and

744
00:41:40,360 --> 00:41:43,520
Speaker 1: young from So, I mean, that's kind of the bad

745
00:41:43,560 --> 00:41:46,360
Speaker 1: news here, right, Like, even if it's a young, healthy

746
00:41:46,440 --> 00:41:48,719
Speaker 1: brain that has a lot of plasticity, that that that

747
00:41:49,280 --> 00:41:53,720
Speaker 1: can or come back bounce back from various injuries, there's

748
00:41:53,880 --> 00:41:56,000
Speaker 1: not a lot of room to bounce back from this.

749
00:41:56,360 --> 00:41:58,800
Speaker 1: But there have been these studies that seem at least

750
00:41:58,800 --> 00:42:03,399
Speaker 1: to show some some moderate improvements or improvement by degrees, right,

751
00:42:03,520 --> 00:42:05,680
Speaker 1: I mean, especially when we get out of the acquired

752
00:42:05,719 --> 00:42:09,239
Speaker 1: area and get into the truly developmental area. So for

753
00:42:09,360 --> 00:42:14,400
Speaker 1: children with developmental prosopagnosia. Uh, some of these methods also

754
00:42:14,480 --> 00:42:19,359
Speaker 1: work for adults with with developmental prosopagnosia. Remedial training and

755
00:42:19,520 --> 00:42:26,440
Speaker 1: oxytocin administration has resulted in improvement improves c tosin. That's interesting. Yeah, Still,

756
00:42:26,480 --> 00:42:30,400
Speaker 1: there are no widely accepted treatments. Most individuals ultimately have

757
00:42:30,480 --> 00:42:33,960
Speaker 1: to develop their own strategies, sometimes with the aid of

758
00:42:34,000 --> 00:42:38,600
Speaker 1: these established methods. Now, one of the things that people

759
00:42:38,680 --> 00:42:42,320
Speaker 1: might not realize is that the acquired While the acquired

760
00:42:42,400 --> 00:42:45,600
Speaker 1: version seems to be pretty rare, the developmental version is

761
00:42:45,640 --> 00:42:49,800
Speaker 1: actually pretty common. Multiple studies I've read have found somewhere

762
00:42:49,840 --> 00:42:52,560
Speaker 1: around like two to two point five percent of the

763
00:42:52,600 --> 00:42:57,359
Speaker 1: general population have some degree of prosopagnosia. Yeah. I know

764
00:42:57,440 --> 00:43:00,560
Speaker 1: one individual in my own like real world life that

765
00:43:01,440 --> 00:43:03,880
Speaker 1: that that that claims to have a certain level of

766
00:43:03,920 --> 00:43:08,280
Speaker 1: face blindness. Yeah. And so, while there aren't really totally

767
00:43:08,320 --> 00:43:12,279
Speaker 1: reliable known treatments yet, one thing that could certainly help

768
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:16,160
Speaker 1: is if other people are more accommodating to people who

769
00:43:16,239 --> 00:43:20,239
Speaker 1: have face blindness, Like, don't necessarily conclude that someone is

770
00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:23,640
Speaker 1: rude or something like that if they don't immediately recognize you,

771
00:43:23,719 --> 00:43:27,520
Speaker 1: it's possible that they have prosopagnosia. Another thing that you

772
00:43:27,560 --> 00:43:31,160
Speaker 1: could possibly do to help people with prosopagnosia, it's a

773
00:43:31,239 --> 00:43:34,880
Speaker 1: very simple ways just to identify yourself when you meet them,

774
00:43:34,920 --> 00:43:37,719
Speaker 1: you know you, instead of just saying like hey, you

775
00:43:37,800 --> 00:43:40,959
Speaker 1: say hey, it's me Joe, good to see you. And

776
00:43:41,000 --> 00:43:43,680
Speaker 1: I realized that can be difficult though, because you, like

777
00:43:43,760 --> 00:43:46,640
Speaker 1: I have a lot of I guess social anxiety that

778
00:43:46,719 --> 00:43:49,400
Speaker 1: kicks in in situations like this. I don't want to

779
00:43:49,760 --> 00:43:52,839
Speaker 1: sound like I think you've forgotten my name, you know?

