Face Blindness

for you. All right, hit me. Do you think it is polite to show up to work wearing a ski mask, m a full ski mask, assuming you don't have a reason, like you don't you don't have burns or something like that, or if you know, if you maybe if you work at a you know, an antarctic receipt research facility and you have to walk across you know, the barren waste lands, No, I can think that would be okay, I'm saying more like you work in an office, or maybe you know,

you work at Walmart. Um, yeah, I'd say that this is a terrible idea. You should not wear that full scheme ask to work because people are going to assume that you're hiding your identity and possibly about to rob the place. Yeah, that seems pretty obvious. But do you ever stop to think, Wait a minute, why biologically is that the case? Why is it that hiding your face

is an extreme social taboo? Whereas hiding other parts of your body is not like it's not taboo to wear a shirt to work or to wear gloves to work. I mean you, you would expect certain parts of the body to be covered, and people could potentially identify you by other parts of your body than your face. But that just seems like like ridiculous to us. Of course

it's the face we would identify you by. Well, I think identity is key here because a mask gives one the ability to, i mean certainly to change inter identity to a certain extent, because we've we've discussed this before and with clothed cognition, but a mask changes outer identity. Um, you look to all the various great mass traditions and human history, you know, from from very very old, very ancient practices to even more recent creations such as lucid

libray masks, like the mask changes. It transforms the individual into something else. Putting on a mask inherently suggests a kind of performance, right yeah, yeah, you are becoming something

other than your you know, baseline identity. And on the Lucha liber note, I do recommend anyone who hasn't watched one of these matches check out a mask versus mask match like a big one, and then watch the ending, in which generally like an older luchador will unmask and in doing so they will cease to be this fabulous panther person or you know, or some other kind of exotic semi as tech creation, and they become this older man and and and he'll and he'll be in tears,

and sometimes family members will be there in tears. And even though it is all performance, uh and it is uh there, there is still this like there's a passion there, there's a true transformation. There's a loss of an established identity. Why is that the thing that's so emotional? I mean, it's silly to ask. It's so obvious to us that faces are the things that are the visual marker of the identity of a person. But yet again I insist it doesn't have to be that way. That's just how

it is. Biologically. For some reason, we are incredibly compelled by the image of the human face. And it's the thing that most people tend to most associate with the humans identity. Right, We're we're just strongly wired for faces. Yeah. A fun note that I believe I've probably mentioned on the show before is that the human face is a communications array input output, right, Yeah, so it's not only for purposes of receiving communication via the organs positioned on it,

but it also conveys. So yeah, we've heard for instance, uh, there's a two thousand eight check study that found that facial expressions alone speak a thousand words. We've discussed micro expressions on the show before as well, but I always come back to an interesting point raised in a two thousand twelve U c l A primate study. The more solitary is species, the more wild and colorful. Meanwhile, the more social primates are more plain faced, because this theoretically

allows us to see facial expressions more easily. So yeah, you don't want to like a bunch of wild colors. You want something kind of plain that you can in which you can see all the variants nuances of communication. Almost makes me think of that in a time when written manuscripts were rare, there was a lot of adornment and calligraphy and illumination of them, and now now that they're much more common, they tend to be more utility oriented.

You just want to be able to clearly read what's on the page, right, and of course, you still need to be able to identify individual faces, because that's part of knowing who's who within a social order. Incidentally, research shows that chimps can also recall the specific butts of

other chimps as readily as we recognize specific faces. And of course this this I can't help, since we're talking about face blindness today, I can't have help, But wonder if it's possible for a chimp to experience butt blindness. I would venture a guest that, say, standard neurological deviation from what what chimp brains normally do. There are but

blind chimps. But yeah, so we are going to be talking about this concept of face blindness today, and this is a topic that's come up tangentially on the show before, but today people have asked for it, and we've decided to devote an entire episode to it. If you've never heard otherwise, you might just assume that everybody has roughly the same ability to instantly process and recognize visual face data. Maybe you assume that there's like a normal range of

ability at recognizing faces. Some people are a little better at it, some people are a little worse at it. You probably know some people who recognize every actor in a movie. Some people who don't recognize people quite as easily.

But you might just assume there's a standard range. Pretty much everybody reads faces, and that's just how it is, right, Yeah, chances are, unless you've come to believe you you are are better or less able than other individuals, you doably think that your facial recognition is the normal level of facial recognition, and it's important to recognize that for most people. I think that normal level of facial recognition is incredibly powerful.

