Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick and Robert. I got a point of etiquette question
Speaker 1: for you. All right, hit me. Do you think it
Speaker 1: is polite to show up to work wearing a ski mask,
Speaker 1: m a full ski mask, assuming you don't have a reason,
Speaker 1: like you don't you don't have burns or something like that,
Speaker 1: or if you know, if you maybe if you work
Speaker 1: at a you know, an antarctic receipt research facility and
Speaker 1: you have to walk across you know, the barren waste lands, No,
Speaker 1: I can think that would be okay, I'm saying more
Speaker 1: like you work in an office, or maybe you know,
Speaker 1: you work at Walmart. Um, yeah, I'd say that this
Speaker 1: is a terrible idea. You should not wear that full
Speaker 1: scheme ask to work because people are going to assume
Speaker 1: that you're hiding your identity and possibly about to rob
Speaker 1: the place. Yeah, that seems pretty obvious. But do you
Speaker 1: ever stop to think, Wait a minute, why biologically is
Speaker 1: that the case? Why is it that hiding your face
Speaker 1: is an extreme social taboo? Whereas hiding other parts of
Speaker 1: your body is not like it's not taboo to wear
Speaker 1: a shirt to work or to wear gloves to work.
Speaker 1: I mean you, you would expect certain parts of the
Speaker 1: body to be covered, and people could potentially identify you
Speaker 1: by other parts of your body than your face. But
Speaker 1: that just seems like like ridiculous to us. Of course
Speaker 1: it's the face we would identify you by. Well, I
Speaker 1: think identity is key here because a mask gives one
Speaker 1: the ability to, i mean certainly to change inter identity
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, because we've we've discussed this before
Speaker 1: and with clothed cognition, but a mask changes outer identity. Um,
Speaker 1: you look to all the various great mass traditions and
Speaker 1: human history, you know, from from very very old, very
Speaker 1: ancient practices to even more recent creations such as lucid
Speaker 1: libray masks, like the mask changes. It transforms the individual
Speaker 1: into something else. Putting on a mask inherently suggests a
Speaker 1: kind of performance, right yeah, yeah, you are becoming something
Speaker 1: other than your you know, baseline identity. And on the
Speaker 1: Lucha liber note, I do recommend anyone who hasn't watched
Speaker 1: one of these matches check out a mask versus mask
Speaker 1: match like a big one, and then watch the ending,
Speaker 1: in which generally like an older luchador will unmask and
Speaker 1: in doing so they will cease to be this fabulous
Speaker 1: panther person or you know, or some other kind of
Speaker 1: exotic semi as tech creation, and they become this older
Speaker 1: man and and and he'll and he'll be in tears,
Speaker 1: and sometimes family members will be there in tears. And
Speaker 1: even though it is all performance, uh and it is
Speaker 1: uh there, there is still this like there's a passion there,
Speaker 1: there's a true transformation. There's a loss of an established identity.
Speaker 1: Why is that the thing that's so emotional? I mean,
Speaker 1: it's silly to ask. It's so obvious to us that
Speaker 1: faces are the things that are the visual marker of
Speaker 1: the identity of a person. But yet again I insist
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be that way. That's just how
Speaker 1: it is. Biologically. For some reason, we are incredibly compelled
Speaker 1: by the image of the human face. And it's the
Speaker 1: thing that most people tend to most associate with the
Speaker 1: humans identity. Right, We're we're just strongly wired for faces. Yeah.
Speaker 1: A fun note that I believe I've probably mentioned on
Speaker 1: the show before is that the human face is a
Speaker 1: communications array input output, right, Yeah, so it's not only
Speaker 1: for purposes of receiving communication via the organs positioned on it,
Speaker 1: but it also conveys. So yeah, we've heard for instance, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a two thousand eight check study that found that
Speaker 1: facial expressions alone speak a thousand words. We've discussed micro
Speaker 1: expressions on the show before as well, but I always
Speaker 1: come back to an interesting point raised in a two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve U c l A primate study. The more
Speaker 1: solitary is species, the more wild and colorful. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: more social primates are more plain faced, because this theoretically
Speaker 1: allows us to see facial expressions more easily. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to like a bunch of wild colors.
Speaker 1: You want something kind of plain that you can in
Speaker 1: which you can see all the variants nuances of communication.
Speaker 1: Almost makes me think of that in a time when
Speaker 1: written manuscripts were rare, there was a lot of adornment
Speaker 1: and calligraphy and illumination of them, and now now that
Speaker 1: they're much more common, they tend to be more utility oriented.
Speaker 1: You just want to be able to clearly read what's
Speaker 1: on the page, right, and of course, you still need
Speaker 1: to be able to identify individual faces, because that's part
Speaker 1: of knowing who's who within a social order. Incidentally, research
Speaker 1: shows that chimps can also recall the specific butts of
Speaker 1: other chimps as readily as we recognize specific faces. And
Speaker 1: of course this this I can't help, since we're talking
Speaker 1: about face blindness today, I can't have help, But wonder
Speaker 1: if it's possible for a chimp to experience butt blindness.
Speaker 1: I would venture a guest that, say, standard neurological deviation
Speaker 1: from what what chimp brains normally do. There are but
Speaker 1: blind chimps. But yeah, so we are going to be
Speaker 1: talking about this concept of face blindness today, and this
Speaker 1: is a topic that's come up tangentially on the show before,
Speaker 1: but today people have asked for it, and we've decided
Speaker 1: to devote an entire episode to it. If you've never
Speaker 1: heard otherwise, you might just assume that everybody has roughly
Speaker 1: the same ability to instantly process and recognize visual face data.
Speaker 1: Maybe you assume that there's like a normal range of
Speaker 1: ability at recognizing faces. Some people are a little better
Speaker 1: at it, some people are a little worse at it.
Speaker 1: You probably know some people who recognize every actor in
Speaker 1: a movie. Some people who don't recognize people quite as easily.
Speaker 1: But you might just assume there's a standard range. Pretty
Speaker 1: much everybody reads faces, and that's just how it is, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: chances are, unless you've come to believe you you are
Speaker 1: are better or less able than other individuals, you doably
Speaker 1: think that your facial recognition is the normal level of
Speaker 1: facial recognition, and it's important to recognize that for most people.
Speaker 1: I think that normal level of facial recognition is incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1: Like it's a highly tuned neural instrument that is able
Speaker 1: to read tiny variations in visual data and match that
Speaker 1: to extremely detailed amounts of mental concepts and associations and memories.