780
00:43:53,080 --> 00:43:55,320
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean I guess that. That one is

781
00:43:55,360 --> 00:43:58,280
Speaker 1: easier to do if you know the person has prosopagnosia.

782
00:43:58,320 --> 00:44:00,400
Speaker 1: It would be more awkward saying that to people who

783
00:44:00,480 --> 00:44:04,240
Speaker 1: don't have it. And yeah, but seriously, there are people

784
00:44:04,280 --> 00:44:07,360
Speaker 1: that I mean not people I know closely, but but

785
00:44:07,480 --> 00:44:11,680
Speaker 1: people that I know who they are, but I either

786
00:44:12,040 --> 00:44:14,680
Speaker 1: didn't learn their name or didn't really catch catch on.

787
00:44:15,120 --> 00:44:17,799
Speaker 1: But it's too late. I can never introduce myself to

788
00:44:17,840 --> 00:44:20,439
Speaker 1: them again, and I can never ask what their name

789
00:44:20,520 --> 00:44:23,960
Speaker 1: is again. We're is doomed to awkwardly run into each

790
00:44:23,960 --> 00:44:26,840
Speaker 1: other and not say each other's names. Oh yeah, I

791
00:44:27,200 --> 00:44:30,960
Speaker 1: know that problem. Like I'm constantly recognizing faces, but forgetting

792
00:44:31,000 --> 00:44:33,799
Speaker 1: the name. Yeah, there's a somebody. There's this guy at

793
00:44:33,840 --> 00:44:36,360
Speaker 1: work that has the same problem. What's his name? But

794
00:44:37,640 --> 00:44:41,160
Speaker 1: no another like small thing. This is like such a

795
00:44:41,160 --> 00:44:45,440
Speaker 1: no brainer really, But like name tags, especially in uh

796
00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:51,520
Speaker 1: in like large groupies, parties, um churches, community groups. You know,

797
00:44:52,000 --> 00:44:55,400
Speaker 1: it's we've become accustomed to seeing like the name tag table,

798
00:44:55,920 --> 00:44:59,360
Speaker 1: and I've i have found myself falling into the situation

799
00:44:59,400 --> 00:45:01,280
Speaker 1: where I'm like, I need to fill out a name tag.

800
00:45:01,640 --> 00:45:03,520
Speaker 1: Well what I want to name tag for? You know.

801
00:45:04,000 --> 00:45:07,240
Speaker 1: But really that's one way you could be marginally helpful

802
00:45:07,400 --> 00:45:10,960
Speaker 1: to individuals who have trouble with faces. I agree. Yeah,

803
00:45:11,239 --> 00:45:13,719
Speaker 1: So those are some of the sort of everyday implications.

804
00:45:13,719 --> 00:45:17,200
Speaker 1: But what are some of the more interesting implications of

805
00:45:17,200 --> 00:45:19,800
Speaker 1: face blindness? You know? One of the things that Sachs

806
00:45:19,880 --> 00:45:22,920
Speaker 1: talks about in his article is that the recognition of

807
00:45:22,960 --> 00:45:25,680
Speaker 1: a visual arrangement like a face or a place is

808
00:45:25,680 --> 00:45:28,400
Speaker 1: not just seeing all of the parts and seeing them together.

809
00:45:29,040 --> 00:45:32,040
Speaker 1: It's not just taking in the data of shapes and colors.