Like it's a highly tuned neural instrument that is able to read tiny variations in visual data and match that to extremely detailed amounts of mental concepts and associations and memories. Like it's a truly remarkable process. How easily and quickly

most people are able to match faces to other information. Yeah, I I would uh, I would certainly encourage everyone after this episode to to think about it as you're recognizing faces, as you're you know, glimpsing someone you know for the first time, or that fabulous experience when you glimpse somebody that you think you know and then realize that you don't know them, Like it it passes the initial UH tests of facial recognition before it's ruled that no, this

is a stranger who just has a very similar nose to your friend. But the truth is, in fact that everybody is within this normal range of facial recognition ability. So the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote memorably about the many ways that our brains can behave abnormally in books like The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which was published in nineteen eighty five. He wrote about his own problems with recognizing faces in a truly excellent

two thousand ten article for The New Yorkers. So he starts by talking about his childhood and he writes about how as long as he could remember, he had a hard time identifying a person by their face, like when he was a kid. He didn't think of this as a particular neurological disorder. He just thought he was quote bad with faces. And you know, as you can imagine, this would be embarrassing because he would see people he

knew intimately and not recognize them on site. What comes naturally to most people, like picking a familiar face out of a crowd, would become a difficult and laborious process, and he found he had to carefully and intentionally memorize particular features and characteristics to remember what people look to like. So somebody might have, Okay, that guy's got heavy eyebrows and thick glasses and red hair, so I can log

that and remember it for next time. Most of the time people don't have to uh use this kind of conscious effort to remember facial characteristics of people. But even then, Sacks says it often didn't work. Like after his graduation, he had high school friends who could go back and look at photos of old classmates and recognize hundreds of them, and Sacks himself could not recognize a single person from

his high school by their face, not one. And you might think, well, at least he be able to recognize his own picture right, not necessarily. Later in this piece, Sacks writes, quote, on several occasions, I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror. The opposite situation once occurred at a restaurant. Sitting at a sidewalk table, I turned towards the restaurant window and

began grooming my beard as I often do. I then real is that what I had taken to be my reflection was not grooming himself but looking at me oddly. Huh, you know this, this does remind me. We uh, we touched on self facial recognition a little bit in our most recent Ignoble Prizes episode of study with twins, but

with the inverted ones. Yeah, but it does make one realize here talking about Oliver Sax seeing himself in the mirror, that for the vast majority of a human history, like self facial recognition, like what is what is that for? When would you ever see your own face? I guess only when looking into maybe into a body of water, right, yeah, but then only faintly, maybe seeing aspects of your own face in um, you know, in biological children or in

your parents. But even then you you kind of need some sort of clear reflection that you're going off of. For all that, I'm just gonna earmark that one for later. Maybe we'll come back to considerations of self facial recognition.

No, no no, no, that that is actually really interesting because we Yeah, you're right, for most of human history, there wouldn't have been a whole lot of opportunities to see reflections of oneself, except maybe when over a body of water, and one could potentially pose it that modern humans who are constantly looking into reflective surfaces or looking at photos of themselves are having in fact their minds warped from from this constant exposure to the image of the self,

Whereas that's not something you would actually see maybe more than a couple of times a day normally when you go to drink from a pool. Now you see it every time you go to the bathroom, every time you get up in the morning, probably more times than that. You're taking selfies all day. A bet, maybe we'll have

to come back and do an episode on Narcissus. Yeah, yeah, But anyway, So I want to zero in on some of the particulars that Oliver Sacks talks about in his own case of face blindness, because it's not just that he has trouble recognizing faces. There's some interesting characteristics to this condition he has. One of the things he talks about is that he has a lot more difficulty recognizing

people when he sees them out of context. And an example of that might be Okay, so you have an appointment to meet a certain person at a certain place at a certain time every week, and you go and when you see that person in the time and place you expect to meet them, you're pretty sure you recognize them, this is the right person. But then you could see the same person a few minutes later in a place where you don't expect to see them, maybe you know,

downstairs and around the corner, and not recognize them at all. Yeah, I mean, I think how jarring it can be to run into someone in the wrong place, you know, out of place. I'm not supposed to see a co worker at the grocery store. But it throws you. It throws you completely off. But if you had a problem with facial problem, a problem with facial recognition on top of that, it could be even worse, because then you'd have someone who looks mostly like a stranger to you saying like,

oh hie, and you don't know how to respond. So, for Sax, the inability to recognize faces is also paired with an equally frustrating inability to recognize places. He reports that he would get lost extremely easily, even in familiar neighborhoods, and he tells a story about how one time he was trying to walk home in the rain, and he walked past his own house, his own place of residence, several times in the rain, before somebody yelled at him and is like, what are you doing. He thought he

was lost and didn't realize he'd made it home. And this isn't just for Sacks. The environmental blindness is apparently something that a not not all by any means, but a significant subset of people with face blindness also experience. Another a few other things about Sacks. He reports that members of his own family seem to have the same condition, implying that there may be some kind of genetic component. Uh. He notes that he can actually recognize caricatures of people

better than photos or realistic drawings of them. Yeah, because it's probably drawing attention to the sort of like notable features that you would need a queue into to circumvent um facial blindness. Yeah, exactly, Like, Okay, this person has enormous eyebrows, and then that the first thing that a character sure artist is going to draw just outrageous eyebrows. It makes me wonder if there are face blind caricature artists. Interesting. Yeah.