Speaker 1: Like it's a truly remarkable process. How easily and quickly
Speaker 1: most people are able to match faces to other information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I would uh, I would certainly encourage everyone after
Speaker 1: this episode to to think about it as you're recognizing faces,
Speaker 1: as you're you know, glimpsing someone you know for the
Speaker 1: first time, or that fabulous experience when you glimpse somebody
Speaker 1: that you think you know and then realize that you
Speaker 1: don't know them, Like it it passes the initial UH
Speaker 1: tests of facial recognition before it's ruled that no, this
Speaker 1: is a stranger who just has a very similar nose
Speaker 1: to your friend. But the truth is, in fact that
Speaker 1: everybody is within this normal range of facial recognition ability.
Speaker 1: So the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote memorably about
Speaker 1: the many ways that our brains can behave abnormally in
Speaker 1: books like The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
Speaker 1: which was published in nineteen eighty five. He wrote about
Speaker 1: his own problems with recognizing faces in a truly excellent
Speaker 1: two thousand ten article for The New Yorkers. So he
Speaker 1: starts by talking about his childhood and he writes about
Speaker 1: how as long as he could remember, he had a
Speaker 1: hard time identifying a person by their face, like when
Speaker 1: he was a kid. He didn't think of this as
Speaker 1: a particular neurological disorder. He just thought he was quote
Speaker 1: bad with faces. And you know, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: this would be embarrassing because he would see people he
Speaker 1: knew intimately and not recognize them on site. What comes
Speaker 1: naturally to most people, like picking a familiar face out
Speaker 1: of a crowd, would become a difficult and laborious process,
Speaker 1: and he found he had to carefully and intentionally memorize
Speaker 1: particular features and characteristics to remember what people look to like.
Speaker 1: So somebody might have, Okay, that guy's got heavy eyebrows
Speaker 1: and thick glasses and red hair, so I can log
Speaker 1: that and remember it for next time. Most of the
Speaker 1: time people don't have to uh use this kind of
Speaker 1: conscious effort to remember facial characteristics of people. But even then,
Speaker 1: Sacks says it often didn't work. Like after his graduation,
Speaker 1: he had high school friends who could go back and
Speaker 1: look at photos of old classmates and recognize hundreds of them,
Speaker 1: and Sacks himself could not recognize a single person from
Speaker 1: his high school by their face, not one. And you
Speaker 1: might think, well, at least he be able to recognize
Speaker 1: his own picture right, not necessarily. Later in this piece,
Speaker 1: Sacks writes, quote, on several occasions, I have apologized for
Speaker 1: almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize
Speaker 1: that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.
Speaker 1: The opposite situation once occurred at a restaurant. Sitting at
Speaker 1: a sidewalk table, I turned towards the restaurant window and
Speaker 1: began grooming my beard as I often do. I then
Speaker 1: real is that what I had taken to be my
Speaker 1: reflection was not grooming himself but looking at me oddly. Huh,
Speaker 1: you know this, this does remind me. We uh, we
Speaker 1: touched on self facial recognition a little bit in our
Speaker 1: most recent Ignoble Prizes episode of study with twins, but
Speaker 1: with the inverted ones. Yeah, but it does make one
Speaker 1: realize here talking about Oliver Sax seeing himself in the mirror,
Speaker 1: that for the vast majority of a human history, like
Speaker 1: self facial recognition, like what is what is that for?
Speaker 1: When would you ever see your own face? I guess
Speaker 1: only when looking into maybe into a body of water, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but then only faintly, maybe seeing aspects of your own
Speaker 1: face in um, you know, in biological children or in
Speaker 1: your parents. But even then you you kind of need
Speaker 1: some sort of clear reflection that you're going off of.
Speaker 1: For all that, I'm just gonna earmark that one for later.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll come back to considerations of self facial recognition.
Speaker 1: No, no no, no, that that is actually really interesting because
Speaker 1: we Yeah, you're right, for most of human history, there
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been a whole lot of opportunities to see
Speaker 1: reflections of oneself, except maybe when over a body of water,
Speaker 1: and one could potentially pose it that modern humans who
Speaker 1: are constantly looking into reflective surfaces or looking at photos
Speaker 1: of themselves are having in fact their minds warped from
Speaker 1: from this constant exposure to the image of the self,
Speaker 1: Whereas that's not something you would actually see maybe more
Speaker 1: than a couple of times a day normally when you
Speaker 1: go to drink from a pool. Now you see it
Speaker 1: every time you go to the bathroom, every time you
Speaker 1: get up in the morning, probably more times than that.
Speaker 1: You're taking selfies all day. A bet, maybe we'll have
Speaker 1: to come back and do an episode on Narcissus. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But anyway, So I want to zero in on some
Speaker 1: of the particulars that Oliver Sacks talks about in his
Speaker 1: own case of face blindness, because it's not just that
Speaker 1: he has trouble recognizing faces. There's some interesting characteristics to
Speaker 1: this condition he has. One of the things he talks
Speaker 1: about is that he has a lot more difficulty recognizing
Speaker 1: people when he sees them out of context. And an
Speaker 1: example of that might be Okay, so you have an
Speaker 1: appointment to meet a certain person at a certain place
Speaker 1: at a certain time every week, and you go and
Speaker 1: when you see that person in the time and place
Speaker 1: you expect to meet them, you're pretty sure you recognize them,
Speaker 1: this is the right person. But then you could see
Speaker 1: the same person a few minutes later in a place
Speaker 1: where you don't expect to see them, maybe you know,
Speaker 1: downstairs and around the corner, and not recognize them at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think how jarring it can be to
Speaker 1: run into someone in the wrong place, you know, out
Speaker 1: of place. I'm not supposed to see a co worker
Speaker 1: at the grocery store. But it throws you. It throws
Speaker 1: you completely off. But if you had a problem with
Speaker 1: facial problem, a problem with facial recognition on top of that,
Speaker 1: it could be even worse, because then you'd have someone
Speaker 1: who looks mostly like a stranger to you saying like,
Speaker 1: oh hie, and you don't know how to respond. So,
Speaker 1: for Sax, the inability to recognize faces is also paired
Speaker 1: with an equally frustrating inability to recognize places. He reports
Speaker 1: that he would get lost extremely easily, even in familiar neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: and he tells a story about how one time he
Speaker 1: was trying to walk home in the rain, and he
Speaker 1: walked past his own house, his own place of residence,
Speaker 1: several times in the rain, before somebody yelled at him
Speaker 1: and is like, what are you doing. He thought he
Speaker 1: was lost and didn't realize he'd made it home. And
Speaker 1: this isn't just for Sacks. The environmental blindness is apparently
Speaker 1: something that a not not all by any means, but
Speaker 1: a significant subset of people with face blindness also experience.
Speaker 1: Another a few other things about Sacks. He reports that
Speaker 1: members of his own family seem to have the same condition,
Speaker 1: implying that there may be some kind of genetic component. Uh.