810
00:45:32,080 --> 00:45:35,879
Speaker 1: It's connecting that visual data to some sense of meaning, right,

811
00:45:36,280 --> 00:45:39,279
Speaker 1: it's a feeling or a word or a concept and

812
00:45:39,480 --> 00:45:43,600
Speaker 1: association with other words and concepts and feelings. For example,

813
00:45:43,760 --> 00:45:48,080
Speaker 1: the feeling of familiarity upon seeing someone is a crucial

814
00:45:48,120 --> 00:45:50,520
Speaker 1: part of the face recognition system. Right when you have

815
00:45:50,560 --> 00:45:53,720
Speaker 1: a face recognition system, you don't just see a person

816
00:45:53,880 --> 00:45:56,440
Speaker 1: and then know their name and who they are. You

817
00:45:56,480 --> 00:45:58,560
Speaker 1: see a person, you know their name and who they are,

818
00:45:58,760 --> 00:46:01,279
Speaker 1: and you think I will approach them because I know

819
00:46:01,400 --> 00:46:06,160
Speaker 1: this person. Either way, but either way, that's an emotion,

820
00:46:06,239 --> 00:46:09,279
Speaker 1: and the feeling actually matters, and it's important. It's an

821
00:46:09,280 --> 00:46:13,279
Speaker 1: important part of what recognition is. So actually, the way

822
00:46:13,360 --> 00:46:15,800
Speaker 1: Sax puts it is that you know recognition is based

823
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:19,800
Speaker 1: on knowledge. I associate information with that face, while familiarity

824
00:46:19,880 --> 00:46:22,239
Speaker 1: is based on feeling. I should walk up and say hi.

825
00:46:22,800 --> 00:46:25,680
Speaker 1: And you can actually have one without the other. Both ways,

826
00:46:26,080 --> 00:46:28,080
Speaker 1: you can see a person and you can have the

827
00:46:28,200 --> 00:46:31,400
Speaker 1: feeling without the knowledge, or you could have the knowledge

828
00:46:31,480 --> 00:46:35,480
Speaker 1: without the feeling. Prosopagnosia seems to cause a loss of both,

829
00:46:36,080 --> 00:46:39,799
Speaker 1: But there are people who have conditions like hyper familiarity

830
00:46:39,840 --> 00:46:43,600
Speaker 1: of faces. There's actually a non neurological condition where people

831
00:46:43,640 --> 00:46:48,120
Speaker 1: are constantly seeing faces that they don't actually recognize, but

832
00:46:48,160 --> 00:46:51,319
Speaker 1: having the feeling of knowing the person, and so it's

833
00:46:51,360 --> 00:46:53,320
Speaker 1: like I don't know who you are, but I feel

834
00:46:53,360 --> 00:46:55,080
Speaker 1: like I know you, and you I want to walk

835
00:46:55,160 --> 00:46:57,279
Speaker 1: up and say hi. And there are sometimes people who

836
00:46:57,320 --> 00:46:59,799
Speaker 1: just greet all kinds of people. On the other side

837
00:46:59,800 --> 00:47:02,239
Speaker 1: of the coin, you can have cop gross syndrome right,

838
00:47:02,280 --> 00:47:05,640
Speaker 1: where people recognize faces of people they know, but they

839
00:47:05,680 --> 00:47:09,680
Speaker 1: do not experience the feeling of familiarity and thus believe

840
00:47:10,040 --> 00:47:13,560
Speaker 1: that though this looks like my loved one, this person

841
00:47:13,600 --> 00:47:16,440
Speaker 1: has been replaced by an impostor. I don't feel like

842
00:47:16,480 --> 00:47:19,799
Speaker 1: I actually know them now, of course, looking forward into

843
00:47:19,800 --> 00:47:24,120
Speaker 1: the future. Again, we do not have any hard, vast

844
00:47:24,200 --> 00:47:28,640
Speaker 1: treatments for UH for face blindness currently, but it's been

845
00:47:28,640 --> 00:47:31,920
Speaker 1: pointed out that in treating it, in learning to treat it,

846
00:47:32,080 --> 00:47:36,120
Speaker 1: in questing after an effective treatment for it, we are

847
00:47:36,160 --> 00:47:41,320
Speaker 1: in effect questing after a way to treat autism, Williams syndrome, schizophrenia,

848
00:47:41,360 --> 00:47:45,560
Speaker 1: in various age related cognitive declines, all of which may

849
00:47:45,760 --> 00:47:51,320
Speaker 1: entail facial recognition difficulties. And also it's previously discussed, the