Another thing he says is that he's better at recognizing people by the way they move or what he calls quote their motor style, than by their face. So try to imagine that if, like you were better at identifying a person by their gait and their posture and you know, the way they move their arms, then by the stuff

that's on the front of their head. But this last point is something that I think is really interesting, and I do want to emphasize it's been true about a lot of what I've read about face blindness, or as the proper name for face blindness is prosopagnosia, And we'll get more into the general idea of agnosia in a minute.

But but that sax says that while he has trouble recognizing individual faces or telling them apart, he's perfectly capable of recognizing things about faces, like the expressions they make, or whether the face is attractive of And I think this is a crucial distinction. It's not generally that the prosopagnostic person can't see faces. It's not like it's just a blur and there's nothing there, But they lack some

kind of crucial recognition, sorting and storage capability. And based on my reading, I think I've come up with an analogy that that sort of makes sense for people who don't have a condition like this. Think about bushes of the same type, like holly bushes. So imagine two different holly bushes of roughly the same size. If you are a neurologically typical person, you can perfectly well see both of these bushes and describe their characteristics, and you can

see little things that might be different about them. But would you be able to recognize the same holly bush that you looked at a few minutes ago if it was placed in a different context. I mean probably not right, you see a bush? Yeah, I mean, I mean that's certainly the way I feel. Based on my experiences with with identifying plants, I've always had a great deal of difficulty even even like determining something that I need to

be aware of, like poison ivy I have. I seem to have poison ivy blindness despite being uh very susceptible to it. Yeah. Well, because I mean a lot of things in the plant world, your mind is not highly attuned and noticing minute differences in so you're just seeing a lot of leaves, right, even though you can see them fine, there's nothing wrong with your seeing. It's a

problem with like discerning little differences and recognizing those differences. Now, earlier you mentioned the idea could have characterture artist have face blindness. Well, I don't know about character artists, but we do have one very notable example of an artist with face blindness. Yeah, Sax actually talks about this in this article. But the artist Chuck Close is known for having prosopagnosia, so he can't recognize people by their faces. And yet what is the art he's most known for.

It is these huge, very detailed, sort of photo realistic portraits of people's faces. Yeah, which is which is always fascinating me because you do see this, this contemplation of what it is to identify a face in his work. Yeah, I think this also sort of highlights the thing I was just saying about. The Holly Bush is right, it's not that you don't see the face, but that it's

some kind of storage and recognition and sorting problem. Like he apparently can see faces, great, because he does a mate like he sees more detail in a face than I do. But again, this comes back to the truth that he's not It's not that he cannot see the face. He just he processes the information of the face in a different way. Right. Another interesting example of a famous person with prosopagnosia is Jane Goodall. I don't think I

was aware that Jane Goodall had face blindness. Yes, Sex writes about her, and she so she says, quote, I've had huge problems with people with average faces. I have to search for a mole or something. So she's saying, like, I have to find some kind of unique identifying characteristic to remember, you know. Yeah, when there is a uniformity of a photo style and personal styling, it can be

rather difficult. I've, for instance, I've had this situation where I'll go on IMDb and I'll try to figure out who a particular actor is in a film, and and then you start looking at the head shots. Is this the person? Yeah, It's like sometimes there'll be five or six people in a film that have essentially the same head shot. Like it's this because they're all styled in the same way. They have kind of the same facial features. And I'm I'm not talking about your Irran Pearlman's here.

I'm talking about your your leading man, leading lady material like sometimes there is an uncomfortable uniformity to the dimensions of the face and the way that they are styled and photographed. Oh yeah, I mean, I think there's no denying that certain faces are easier to recognize than others. Right, Some just appear more distinctive, and other people have more generic or average types of features given a certain population.

One of the things that this makes me think about, though, is that for people with typical face recognition skills, I think it might not immediately be apparent how problematic this could be. Being typical, I think sometimes leaves you in a position where you're not prone to imagine the difficulties that people in atypical conditions have to work through. Indeed, we tend to think of it as a bedrock aspect of our reality. But we're not in the world as

it is. We were in the world as we perceive it, the world constructed via the instruments of our perception, and if one of those instruments is out of tune, it changes the world. Yeah, I mean. Sachs actually says that he thinks some of what his entire life has been interpreted as his shyness or his social ineptitude, his eccentricity, or even his Asperger syndrome is actually a consequence of

his difficulty with recognizing people's faces. And many people over the years contacted him with similar comments that you know, really, what was going on with them in their lives is they had trouble recognizing people by their faces, whereas all the people around them did not have this trouble, and this was interpreted by people around them as them being rude or aloof or worse. Anyway, I guess we can take a quick break, then when we come back, we