Speaker 1: He notes that he can actually recognize caricatures of people
Speaker 1: better than photos or realistic drawings of them. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it's probably drawing attention to the sort of like notable
Speaker 1: features that you would need a queue into to circumvent
Speaker 1: um facial blindness. Yeah, exactly, Like, Okay, this person has
Speaker 1: enormous eyebrows, and then that the first thing that a
Speaker 1: character sure artist is going to draw just outrageous eyebrows.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder if there are face blind caricature artists. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another thing he says is that he's better at recognizing
Speaker 1: people by the way they move or what he calls
Speaker 1: quote their motor style, than by their face. So try
Speaker 1: to imagine that if, like you were better at identifying
Speaker 1: a person by their gait and their posture and you know,
Speaker 1: the way they move their arms, then by the stuff
Speaker 1: that's on the front of their head. But this last
Speaker 1: point is something that I think is really interesting, and
Speaker 1: I do want to emphasize it's been true about a
Speaker 1: lot of what I've read about face blindness, or as
Speaker 1: the proper name for face blindness is prosopagnosia, And we'll
Speaker 1: get more into the general idea of agnosia in a minute.
Speaker 1: But but that sax says that while he has trouble
Speaker 1: recognizing individual faces or telling them apart, he's perfectly capable
Speaker 1: of recognizing things about faces, like the expressions they make,
Speaker 1: or whether the face is attractive of And I think
Speaker 1: this is a crucial distinction. It's not generally that the
Speaker 1: prosopagnostic person can't see faces. It's not like it's just
Speaker 1: a blur and there's nothing there, But they lack some
Speaker 1: kind of crucial recognition, sorting and storage capability. And based
Speaker 1: on my reading, I think I've come up with an
Speaker 1: analogy that that sort of makes sense for people who
Speaker 1: don't have a condition like this. Think about bushes of
Speaker 1: the same type, like holly bushes. So imagine two different
Speaker 1: holly bushes of roughly the same size. If you are
Speaker 1: a neurologically typical person, you can perfectly well see both
Speaker 1: of these bushes and describe their characteristics, and you can
Speaker 1: see little things that might be different about them. But
Speaker 1: would you be able to recognize the same holly bush
Speaker 1: that you looked at a few minutes ago if it
Speaker 1: was placed in a different context. I mean probably not right,
Speaker 1: you see a bush? Yeah, I mean, I mean that's
Speaker 1: certainly the way I feel. Based on my experiences with
Speaker 1: with identifying plants, I've always had a great deal of
Speaker 1: difficulty even even like determining something that I need to
Speaker 1: be aware of, like poison ivy I have. I seem
Speaker 1: to have poison ivy blindness despite being uh very susceptible
Speaker 1: to it. Yeah. Well, because I mean a lot of
Speaker 1: things in the plant world, your mind is not highly
Speaker 1: attuned and noticing minute differences in so you're just seeing
Speaker 1: a lot of leaves, right, even though you can see
Speaker 1: them fine, there's nothing wrong with your seeing. It's a
Speaker 1: problem with like discerning little differences and recognizing those differences. Now,
Speaker 1: earlier you mentioned the idea could have characterture artist have
Speaker 1: face blindness. Well, I don't know about character artists, but
Speaker 1: we do have one very notable example of an artist
Speaker 1: with face blindness. Yeah, Sax actually talks about this in
Speaker 1: this article. But the artist Chuck Close is known for
Speaker 1: having prosopagnosia, so he can't recognize people by their faces.
Speaker 1: And yet what is the art he's most known for.
Speaker 1: It is these huge, very detailed, sort of photo realistic
Speaker 1: portraits of people's faces. Yeah, which is which is always
Speaker 1: fascinating me because you do see this, this contemplation of
Speaker 1: what it is to identify a face in his work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this also sort of highlights the thing I
Speaker 1: was just saying about. The Holly Bush is right, it's
Speaker 1: not that you don't see the face, but that it's
Speaker 1: some kind of storage and recognition and sorting problem. Like
Speaker 1: he apparently can see faces, great, because he does a
Speaker 1: mate like he sees more detail in a face than
Speaker 1: I do. But again, this comes back to the truth
Speaker 1: that he's not It's not that he cannot see the face.
Speaker 1: He just he processes the information of the face in
Speaker 1: a different way. Right. Another interesting example of a famous
Speaker 1: person with prosopagnosia is Jane Goodall. I don't think I
Speaker 1: was aware that Jane Goodall had face blindness. Yes, Sex
Speaker 1: writes about her, and she so she says, quote, I've
Speaker 1: had huge problems with people with average faces. I have
Speaker 1: to search for a mole or something. So she's saying, like,
Speaker 1: I have to find some kind of unique identifying characteristic
Speaker 1: to remember, you know. Yeah, when there is a uniformity
Speaker 1: of a photo style and personal styling, it can be
Speaker 1: rather difficult. I've, for instance, I've had this situation where
Speaker 1: I'll go on IMDb and I'll try to figure out
Speaker 1: who a particular actor is in a film, and and
Speaker 1: then you start looking at the head shots. Is this
Speaker 1: the person? Yeah, It's like sometimes there'll be five or
Speaker 1: six people in a film that have essentially the same
Speaker 1: head shot. Like it's this because they're all styled in
Speaker 1: the same way. They have kind of the same facial features.
Speaker 1: And I'm I'm not talking about your Irran Pearlman's here.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about your your leading man, leading lady material
Speaker 1: like sometimes there is an uncomfortable uniformity to the dimensions
Speaker 1: of the face and the way that they are styled
Speaker 1: and photographed. Oh yeah, I mean, I think there's no
Speaker 1: denying that certain faces are easier to recognize than others. Right,
Speaker 1: Some just appear more distinctive, and other people have more
Speaker 1: generic or average types of features given a certain population.
Speaker 1: One of the things that this makes me think about, though,
Speaker 1: is that for people with typical face recognition skills, I
Speaker 1: think it might not immediately be apparent how problematic this
Speaker 1: could be. Being typical, I think sometimes leaves you in
Speaker 1: a position where you're not prone to imagine the difficulties
Speaker 1: that people in atypical conditions have to work through. Indeed,
Speaker 1: we tend to think of it as a bedrock aspect
Speaker 1: of our reality. But we're not in the world as
Speaker 1: it is. We were in the world as we perceive it,
Speaker 1: the world constructed via the instruments of our perception, and
Speaker 1: if one of those instruments is out of tune, it
Speaker 1: changes the world. Yeah, I mean. Sachs actually says that
Speaker 1: he thinks some of what his entire life has been
Speaker 1: interpreted as his shyness or his social ineptitude, his eccentricity,
Speaker 1: or even his Asperger syndrome is actually a consequence of
Speaker 1: his difficulty with recognizing people's faces. And many people over
Speaker 1: the years contacted him with similar comments that you know, really,
Speaker 1: what was going on with them in their lives is
Speaker 1: they had trouble recognizing people by their faces, whereas all
Speaker 1: the people around them did not have this trouble, and
Speaker 1: this was interpreted by people around them as them being
Speaker 1: rude or aloof or worse. Anyway, I guess we can
Speaker 1: take a quick break, then when we come back, we
Speaker 1: can talk about the condition of generalized agnosias. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. All right, we're back. So today we've been
Speaker 1: talking about prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and prosopagnosia seems to
Speaker 1: be a specific manifestation of a more generalized condition known
Speaker 1: as agnosia, which is a failure to recognize something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Agnosia is a broad category of stimuli transmission scrambling conditions,
Speaker 1: so it's a it's a rare area of neural disorder
Speaker 1: that disrupts the ability to process sensory information, and this
Speaker 1: includes such specific conditions as phone agnosia or voice blindness.