850
00:47:51,600 --> 00:47:55,080
Speaker 1: study of face blindness is also the study of of

851
00:47:55,080 --> 00:47:59,319
Speaker 1: of normal facial recognition, the more we understand what's not

852
00:47:59,400 --> 00:48:03,120
Speaker 1: working there, or we understand functional facial recognition, and from

853
00:48:03,160 --> 00:48:06,160
Speaker 1: there the possibilities extend beyond the realm of medical science

854
00:48:06,160 --> 00:48:10,080
Speaker 1: and into AI and robotics, where facial recognition is and

855
00:48:10,080 --> 00:48:13,319
Speaker 1: will continue to be crucial. And here here a few

856
00:48:13,440 --> 00:48:16,720
Speaker 1: sort of outside thoughts to get a little I guess

857
00:48:16,719 --> 00:48:19,960
Speaker 1: comic bookie in all, but what if we do figure

858
00:48:19,960 --> 00:48:23,080
Speaker 1: out a way to treat it. I wonder if if

859
00:48:23,080 --> 00:48:26,080
Speaker 1: this also opens the door for enhanced facial recognition, the

860
00:48:26,080 --> 00:48:31,040
Speaker 1: creation of the sort of super seares that we've referenced previously. Uh,

861
00:48:31,040 --> 00:48:34,600
Speaker 1: and what else would be possible? Recreational heightened ability to

862
00:48:34,640 --> 00:48:39,000
Speaker 1: see abstract patterns as forms and symbols, heightened a musical hearing.

863
00:48:39,320 --> 00:48:41,600
Speaker 1: I mean, really, the possibilities of tuning the instruments that

864
00:48:41,680 --> 00:48:46,560
Speaker 1: create the world around us, um, they're they're almost limitless

865
00:48:46,560 --> 00:48:49,360
Speaker 1: possibilities there. I think this is something that's actually under

866
00:48:49,440 --> 00:48:54,120
Speaker 1: explored in our superhero literature. Often when our superheroes have

867
00:48:54,480 --> 00:48:58,800
Speaker 1: cognitive enhancements, it might be like super intelligence. More often

868
00:48:58,840 --> 00:49:03,560
Speaker 1: it's super perception, right, so they can see through things,

869
00:49:03,719 --> 00:49:06,799
Speaker 1: or they can see super far or something like that.

870
00:49:07,760 --> 00:49:11,080
Speaker 1: What's under explored is super recognition. What if they have

871
00:49:11,239 --> 00:49:16,120
Speaker 1: normal sense data, but they are abnormally able to match

872
00:49:16,239 --> 00:49:19,400
Speaker 1: that sense data with relevant other information in the mind.

873
00:49:20,600 --> 00:49:22,239
Speaker 1: I would also it would also be interesting if you

874
00:49:22,239 --> 00:49:24,680
Speaker 1: had more comic book characters that you know, because often

875
00:49:24,760 --> 00:49:27,640
Speaker 1: there's a there's a trade off. Right, they have the superpower,

876
00:49:27,680 --> 00:49:31,120
Speaker 1: but it also means that they, you know, can't touch

877
00:49:31,160 --> 00:49:33,839
Speaker 1: somebody without catching them on fire or whatnot. It would

878
00:49:33,840 --> 00:49:37,120
Speaker 1: be interesting to have more. Is that a superhero? Well

879
00:49:37,160 --> 00:49:39,640
Speaker 1: so sort of? The human flame is kind of like that, right,

880
00:49:39,680 --> 00:49:41,759
Speaker 1: I guess you can turn it on flame on, flame off,

881
00:49:41,800 --> 00:49:46,800
Speaker 1: But yeah, not not so for Dr burnoning, but it

882
00:49:46,840 --> 00:49:49,160
Speaker 1: would be interesting off and maybe and for all I know,

883
00:49:49,200 --> 00:49:51,480
Speaker 1: there there there is a common boo character that employs

884
00:49:51,520 --> 00:49:54,560
Speaker 1: this where there are sensory tradeoffs. I can't come up

885
00:49:54,600 --> 00:49:56,359
Speaker 1: with any great examples off the top of my head.