can talk about the condition of generalized agnosias. Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. So today we've been talking about prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and prosopagnosia seems to be a specific manifestation of a more generalized condition known

as agnosia, which is a failure to recognize something. Yeah, Agnosia is a broad category of stimuli transmission scrambling conditions, so it's a it's a rare area of neural disorder that disrupts the ability to process sensory information, and this includes such specific conditions as phone agnosia or voice blindness. As well as, of course, UH prosopagnosia face blindness, which we're focusing on today, and there are a number of

other varieties as well. I actually ran across a really interesting one when I when I was trying to figure out these characters that pop up in our Scott Baker's Second Apocalypse saga, These these non men, essentially the that the l of his world. I remember you talking to Scott about those and you were saying, I think that they couldn't see art, right, Well, they couldn't see paintings. Uh, it's and this is something that a human character says of the non men. So I was curious. I was like, well,

what could that consist of? What could make someone be enabled to to see uh, two dimensional art? That would make you have to rely on three dimensional art? Of course,

this brought me to the realm of agnosia. Uh. There are a number of cases that relate directly to the cognitive experience of music, as well as various forms of visual community visual information and UH I actually ran across the case of an artist who, following an accident, developed an inability quote to identify single objects on visual presentation and displayed marked difficulty in interpreting complex objects, depicted scenes,

and partially occluded figures, so he could still recognize geometric forms, perceive optical illusions, and copy designs. He could, in fact, he could in fact ualize many of his artistic skills, but his post injury work exhibited quote an over elaboration of detail. Yeah. I think it's interesting that you mentioned he could copy designs. So this tells you there's not really a problem with the seeing aspect if he's just trying to copy like lines and shading and stuff like that.

But it's a problem with the recognizing aspect of the brain. What the brain does with the visual information once it comes in. Now, as you mentioned, I did give the chance to actually ask Scott about the non men and their inability to see paintings in one of our two thousands seventeen interviews with him. Uh, And so I thought I would just cut out his answer here and uh

and read it for everyone. Uh. He says, quote, you always want to distinguish your various races and species you create in speca to fiction, and this notion of non men not being able to see two dimensional visual representations is a textual detail along those lines, but it actually does have a rationale. Just think of the caveman in Chevet and France. They dragged their charcoal stains across the cave walls for the first time and realizing they could

see a shape in that, they experimented. It turns out for humans that we can actually see horses and bison and figures of humans given a very very small amount of visual information. A finger covered in charcoal dragged across a cave wall is enough for us to be able to recognize a lion or a horse. The famous horses

of Cheves are a wonderful example of this. For non men, their ability to cue cognition of scenes simply requires a bit more information, and particularly requires depth information, so they can see representations the way we can. They just have difficulty with two dimensional representations, just simply because the amount of information that is given in two dimensional representation isn't enough to actually cue the cognitive systems involved in recognizing

horses and tigers and what have you. So it's just one of many ways in which my blind brain theory has sort of nuanced the background and the landscape of the novels. So there are scots referring to his idea that like the brain doesn't understand and the mechanisms by which it generates the recognitions or sensations or perceptions. Yeah, and I should also just add in passing that his two thousand eight novel Neuropath actually has a character in it that that that has face blindness, and it pops

up as a minor plot point. Now, I mentioned music earlier, and I should mention that that we do have an earlier episode of Stuff to Blow your mind title Minds of Musical Emptiness that explores the conditions of a musia and auditory agnosia. Auditory agnosia basically breaks down into two different forms. Uh. There's the classical form, which entails environmental sound, so you hear a bird or a car, but you're unable to process the sound. And then there's also interpretive

or receptive agnosia, which entails music. So basically what I'm trying to drive home here is that, like you see some version of this with various forms of stimuli. Uh, there's finger agnosia, inability to recognize the fingers of the hand. Um, there's a time agnosia and ability to interpret the passing of time. And then semantic agnosia, which has is essentially object blindness, so like you can see an object, but

it doesn't it doesn't register to you what that object is. Yeah. Yeah, So, and again I think all of this underlies just what are perceived reality really is. That it is very much this perceived reality, and it is not this bedrock reality that so many of us assume that it is. Yeah. And as we've been hammering on, it's not just when it's visual information. It's not just site it's not just

normal visual recognition. A lot of the things we do require kind of specialized evolved superpowers, which most people have. Most people have this superpower for recognizing and categorizing thousands of faces. But how does it happen that some of us don't have this superpower? Before we, uh, we go any further here, I do want to point out that there there is an episode of the hand Nible television series,

season one, episode ten. Actually this is the Eating People one Yes, yeah, which is a very fun series about Hannibal lecter Um, basically the based on the Red Dragon novel and they kind of roll that out and bring in characters in situations from other books while also just creating this universe of crazy dramatic serial killers. So is it kind of like an Oliver Sacks book but they