Speaker 1: As well as, of course, UH prosopagnosia face blindness, which
Speaker 1: we're focusing on today, and there are a number of
Speaker 1: other varieties as well. I actually ran across a really
Speaker 1: interesting one when I when I was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out these characters that pop up in our Scott Baker's
Speaker 1: Second Apocalypse saga, These these non men, essentially the that
Speaker 1: the l of his world. I remember you talking to
Speaker 1: Scott about those and you were saying, I think that
Speaker 1: they couldn't see art, right, Well, they couldn't see paintings. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's and this is something that a human character says
Speaker 1: of the non men. So I was curious. I was like, well,
Speaker 1: what could that consist of? What could make someone be
Speaker 1: enabled to to see uh, two dimensional art? That would
Speaker 1: make you have to rely on three dimensional art? Of course,
Speaker 1: this brought me to the realm of agnosia. Uh. There
Speaker 1: are a number of cases that relate directly to the
Speaker 1: cognitive experience of music, as well as various forms of
Speaker 1: visual community visual information and UH I actually ran across
Speaker 1: the case of an artist who, following an accident, developed
Speaker 1: an inability quote to identify single objects on visual presentation
Speaker 1: and displayed marked difficulty in interpreting complex objects, depicted scenes,
Speaker 1: and partially occluded figures, so he could still recognize geometric forms,
Speaker 1: perceive optical illusions, and copy designs. He could, in fact,
Speaker 1: he could in fact ualize many of his artistic skills,
Speaker 1: but his post injury work exhibited quote an over elaboration
Speaker 1: of detail. Yeah. I think it's interesting that you mentioned
Speaker 1: he could copy designs. So this tells you there's not
Speaker 1: really a problem with the seeing aspect if he's just
Speaker 1: trying to copy like lines and shading and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But it's a problem with the recognizing aspect of the brain.
Speaker 1: What the brain does with the visual information once it
Speaker 1: comes in. Now, as you mentioned, I did give the
Speaker 1: chance to actually ask Scott about the non men and
Speaker 1: their inability to see paintings in one of our two
Speaker 1: thousands seventeen interviews with him. Uh, And so I thought
Speaker 1: I would just cut out his answer here and uh
Speaker 1: and read it for everyone. Uh. He says, quote, you
Speaker 1: always want to distinguish your various races and species you
Speaker 1: create in speca to fiction, and this notion of non
Speaker 1: men not being able to see two dimensional visual representations
Speaker 1: is a textual detail along those lines, but it actually
Speaker 1: does have a rationale. Just think of the caveman in
Speaker 1: Chevet and France. They dragged their charcoal stains across the
Speaker 1: cave walls for the first time and realizing they could
Speaker 1: see a shape in that, they experimented. It turns out
Speaker 1: for humans that we can actually see horses and bison
Speaker 1: and figures of humans given a very very small amount
Speaker 1: of visual information. A finger covered in charcoal dragged across
Speaker 1: a cave wall is enough for us to be able
Speaker 1: to recognize a lion or a horse. The famous horses
Speaker 1: of Cheves are a wonderful example of this. For non men,
Speaker 1: their ability to cue cognition of scenes simply requires a
Speaker 1: bit more information, and particularly requires depth information, so they
Speaker 1: can see representations the way we can. They just have
Speaker 1: difficulty with two dimensional representations, just simply because the amount
Speaker 1: of information that is given in two dimensional representation isn't
Speaker 1: enough to actually cue the cognitive systems involved in recognizing
Speaker 1: horses and tigers and what have you. So it's just
Speaker 1: one of many ways in which my blind brain theory
Speaker 1: has sort of nuanced the background and the landscape of
Speaker 1: the novels. So there are scots referring to his idea
Speaker 1: that like the brain doesn't understand and the mechanisms by
Speaker 1: which it generates the recognitions or sensations or perceptions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I should also just add in passing that his
Speaker 1: two thousand eight novel Neuropath actually has a character in
Speaker 1: it that that that has face blindness, and it pops
Speaker 1: up as a minor plot point. Now, I mentioned music earlier,
Speaker 1: and I should mention that that we do have an
Speaker 1: earlier episode of Stuff to Blow your mind title Minds
Speaker 1: of Musical Emptiness that explores the conditions of a musia
Speaker 1: and auditory agnosia. Auditory agnosia basically breaks down into two
Speaker 1: different forms. Uh. There's the classical form, which entails environmental sound,
Speaker 1: so you hear a bird or a car, but you're
Speaker 1: unable to process the sound. And then there's also interpretive
Speaker 1: or receptive agnosia, which entails music. So basically what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to drive home here is that, like you see
Speaker 1: some version of this with various forms of stimuli. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's finger agnosia, inability to recognize the fingers of the hand. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a time agnosia and ability to interpret the passing
Speaker 1: of time. And then semantic agnosia, which has is essentially
Speaker 1: object blindness, so like you can see an object, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't it doesn't register to you what that object is. Yeah. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: and again I think all of this underlies just what
Speaker 1: are perceived reality really is. That it is very much
Speaker 1: this perceived reality, and it is not this bedrock reality
Speaker 1: that so many of us assume that it is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And as we've been hammering on, it's not just when
Speaker 1: it's visual information. It's not just site it's not just
Speaker 1: normal visual recognition. A lot of the things we do
Speaker 1: require kind of specialized evolved superpowers, which most people have.