886
00:49:56,440 --> 00:49:59,960
Speaker 1: But but it seems like the sensory realm of superhero

887
00:50:00,160 --> 00:50:02,960
Speaker 1: is not all that well explored. I agree, get more

888
00:50:03,000 --> 00:50:06,160
Speaker 1: creative the next revision. Come on, you know we're seeing far,

889
00:50:06,640 --> 00:50:09,840
Speaker 1: you know, hearing, having great here and great great eyesight.

890
00:50:09,920 --> 00:50:11,359
Speaker 1: That tends to be the extent of it, right, It's

891
00:50:11,400 --> 00:50:15,319
Speaker 1: just whatever we have um doubled or tripled, right, the

892
00:50:15,320 --> 00:50:17,800
Speaker 1: the superhero should have the power not of super hearing,

893
00:50:17,920 --> 00:50:21,640
Speaker 1: but of super match that tune, you know, they always

894
00:50:21,680 --> 00:50:23,920
Speaker 1: know what that song is. Yeah, they're not useful on

895
00:50:24,000 --> 00:50:26,840
Speaker 1: most Avengers missions, but every now and then the perfect

896
00:50:26,880 --> 00:50:29,719
Speaker 1: mission presents itself. I'm sure it does. It's often in

897
00:50:29,760 --> 00:50:32,680
Speaker 1: the car when they've got the radio goes uh So.

898
00:50:32,960 --> 00:50:35,520
Speaker 1: One thing I definitely want to say is that I

899
00:50:35,560 --> 00:50:37,920
Speaker 1: want to hear from our listeners out there who have

900
00:50:38,040 --> 00:50:42,560
Speaker 1: various degrees of prosopagnosia. Statistically, if it's too to two

901
00:50:42,560 --> 00:50:44,759
Speaker 1: point five percent of the general population, we know we

902
00:50:44,840 --> 00:50:46,719
Speaker 1: must have there. There's got to be a lot of

903
00:50:46,719 --> 00:50:49,239
Speaker 1: you out there, So I'd love to hear what your

904
00:50:49,239 --> 00:50:52,040
Speaker 1: experiences are like. In what ways do they line up

905
00:50:52,120 --> 00:50:54,799
Speaker 1: not line up with what we talked about today. Have

906
00:50:54,960 --> 00:50:58,720
Speaker 1: you come up with any interesting strategies for for compensating

907
00:50:58,760 --> 00:51:01,680
Speaker 1: for this in your life generally? What's it like? Yeah,

908
00:51:01,719 --> 00:51:03,839
Speaker 1: we have a listener mail episodes coming up, and we'd

909
00:51:03,840 --> 00:51:07,640
Speaker 1: love to share your experiences with everyone else. All right.

910
00:51:07,680 --> 00:51:09,360
Speaker 1: In the meantime, be sure to check out stuff to

911
00:51:09,360 --> 00:51:11,120
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all

912
00:51:11,120 --> 00:51:13,920
Speaker 1: the podcast, episodes, blog posts, links out to our various

913
00:51:13,960 --> 00:51:16,640
Speaker 1: social media accounts as well. Big thanks as always to

914
00:51:16,680 --> 00:51:19,799
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producers, Alex Williams and Terry Harrison. If

915
00:51:19,840 --> 00:51:21,680
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us directly

916
00:51:21,719 --> 00:51:23,920
Speaker 1: to let us know feedback on this episode or any other,

917
00:51:24,040 --> 00:51:27,160
Speaker 1: to let us know about your experiences with prosopagnosia, or

918
00:51:27,239 --> 00:51:29,560
Speaker 1: just to say hi, you can email us at blow

919
00:51:29,640 --> 00:51:41,480
Speaker 1: the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more

920
00:51:41,520 --> 00:51:43,799
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how

921
00:51:43,840 --> 00:52:03,680
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. The proper fas