eat the person at the end of each chapter sort of. Yeah, But this particular episode was is notable because again there's a character with face blindness, and so when Hannibal walks into the room, we get their p o V view and all they see is like a Hannibal with a featureless face, just like a skin face. And it's very creepy and effective in the television episode. But based on everything we've discussed here, this does not seem to be what facial blindness actually is, at least in most cases

we've read about. Everybody's different there. There may actually be perception problems and how some people process faces, but most of the cases that I've read about don't seem to be perception problems there, recognition problems. Yeah. Yeah. I should also add that the character that has face blindness in that episode also suffers from Cotard syndrome, which we did

an episode on. This is when you believe that you were a corpse, yeah, or believe in some other sense that you sort of don't exist, right, So, uh, you know, Hannibal is was a fun television series, and that it trotted out a lot a number of these ideas, but sometimes, as one might expect from a network television horror drama, Uh, they're not going to maybe utilize those ideas to a depth that fully illuminates what they are. Yeah, you get

a kind of sensationalized version that's more towards fulfilling the plot. Now, I was reading one. I don't know about you, Joe, but when when I was reading about face blindness, it's frequently mentioned that cases of order observation of face blindness. Uh, did they date back to antiquity? Yeah, though maybe not

recognized as a neurological condition. But yeah, I mean I think about there's a story I believe if I'm remembering right in the Gospel of Luke, where where after Jesus has died and then resurrected, some people walk with him for a while on the road, and then after he leaves there like, wait a minute, that was Jesus. It's like, wait a minute, why didn't they recognize him? And you gotta wonder, like, wait, was this supposed to be a person with face blindness? Huh? Well, I didn't run across

any commentary on that. But I did find a two thousand fourteen paper from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament that mentions face blindness. This is from author Brian R. Glennie, who ponders the implications of Mark eight versus twenty two through So this is a this is a reading from that. I believe this is the King James version. And he cometh to Bethseda, and they bring a blind man unto him, and this ought him to touch him. And he took the blind man by

the hand and led him out of the town. And when he had spit on his eyes and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he has if he saw aught, And he looked up and said, I seem in his trees walking. After that he put his hands to again upon his eyes and made him look up, and he was restored and saw every man clearly. And he sent him away to his house, saying, neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.

So in in this Glenny ponders this double he healing here in which Jesus first appears to heal the optical and then the cognitive blindness in the individual. Okay, so first he makes him able to see and then makes him able to recognize. Right, so he says quote without facial recognition. However, many people appear tree like because trees

closely resemble the human body without facial features. Thus, the blind man's own report provides suggestive evidence that the first healing clears away cataracts, providing full optical sight, but it fails to enable him cognitively to identify the faces of people, thus leaving the middle blind man in the condition of prosopagnosia. I think that's a really interesting interpretation on the verse.

Another way you could interpret it is that he's more like in the middle position that Hans Solos in the Big Fight in Return of the Jedi, where he says, like, you know, I see a big light spot or a big dark spot or something. Yes, yes, so yeah, maybe that's what's going on. Like he's like, I don't see detail yet. I just see like shapes moving around, pointy shapes. But no. I like the prosopagnosia interpretation. That's interesting, but that's all I was really able to find in terms

of cases of face blindness and antiquity. So there are better examples out there that listeners are aware of, let us know, we would love to hear them. Well, we should look at a little bit about the history of prosopagnosia. So it was extensively studied, I think first, and it's acquired form, which in which it's believed to be pretty rare, right like, people with acquired prosopagnosia aren't all that common.

But more recently it's become clear that there is an inherited or developmental form of prosopagnosia which exists from birth or early childhood and is not caused by injury or disease, and this can be spread from parents to children and is much more common than the acquired version, right because the acquired version, again is going to depend upon a

particular injury or disease damaging the brain and affecting cognition. Uh. And of course we see we see plenty of examples of studies to deal with individuals that you know, they've sustained some sort of damage has changed the way their brain works, and the study of that change illuminates how healthy brain works. Now, generalized visual agnosia was medically recognized at least as far back as the eighteen nineties, but specific types of visual agnosia for specific classes of images

like faces or places. That wasn't really recognized until later, in like the late nineteen forties, when the German neurologist Joachim bodomer Uh disc gcribed three patients who were unable to recognize faces but had no other neurological problems with

recognition just faces. So if you've got many people who independently report a condition in which the only thing wrong with you is that you can't recognize faces, but you can recognize everything else, that seems to indicate there's probably a discrete, specialized function in the brain for face recognition that can be impaired. Right, that was going to be the case, And so autopsies on people who died with acquired prosopagnosia, which was the more studied version first, were

amazingly consistent. They almost all show lesions on the same region of the brain, which is the right hemisphere, which is often thought of as the visual hemisphere, the right hemisphere of visual association cortex, which is down on the bottom of the occipito temporal cortex and specifically in a place called the fusiform gyrus. So that's a lot of terminology, but generally, if your picture in the brain, it's going to be down near the bottom, sort of between the

back and the middle of the brain. And so that was established in autopsies, but CT scanning an m r I on live patients actually revealed the same thing. While people were still alive, they if they had face blindness, they tended to have lesions on the right hemisphere of visual association cortex, which eventually came to be known as

the fusiform face area. And then in the ninety nine fMRI I studies showed that when people were actively looking at pictures of faces as opposed to pictures of other things like inanimate objects, this fusiform face region showed increased activity.