Speaker 1: Most people have this superpower for recognizing and categorizing thousands
Speaker 1: of faces. But how does it happen that some of
Speaker 1: us don't have this superpower? Before we, uh, we go
Speaker 1: any further here, I do want to point out that
Speaker 1: there there is an episode of the hand Nible television series,
Speaker 1: season one, episode ten. Actually this is the Eating People
Speaker 1: one Yes, yeah, which is a very fun series about
Speaker 1: Hannibal lecter Um, basically the based on the Red Dragon
Speaker 1: novel and they kind of roll that out and bring
Speaker 1: in characters in situations from other books while also just
Speaker 1: creating this universe of crazy dramatic serial killers. So is
Speaker 1: it kind of like an Oliver Sacks book but they
Speaker 1: eat the person at the end of each chapter sort of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But this particular episode was is notable because again there's
Speaker 1: a character with face blindness, and so when Hannibal walks
Speaker 1: into the room, we get their p o V view
Speaker 1: and all they see is like a Hannibal with a
Speaker 1: featureless face, just like a skin face. And it's very
Speaker 1: creepy and effective in the television episode. But based on
Speaker 1: everything we've discussed here, this does not seem to be
Speaker 1: what facial blindness actually is, at least in most cases
Speaker 1: we've read about. Everybody's different there. There may actually be
Speaker 1: perception problems and how some people process faces, but most
Speaker 1: of the cases that I've read about don't seem to
Speaker 1: be perception problems there, recognition problems. Yeah. Yeah. I should
Speaker 1: also add that the character that has face blindness in
Speaker 1: that episode also suffers from Cotard syndrome, which we did
Speaker 1: an episode on. This is when you believe that you
Speaker 1: were a corpse, yeah, or believe in some other sense
Speaker 1: that you sort of don't exist, right, So, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Hannibal is was a fun television series, and that it
Speaker 1: trotted out a lot a number of these ideas, but sometimes,
Speaker 1: as one might expect from a network television horror drama, Uh,
Speaker 1: they're not going to maybe utilize those ideas to a
Speaker 1: depth that fully illuminates what they are. Yeah, you get
Speaker 1: a kind of sensationalized version that's more towards fulfilling the plot. Now,
Speaker 1: I was reading one. I don't know about you, Joe,
Speaker 1: but when when I was reading about face blindness, it's
Speaker 1: frequently mentioned that cases of order observation of face blindness. Uh,
Speaker 1: did they date back to antiquity? Yeah, though maybe not
Speaker 1: recognized as a neurological condition. But yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: think about there's a story I believe if I'm remembering
Speaker 1: right in the Gospel of Luke, where where after Jesus
Speaker 1: has died and then resurrected, some people walk with him
Speaker 1: for a while on the road, and then after he
Speaker 1: leaves there like, wait a minute, that was Jesus. It's like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, why didn't they recognize him? And you
Speaker 1: gotta wonder, like, wait, was this supposed to be a
Speaker 1: person with face blindness? Huh? Well, I didn't run across
Speaker 1: any commentary on that. But I did find a two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen paper from the Journal for the Study of
Speaker 1: the New Testament that mentions face blindness. This is from
Speaker 1: author Brian R. Glennie, who ponders the implications of Mark
Speaker 1: eight versus twenty two through So this is a this
Speaker 1: is a reading from that. I believe this is the
Speaker 1: King James version. And he cometh to Bethseda, and they
Speaker 1: bring a blind man unto him, and this ought him
Speaker 1: to touch him. And he took the blind man by
Speaker 1: the hand and led him out of the town. And
Speaker 1: when he had spit on his eyes and put his
Speaker 1: hands upon him, he asked him if he has if
Speaker 1: he saw aught, And he looked up and said, I
Speaker 1: seem in his trees walking. After that he put his
Speaker 1: hands to again upon his eyes and made him look up,
Speaker 1: and he was restored and saw every man clearly. And
Speaker 1: he sent him away to his house, saying, neither go
Speaker 1: into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.
Speaker 1: So in in this Glenny ponders this double he healing
Speaker 1: here in which Jesus first appears to heal the optical
Speaker 1: and then the cognitive blindness in the individual. Okay, so
Speaker 1: first he makes him able to see and then makes
Speaker 1: him able to recognize. Right, so he says quote without
Speaker 1: facial recognition. However, many people appear tree like because trees
Speaker 1: closely resemble the human body without facial features. Thus, the
Speaker 1: blind man's own report provides suggestive evidence that the first
Speaker 1: healing clears away cataracts, providing full optical sight, but it
Speaker 1: fails to enable him cognitively to identify the faces of people,
Speaker 1: thus leaving the middle blind man in the condition of prosopagnosia.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting interpretation on the verse.
Speaker 1: Another way you could interpret it is that he's more
Speaker 1: like in the middle position that Hans Solos in the
Speaker 1: Big Fight in Return of the Jedi, where he says, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I see a big light spot or a
Speaker 1: big dark spot or something. Yes, yes, so yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: that's what's going on. Like he's like, I don't see
Speaker 1: detail yet. I just see like shapes moving around, pointy shapes.
Speaker 1: But no. I like the prosopagnosia interpretation. That's interesting, but
Speaker 1: that's all I was really able to find in terms
Speaker 1: of cases of face blindness and antiquity. So there are
Speaker 1: better examples out there that listeners are aware of, let
Speaker 1: us know, we would love to hear them. Well, we
Speaker 1: should look at a little bit about the history of prosopagnosia.
Speaker 1: So it was extensively studied, I think first, and it's
Speaker 1: acquired form, which in which it's believed to be pretty rare,
Speaker 1: right like, people with acquired prosopagnosia aren't all that common.
Speaker 1: But more recently it's become clear that there is an
Speaker 1: inherited or developmental form of prosopagnosia which exists from birth
Speaker 1: or early childhood and is not caused by injury or disease,
Speaker 1: and this can be spread from parents to children and
Speaker 1: is much more common than the acquired version, right because
Speaker 1: the acquired version, again is going to depend upon a
Speaker 1: particular injury or disease damaging the brain and affecting cognition. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course we see we see plenty of examples
Speaker 1: of studies to deal with individuals that you know, they've
Speaker 1: sustained some sort of damage has changed the way their
Speaker 1: brain works, and the study of that change illuminates how
Speaker 1: healthy brain works. Now, generalized visual agnosia was medically recognized
Speaker 1: at least as far back as the eighteen nineties, but
Speaker 1: specific types of visual agnosia for specific classes of images
Speaker 1: like faces or places. That wasn't really recognized until later,
Speaker 1: in like the late nineteen forties, when the German neurologist
Speaker 1: Joachim bodomer Uh disc gcribed three patients who were unable
Speaker 1: to recognize faces but had no other neurological problems with
Speaker 1: recognition just faces. So if you've got many people who
Speaker 1: independently report a condition in which the only thing wrong
Speaker 1: with you is that you can't recognize faces, but you
Speaker 1: can recognize everything else, that seems to indicate there's probably
Speaker 1: a discrete, specialized function in the brain for face recognition
Speaker 1: that can be impaired. Right, that was going to be
Speaker 1: the case, And so autopsies on people who died with
Speaker 1: acquired prosopagnosia, which was the more studied version first, were
Speaker 1: amazingly consistent. They almost all show lesions on the same
Speaker 1: region of the brain, which is the right hemisphere, which
Speaker 1: is often thought of as the visual hemisphere, the right
Speaker 1: hemisphere of visual association cortex, which is down on the
Speaker 1: bottom of the occipito temporal cortex and specifically in a
Speaker 1: place called the fusiform gyrus. So that's a lot of terminology,
Speaker 1: but generally, if your picture in the brain, it's going
Speaker 1: to be down near the bottom, sort of between the
Speaker 1: back and the middle of the brain. And so that
Speaker 1: was established in autopsies, but CT scanning an m r
Speaker 1: I on live patients actually revealed the same thing. While
Speaker 1: people were still alive, they if they had face blindness,
Speaker 1: they tended to have lesions on the right hemisphere of
Speaker 1: visual association cortex, which eventually came to be known as
Speaker 1: the fusiform face area. And then in the ninety nine
Speaker 1: fMRI I studies showed that when people were actively looking
Speaker 1: at pictures of faces as opposed to pictures of other
Speaker 1: things like inanimate objects, this fusiform face region showed increased activity.