Now here's a question about underlying causes. Why do many people with face blindness also seemed to have location blindness difficulty recognizing physical locations, like Oliver Sacks described in himself and many of many of the other people he talked to with this condition, Like, are these processes maybe mediated by the same brain region being turned to different tasks or is it merely adjacent brain regions where allusion in one region or or some other abnormality in one region

could easily stretch over into the other. This leads us to the idea that some researchers think maybe prosopagnosia is not so inherently a problem with faces, but a specific example of a more generalized problem in which people have difficulty telling items within a specific category apart, and that category has something to do with expert knowledge expert visual recognition.

And this brings us to the Vanderbilt cognitive neuroscientist Isabel Gauthier so in a paper in Nature Neuroscience called activation of the middle fusiform face area increases with expertise in

recognizing novel objects. Gauthier and colleagues start by pointing out that there's a section of the ventral temporal lobe or what we were talking about before, the occipitotin poral cortex that both brain imaging studies and neuro psiological studies, as we mentioned, have shown is crucial for processing human faces.

And there have been some other curious findings up to this point preceding their research in and they found out that inversion of the images, so inversion like flipping upside down, is more detrimental to the recognition of faces than to other types of objects, and they also recognized that upright

faces are recognized more holistically than other objects. However, more research showed that these conditions were also true about non face objects for people who had expertise in those objects, Like if you are a dog show judge and you look at pictures of dogs, they seemed to for some reason obey these same inversion rules that other people showed with looking at pictures of faces. It was like, if if you're a dog show expert, then looking at a dog is kind of like a normal person looking at

a face. So is this area of the brain really dedicated solely to faces or that have other potential? Could the fusiform face area actually be a more general visual expertise area and the fact is that most people are just primarily experts at faces. Well, the well, Gautier in her colleagues came up with an interesting way of testing this. They made some greebeless Greebel's Robert, I think I've got

a picture of Greebel's for you to look at. This is not Greebel's in the in the Imperial Star Destroyer. Since al right, well these look like abstract goblins. That's kind of what I get from him. Yeah, what do They remind me of a very specific abstract goblin actually, but I can't recall exactly what it is. Well, they also kind of look like the They look like something

Jim Hinson would create. They also remind me of that that squeezy doll that would will you squeeze in its eyeballs pop out forget what that toy was was called classic American toy. You're exactly right, Nedri had one in Jurassic Park that he was squeezing. Yeah. So Greebel's are novel objects with weird d tales that people could be trained over time to have expertise in in categorizing and recognizing.

And they're not faces. They're just things with arrangements of details, right though they do kind of look like noses and horns. Some of them look more like noses than horns. Some of them just look kind of like spiky totem poles.

So the researchers they made these Greeble images that were these weird spiky totem pole things, and then they used fMRI I to scan the brains of test subjects who had variable expertise in Greeble's While viewing Greeble's passively and in a categorization task, and the results were quote acquisition of expertise with novel objects, meaning Greebles, led to increased activation of the right hemisphere face areas for matching of

upright greebles as compared to matching inverted greebles. The same areas were also more activated in experts than in novices during passive viewing of Greeble's, So expertise seems to be one factor that leads to specialization in the face area. So they use this to suggest that visual expertise recruits the fusiform gyros or the face area. And then there was another interesting study by Gauthier and colleagues in Nature Neuroscience in two thousand where they did a kind of

similar experiment. They tested the brains of people who had visual expertise in subjects like cars and birds compared to people who did not, and what they found was that car experts, bird experts, and regular subjects all showed activation of the fusiform face area when looking at human faces, but car experts also showed activation of the same region when looking at cars, and bird watchers showed the same

when looking at birds. So it looks like what's going on according to these results is that everybody uses this fusiform face area to see faces and immediately recognize them. But if you are really good at picking out details and differences of objects in a certain category, maybe you're an expert in the different kinds of troll dolls or

something like that. When you look at the troll doll, then you recruit the special face processing center of the brain to take take advantage of its expertise and say, I want to see as much detail in the differences between troll dolls as I would normally see in the differences between human faces. Interesting, and there's an interesting corollarya of this that Sax points out in his New Yorker article.