Speaker 1: Now here's a question about underlying causes. Why do many
Speaker 1: people with face blindness also seemed to have location blindness
Speaker 1: difficulty recognizing physical locations, like Oliver Sacks described in himself
Speaker 1: and many of many of the other people he talked
Speaker 1: to with this condition, Like, are these processes maybe mediated
Speaker 1: by the same brain region being turned to different tasks
Speaker 1: or is it merely adjacent brain regions where allusion in
Speaker 1: one region or or some other abnormality in one region
Speaker 1: could easily stretch over into the other. This leads us
Speaker 1: to the idea that some researchers think maybe prosopagnosia is
Speaker 1: not so inherently a problem with faces, but a specific
Speaker 1: example of a more generalized problem in which people have
Speaker 1: difficulty telling items within a specific category apart, and that
Speaker 1: category has something to do with expert knowledge expert visual recognition.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the Vanderbilt cognitive neuroscientist Isabel
Speaker 1: Gauthier so in a paper in Nature Neuroscience called activation
Speaker 1: of the middle fusiform face area increases with expertise in
Speaker 1: recognizing novel objects. Gauthier and colleagues start by pointing out
Speaker 1: that there's a section of the ventral temporal lobe or
Speaker 1: what we were talking about before, the occipitotin poral cortex
Speaker 1: that both brain imaging studies and neuro psiological studies, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned, have shown is crucial for processing human faces.
Speaker 1: And there have been some other curious findings up to
Speaker 1: this point preceding their research in and they found out
Speaker 1: that inversion of the images, so inversion like flipping upside down,
Speaker 1: is more detrimental to the recognition of faces than to
Speaker 1: other types of objects, and they also recognized that upright
Speaker 1: faces are recognized more holistically than other objects. However, more
Speaker 1: research showed that these conditions were also true about non
Speaker 1: face objects for people who had expertise in those objects,
Speaker 1: Like if you are a dog show judge and you
Speaker 1: look at pictures of dogs, they seemed to for some
Speaker 1: reason obey these same inversion rules that other people showed
Speaker 1: with looking at pictures of faces. It was like, if
Speaker 1: if you're a dog show expert, then looking at a
Speaker 1: dog is kind of like a normal person looking at
Speaker 1: a face. So is this area of the brain really
Speaker 1: dedicated solely to faces or that have other potential? Could
Speaker 1: the fusiform face area actually be a more general visual
Speaker 1: expertise area and the fact is that most people are
Speaker 1: just primarily experts at faces. Well, the well, Gautier in
Speaker 1: her colleagues came up with an interesting way of testing this.
Speaker 1: They made some greebeless Greebel's Robert, I think I've got
Speaker 1: a picture of Greebel's for you to look at. This
Speaker 1: is not Greebel's in the in the Imperial Star Destroyer.
Speaker 1: Since al right, well these look like abstract goblins. That's
Speaker 1: kind of what I get from him. Yeah, what do
Speaker 1: They remind me of a very specific abstract goblin actually,
Speaker 1: but I can't recall exactly what it is. Well, they
Speaker 1: also kind of look like the They look like something
Speaker 1: Jim Hinson would create. They also remind me of that
Speaker 1: that squeezy doll that would will you squeeze in its
Speaker 1: eyeballs pop out forget what that toy was was called
Speaker 1: classic American toy. You're exactly right, Nedri had one in
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park that he was squeezing. Yeah. So Greebel's are
Speaker 1: novel objects with weird d tales that people could be
Speaker 1: trained over time to have expertise in in categorizing and recognizing.
Speaker 1: And they're not faces. They're just things with arrangements of details,
Speaker 1: right though they do kind of look like noses and horns.
Speaker 1: Some of them look more like noses than horns. Some
Speaker 1: of them just look kind of like spiky totem poles.
Speaker 1: So the researchers they made these Greeble images that were
Speaker 1: these weird spiky totem pole things, and then they used
Speaker 1: fMRI I to scan the brains of test subjects who
Speaker 1: had variable expertise in Greeble's While viewing Greeble's passively and
Speaker 1: in a categorization task, and the results were quote acquisition
Speaker 1: of expertise with novel objects, meaning Greebles, led to increased
Speaker 1: activation of the right hemisphere face areas for matching of
Speaker 1: upright greebles as compared to matching inverted greebles. The same
Speaker 1: areas were also more activated in experts than in novices
Speaker 1: during passive viewing of Greeble's, So expertise seems to be
Speaker 1: one factor that leads to specialization in the face area.
Speaker 1: So they use this to suggest that visual expertise recruits
Speaker 1: the fusiform gyros or the face area. And then there
Speaker 1: was another interesting study by Gauthier and colleagues in Nature
Speaker 1: Neuroscience in two thousand where they did a kind of
Speaker 1: similar experiment. They tested the brains of people who had
Speaker 1: visual expertise in subjects like cars and birds compared to
Speaker 1: people who did not, and what they found was that
Speaker 1: car experts, bird experts, and regular subjects all showed activation
Speaker 1: of the fusiform face area when looking at human faces,
Speaker 1: but car experts also showed activation of the same region
Speaker 1: when looking at cars, and bird watchers showed the same
Speaker 1: when looking at birds. So it looks like what's going
Speaker 1: on according to these results is that everybody uses this
Speaker 1: fusiform face area to see faces and immediately recognize them.
Speaker 1: But if you are really good at picking out details
Speaker 1: and differences of objects in a certain category, maybe you're
Speaker 1: an expert in the different kinds of troll dolls or
Speaker 1: something like that. When you look at the troll doll,
Speaker 1: then you recruit the special face processing center of the
Speaker 1: brain to take take advantage of its expertise and say,
Speaker 1: I want to see as much detail in the differences
Speaker 1: between troll dolls as I would normally see in the
Speaker 1: differences between human faces. Interesting, and there's an interesting corollarya
Speaker 1: of this that Sax points out in his New Yorker article.
Speaker 1: If an expert bird spotter gets an injury leading to
Speaker 1: acquired prosopagnosia, they will probably also lose their ability to
Speaker 1: recognize birds. Oh Man, But I think it's also worth
Speaker 1: stressing that the fusiform face region doesn't work alone, because
Speaker 1: other findings have shown that this face area is basically
Speaker 1: it's a vital part of the face recognition system, but
Speaker 1: it's not the whole system. It's part of a chain
Speaker 1: of neural activity passing between different brain regions, from the
Speaker 1: occipital cortex to the prefrontal cortex and through through the
Speaker 1: whole process of seeing someone associating the face with information
Speaker 1: and memory, generating a feeling of familiarity. So another takeaway
Speaker 1: from this would be that it's possible you could have
Speaker 1: other forms or variants of face blindness without damage to
Speaker 1: the fusiform face area if some other part of the
Speaker 1: face recognition pathway is failing. But again we come back
Speaker 1: to the realization the brain is a complex, integrated system,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's very difficult to isolate just one area
Speaker 1: that is involved in some sort of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: complex sensory computation. Yeah, you can very often identify areas
Speaker 1: that are vital for something but also peripherally depend on
Speaker 1: other areas. All right, well, on that note, let's take
Speaker 1: a break, and when we come back, we will discuss
Speaker 1: the issue of treatment and potential treatment for individuals with
Speaker 1: face blindness. Thank you, thank alright, we're back. So a
Speaker 1: team of researchers published a review called Face Processing Improvements
Speaker 1: in Prosopagnosias Successes and Failures over the Last fifty Years,
Speaker 1: in which they tried to look into. What what have
Speaker 1: we turned up in terms of possible treatments for prosopagnosia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and basically, the one of the big take homes is
Speaker 1: that there are no hard and fast cures. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: no there's no real total cure yot. Yeah, there's not
Speaker 1: a there's not a pill you can take, there's not
Speaker 1: a procedure that can be performed. But according to the study,
Speaker 1: some methods and training techniques do seem to help. So
Speaker 1: for acquired postopagnosia, quote, strategic compensatory training such as verbalizing
Speaker 1: distinctive facial features unquote is effective. Okay, So that would
Speaker 1: be like saying, I want to remember what Robert looks like,
Speaker 1: so I remember he has and you start naming things
Speaker 1: out loud about your face right right. For instance, with me,
Speaker 1: sideburns would probably be a key indicator. You know, what
Speaker 1: is the thing about this person that I can latch
Speaker 1: onto to help me remember them. Another example from the
Speaker 1: paper is encoding the faces in conjunction with details about
Speaker 1: the profession. Okay, like this this person is a doctor,
Speaker 1: and that is a doctor's nose, I suppose. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you're you're like creating associate of helpers. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're sort of weaking the informational system, uh, so
Speaker 1: that you can better remember who this person is and
Speaker 1: how they fit into your life. Now. Though there is
Speaker 1: no known reliable cure, people have recovered from prosopagnosia before. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have seen spontaneous, full and partial recovery. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this is a major area of consideration for researchers. Obviously,
Speaker 1: what happened there? Yeah, what happened? What can we learn
Speaker 1: from this this recovery? Um. For the most part, however,
Speaker 1: it seems clear that quote the face processing system once
Speaker 1: damage is not easily remediated, even in a young plastic brain. Uh,
Speaker 1: that being one of the major findings of Ellis and
Speaker 1: young from So, I mean, that's kind of the bad
Speaker 1: news here, right, Like, even if it's a young, healthy
Speaker 1: brain that has a lot of plasticity, that that that
Speaker 1: can or come back bounce back from various injuries, there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of room to bounce back from this.
Speaker 1: But there have been these studies that seem at least
Speaker 1: to show some some moderate improvements or improvement by degrees, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially when we get out of the acquired
Speaker 1: area and get into the truly developmental area. So for
Speaker 1: children with developmental prosopagnosia. Uh, some of these methods also
Speaker 1: work for adults with with developmental prosopagnosia. Remedial training and
Speaker 1: oxytocin administration has resulted in improvement improves c tosin. That's interesting. Yeah, Still,
Speaker 1: there are no widely accepted treatments. Most individuals ultimately have
Speaker 1: to develop their own strategies, sometimes with the aid of
Speaker 1: these established methods. Now, one of the things that people
Speaker 1: might not realize is that the acquired While the acquired
Speaker 1: version seems to be pretty rare, the developmental version is
Speaker 1: actually pretty common. Multiple studies I've read have found somewhere
Speaker 1: around like two to two point five percent of the
Speaker 1: general population have some degree of prosopagnosia. Yeah. I know
Speaker 1: one individual in my own like real world life that
Speaker 1: that that that claims to have a certain level of
Speaker 1: face blindness. Yeah. And so, while there aren't really totally
Speaker 1: reliable known treatments yet, one thing that could certainly help
Speaker 1: is if other people are more accommodating to people who
Speaker 1: have face blindness, Like, don't necessarily conclude that someone is
Speaker 1: rude or something like that if they don't immediately recognize you,
Speaker 1: it's possible that they have prosopagnosia. Another thing that you
Speaker 1: could possibly do to help people with prosopagnosia, it's a
Speaker 1: very simple ways just to identify yourself when you meet them,
Speaker 1: you know you, instead of just saying like hey, you
Speaker 1: say hey, it's me Joe, good to see you. And
Speaker 1: I realized that can be difficult though, because you, like
Speaker 1: I have a lot of I guess social anxiety that
Speaker 1: kicks in in situations like this. I don't want to
Speaker 1: sound like I think you've forgotten my name, you know?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean I guess that. That one is
Speaker 1: easier to do if you know the person has prosopagnosia.
Speaker 1: It would be more awkward saying that to people who
Speaker 1: don't have it. And yeah, but seriously, there are people
Speaker 1: that I mean not people I know closely, but but
Speaker 1: people that I know who they are, but I either
Speaker 1: didn't learn their name or didn't really catch catch on.
Speaker 1: But it's too late. I can never introduce myself to
Speaker 1: them again, and I can never ask what their name
Speaker 1: is again. We're is doomed to awkwardly run into each
Speaker 1: other and not say each other's names. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: know that problem. Like I'm constantly recognizing faces, but forgetting
Speaker 1: the name. Yeah, there's a somebody. There's this guy at
Speaker 1: work that has the same problem. What's his name? But
Speaker 1: no another like small thing. This is like such a
Speaker 1: no brainer really, But like name tags, especially in uh
Speaker 1: in like large groupies, parties, um churches, community groups. You know,
Speaker 1: it's we've become accustomed to seeing like the name tag table,
Speaker 1: and I've i have found myself falling into the situation
Speaker 1: where I'm like, I need to fill out a name tag.
Speaker 1: Well what I want to name tag for? You know.
Speaker 1: But really that's one way you could be marginally helpful
Speaker 1: to individuals who have trouble with faces. I agree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So those are some of the sort of everyday implications.