If an expert bird spotter gets an injury leading to acquired prosopagnosia, they will probably also lose their ability to recognize birds. Oh Man, But I think it's also worth stressing that the fusiform face region doesn't work alone, because other findings have shown that this face area is basically it's a vital part of the face recognition system, but

it's not the whole system. It's part of a chain of neural activity passing between different brain regions, from the occipital cortex to the prefrontal cortex and through through the whole process of seeing someone associating the face with information and memory, generating a feeling of familiarity. So another takeaway from this would be that it's possible you could have other forms or variants of face blindness without damage to the fusiform face area if some other part of the

face recognition pathway is failing. But again we come back to the realization the brain is a complex, integrated system, and uh, it's very difficult to isolate just one area that is involved in some sort of uh, you know, complex sensory computation. Yeah, you can very often identify areas that are vital for something but also peripherally depend on

other areas. All right, well, on that note, let's take a break, and when we come back, we will discuss the issue of treatment and potential treatment for individuals with face blindness. Thank you, thank alright, we're back. So a team of researchers published a review called Face Processing Improvements in Prosopagnosias Successes and Failures over the Last fifty Years, in which they tried to look into. What what have

we turned up in terms of possible treatments for prosopagnosia. Yeah, and basically, the one of the big take homes is that there are no hard and fast cures. Yeah, there's no there's no real total cure yot. Yeah, there's not a there's not a pill you can take, there's not a procedure that can be performed. But according to the study, some methods and training techniques do seem to help. So for acquired postopagnosia, quote, strategic compensatory training such as verbalizing

distinctive facial features unquote is effective. Okay, So that would be like saying, I want to remember what Robert looks like, so I remember he has and you start naming things out loud about your face right right. For instance, with me, sideburns would probably be a key indicator. You know, what is the thing about this person that I can latch onto to help me remember them. Another example from the paper is encoding the faces in conjunction with details about

the profession. Okay, like this this person is a doctor, and that is a doctor's nose, I suppose. Okay, Yeah, so you're you're like creating associate of helpers. Yeah, yeah, you're you're sort of weaking the informational system, uh, so that you can better remember who this person is and how they fit into your life. Now. Though there is no known reliable cure, people have recovered from prosopagnosia before. Yeah. Yeah, we have seen spontaneous, full and partial recovery. Uh. And

this is a major area of consideration for researchers. Obviously, what happened there? Yeah, what happened? What can we learn from this this recovery? Um. For the most part, however, it seems clear that quote the face processing system once

damage is not easily remediated, even in a young plastic brain. Uh, that being one of the major findings of Ellis and young from So, I mean, that's kind of the bad news here, right, Like, even if it's a young, healthy brain that has a lot of plasticity, that that that can or come back bounce back from various injuries, there's not a lot of room to bounce back from this.

But there have been these studies that seem at least to show some some moderate improvements or improvement by degrees, right, I mean, especially when we get out of the acquired area and get into the truly developmental area. So for children with developmental prosopagnosia. Uh, some of these methods also work for adults with with developmental prosopagnosia. Remedial training and oxytocin administration has resulted in improvement improves c tosin. That's interesting. Yeah, Still,

there are no widely accepted treatments. Most individuals ultimately have to develop their own strategies, sometimes with the aid of these established methods. Now, one of the things that people might not realize is that the acquired While the acquired version seems to be pretty rare, the developmental version is actually pretty common. Multiple studies I've read have found somewhere around like two to two point five percent of the

general population have some degree of prosopagnosia. Yeah. I know one individual in my own like real world life that that that that claims to have a certain level of face blindness. Yeah. And so, while there aren't really totally reliable known treatments yet, one thing that could certainly help is if other people are more accommodating to people who have face blindness, Like, don't necessarily conclude that someone is rude or something like that if they don't immediately recognize you,

it's possible that they have prosopagnosia. Another thing that you could possibly do to help people with prosopagnosia, it's a very simple ways just to identify yourself when you meet them, you know you, instead of just saying like hey, you say hey, it's me Joe, good to see you. And I realized that can be difficult though, because you, like I have a lot of I guess social anxiety that kicks in in situations like this. I don't want to sound like I think you've forgotten my name, you know?

Oh yeah, I mean I guess that. That one is easier to do if you know the person has prosopagnosia. It would be more awkward saying that to people who don't have it. And yeah, but seriously, there are people that I mean not people I know closely, but but people that I know who they are, but I either didn't learn their name or didn't really catch catch on. But it's too late. I can never introduce myself to them again, and I can never ask what their name

is again. We're is doomed to awkwardly run into each other and not say each other's names. Oh yeah, I know that problem. Like I'm constantly recognizing faces, but forgetting the name. Yeah, there's a somebody. There's this guy at work that has the same problem. What's his name? But no another like small thing. This is like such a no brainer really, But like name tags, especially in uh

in like large groupies, parties, um churches, community groups. You know, it's we've become accustomed to seeing like the name tag table, and I've i have found myself falling into the situation where I'm like, I need to fill out a name tag. Well what I want to name tag for? You know. But really that's one way you could be marginally helpful to individuals who have trouble with faces. I agree. Yeah, So those are some of the sort of everyday implications.