Speaker 1: But what are some of the more interesting implications of
Speaker 1: face blindness? You know? One of the things that Sachs
Speaker 1: talks about in his article is that the recognition of
Speaker 1: a visual arrangement like a face or a place is
Speaker 1: not just seeing all of the parts and seeing them together.
Speaker 1: It's not just taking in the data of shapes and colors.
Speaker 1: It's connecting that visual data to some sense of meaning, right,
Speaker 1: it's a feeling or a word or a concept and
Speaker 1: association with other words and concepts and feelings. For example,
Speaker 1: the feeling of familiarity upon seeing someone is a crucial
Speaker 1: part of the face recognition system. Right when you have
Speaker 1: a face recognition system, you don't just see a person
Speaker 1: and then know their name and who they are. You
Speaker 1: see a person, you know their name and who they are,
Speaker 1: and you think I will approach them because I know
Speaker 1: this person. Either way, but either way, that's an emotion,
Speaker 1: and the feeling actually matters, and it's important. It's an
Speaker 1: important part of what recognition is. So actually, the way
Speaker 1: Sax puts it is that you know recognition is based
Speaker 1: on knowledge. I associate information with that face, while familiarity
Speaker 1: is based on feeling. I should walk up and say hi.
Speaker 1: And you can actually have one without the other. Both ways,
Speaker 1: you can see a person and you can have the
Speaker 1: feeling without the knowledge, or you could have the knowledge
Speaker 1: without the feeling. Prosopagnosia seems to cause a loss of both,
Speaker 1: But there are people who have conditions like hyper familiarity
Speaker 1: of faces. There's actually a non neurological condition where people
Speaker 1: are constantly seeing faces that they don't actually recognize, but
Speaker 1: having the feeling of knowing the person, and so it's
Speaker 1: like I don't know who you are, but I feel
Speaker 1: like I know you, and you I want to walk
Speaker 1: up and say hi. And there are sometimes people who
Speaker 1: just greet all kinds of people. On the other side
Speaker 1: of the coin, you can have cop gross syndrome right,
Speaker 1: where people recognize faces of people they know, but they
Speaker 1: do not experience the feeling of familiarity and thus believe
Speaker 1: that though this looks like my loved one, this person
Speaker 1: has been replaced by an impostor. I don't feel like
Speaker 1: I actually know them now, of course, looking forward into
Speaker 1: the future. Again, we do not have any hard, vast
Speaker 1: treatments for UH for face blindness currently, but it's been
Speaker 1: pointed out that in treating it, in learning to treat it,
Speaker 1: in questing after an effective treatment for it, we are
Speaker 1: in effect questing after a way to treat autism, Williams syndrome, schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: in various age related cognitive declines, all of which may
Speaker 1: entail facial recognition difficulties. And also it's previously discussed, the
Speaker 1: study of face blindness is also the study of of
Speaker 1: of normal facial recognition, the more we understand what's not
Speaker 1: working there, or we understand functional facial recognition, and from
Speaker 1: there the possibilities extend beyond the realm of medical science
Speaker 1: and into AI and robotics, where facial recognition is and
Speaker 1: will continue to be crucial. And here here a few
Speaker 1: sort of outside thoughts to get a little I guess
Speaker 1: comic bookie in all, but what if we do figure
Speaker 1: out a way to treat it. I wonder if if
Speaker 1: this also opens the door for enhanced facial recognition, the
Speaker 1: creation of the sort of super seares that we've referenced previously. Uh,
Speaker 1: and what else would be possible? Recreational heightened ability to
Speaker 1: see abstract patterns as forms and symbols, heightened a musical hearing.
Speaker 1: I mean, really, the possibilities of tuning the instruments that
Speaker 1: create the world around us, um, they're they're almost limitless
Speaker 1: possibilities there. I think this is something that's actually under
Speaker 1: explored in our superhero literature. Often when our superheroes have
Speaker 1: cognitive enhancements, it might be like super intelligence. More often
Speaker 1: it's super perception, right, so they can see through things,
Speaker 1: or they can see super far or something like that.
Speaker 1: What's under explored is super recognition. What if they have
Speaker 1: normal sense data, but they are abnormally able to match
Speaker 1: that sense data with relevant other information in the mind.
Speaker 1: I would also it would also be interesting if you
Speaker 1: had more comic book characters that you know, because often
Speaker 1: there's a there's a trade off. Right, they have the superpower,
Speaker 1: but it also means that they, you know, can't touch
Speaker 1: somebody without catching them on fire or whatnot. It would
Speaker 1: be interesting to have more. Is that a superhero? Well
Speaker 1: so sort of? The human flame is kind of like that, right,
Speaker 1: I guess you can turn it on flame on, flame off,
Speaker 1: But yeah, not not so for Dr burnoning, but it
Speaker 1: would be interesting off and maybe and for all I know,
Speaker 1: there there there is a common boo character that employs
Speaker 1: this where there are sensory tradeoffs. I can't come up
Speaker 1: with any great examples off the top of my head.
Speaker 1: But but it seems like the sensory realm of superhero
Speaker 1: is not all that well explored. I agree, get more
Speaker 1: creative the next revision. Come on, you know we're seeing far,
Speaker 1: you know, hearing, having great here and great great eyesight.
Speaker 1: That tends to be the extent of it, right, It's
Speaker 1: just whatever we have um doubled or tripled, right, the
Speaker 1: the superhero should have the power not of super hearing,
Speaker 1: but of super match that tune, you know, they always
Speaker 1: know what that song is. Yeah, they're not useful on
Speaker 1: most Avengers missions, but every now and then the perfect
Speaker 1: mission presents itself. I'm sure it does. It's often in
Speaker 1: the car when they've got the radio goes uh So.
Speaker 1: One thing I definitely want to say is that I
Speaker 1: want to hear from our listeners out there who have
Speaker 1: various degrees of prosopagnosia. Statistically, if it's too to two
Speaker 1: point five percent of the general population, we know we
Speaker 1: must have there. There's got to be a lot of
Speaker 1: you out there, So I'd love to hear what your
Speaker 1: experiences are like. In what ways do they line up
Speaker 1: not line up with what we talked about today. Have
Speaker 1: you come up with any interesting strategies for for compensating
Speaker 1: for this in your life generally? What's it like? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have a listener mail episodes coming up, and we'd
Speaker 1: love to share your experiences with everyone else. All right.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, be sure to check out stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all
Speaker 1: the podcast, episodes, blog posts, links out to our various
Speaker 1: social media accounts as well. Big thanks as always to
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producers, Alex Williams and Terry Harrison. If
Speaker 1: you would like to get in touch with us directly
Speaker 1: to let us know feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to let us know about your experiences with prosopagnosia, or
Speaker 1: just to say hi, you can email us at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. The proper fas