But what are some of the more interesting implications of face blindness? You know? One of the things that Sachs talks about in his article is that the recognition of a visual arrangement like a face or a place is not just seeing all of the parts and seeing them together. It's not just taking in the data of shapes and colors. It's connecting that visual data to some sense of meaning, right, it's a feeling or a word or a concept and

association with other words and concepts and feelings. For example, the feeling of familiarity upon seeing someone is a crucial part of the face recognition system. Right when you have a face recognition system, you don't just see a person and then know their name and who they are. You see a person, you know their name and who they are, and you think I will approach them because I know this person. Either way, but either way, that's an emotion,

and the feeling actually matters, and it's important. It's an important part of what recognition is. So actually, the way Sax puts it is that you know recognition is based on knowledge. I associate information with that face, while familiarity is based on feeling. I should walk up and say hi. And you can actually have one without the other. Both ways, you can see a person and you can have the feeling without the knowledge, or you could have the knowledge

without the feeling. Prosopagnosia seems to cause a loss of both, But there are people who have conditions like hyper familiarity of faces. There's actually a non neurological condition where people are constantly seeing faces that they don't actually recognize, but having the feeling of knowing the person, and so it's like I don't know who you are, but I feel like I know you, and you I want to walk up and say hi. And there are sometimes people who

just greet all kinds of people. On the other side of the coin, you can have cop gross syndrome right, where people recognize faces of people they know, but they do not experience the feeling of familiarity and thus believe that though this looks like my loved one, this person has been replaced by an impostor. I don't feel like I actually know them now, of course, looking forward into

the future. Again, we do not have any hard, vast treatments for UH for face blindness currently, but it's been pointed out that in treating it, in learning to treat it, in questing after an effective treatment for it, we are in effect questing after a way to treat autism, Williams syndrome, schizophrenia, in various age related cognitive declines, all of which may

entail facial recognition difficulties. And also it's previously discussed, the study of face blindness is also the study of of of normal facial recognition, the more we understand what's not working there, or we understand functional facial recognition, and from there the possibilities extend beyond the realm of medical science and into AI and robotics, where facial recognition is and

will continue to be crucial. And here here a few sort of outside thoughts to get a little I guess comic bookie in all, but what if we do figure out a way to treat it. I wonder if if this also opens the door for enhanced facial recognition, the creation of the sort of super seares that we've referenced previously. Uh, and what else would be possible? Recreational heightened ability to see abstract patterns as forms and symbols, heightened a musical hearing.

I mean, really, the possibilities of tuning the instruments that create the world around us, um, they're they're almost limitless possibilities there. I think this is something that's actually under explored in our superhero literature. Often when our superheroes have cognitive enhancements, it might be like super intelligence. More often it's super perception, right, so they can see through things, or they can see super far or something like that.

What's under explored is super recognition. What if they have normal sense data, but they are abnormally able to match that sense data with relevant other information in the mind. I would also it would also be interesting if you had more comic book characters that you know, because often there's a there's a trade off. Right, they have the superpower, but it also means that they, you know, can't touch somebody without catching them on fire or whatnot. It would

be interesting to have more. Is that a superhero? Well so sort of? The human flame is kind of like that, right, I guess you can turn it on flame on, flame off, But yeah, not not so for Dr burnoning, but it would be interesting off and maybe and for all I know, there there there is a common boo character that employs this where there are sensory tradeoffs. I can't come up with any great examples off the top of my head. But but it seems like the sensory realm of superhero

is not all that well explored. I agree, get more creative the next revision. Come on, you know we're seeing far, you know, hearing, having great here and great great eyesight. That tends to be the extent of it, right, It's just whatever we have um doubled or tripled, right, the the superhero should have the power not of super hearing, but of super match that tune, you know, they always know what that song is. Yeah, they're not useful on most Avengers missions, but every now and then the perfect

mission presents itself. I'm sure it does. It's often in the car when they've got the radio goes uh So. One thing I definitely want to say is that I want to hear from our listeners out there who have various degrees of prosopagnosia. Statistically, if it's too to two point five percent of the general population, we know we must have there. There's got to be a lot of you out there, So I'd love to hear what your experiences are like. In what ways do they line up

not line up with what we talked about today. Have you come up with any interesting strategies for for compensating for this in your life generally? What's it like? Yeah, we have a listener mail episodes coming up, and we'd love to share your experiences with everyone else. All right. In the meantime, be sure to check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the podcast, episodes, blog posts, links out to our various social media accounts as well. Big thanks as always to

our excellent audio producers, Alex Williams and Terry Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us directly to let us know feedback on this episode or any other, to let us know about your experiences with prosopagnosia, or just to say hi, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. The proper fas