The Woman Who Can't Recognize Her Face

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23482-mindscapes-the-woman-who-cant-recognise-her-face.html

by sofperseus • 13 years ago

39 57 13 years ago

ThomPete• 13 years ago

It's an old lecture but if you want to understand some of the reasons why this is happening I can't recommend http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lectures.shtml enough.

terolacu• 13 years ago

2.5% of the population? Is that accurate? Seems too high.

JOfferijns• 13 years ago

"The researchers, led by Ken Nakayama and Richard Russell at Harvard and Bradley Duchaine at University College London, have found evidence that prosopagnosia, once thought to be exceedingly rare, may affect up to 2 percent of the population – suggesting that millions of people may be face-blind."

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/06/face-blindness...

"Recently, a hereditary sub-type of congenital prosopagnosia with a very high prevalence rate of 2.5% has been identified."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/174866407X231001/...

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

Presumably most cases are much milder.

cristianpascu2• 13 years ago

It's fascinating that that by accident/by design we, animals or humans, can recognize anything at all.

mackwic2• 13 years ago

It's a survivor behavior. Recognize weak and strong elements in the group. Recognize safe places and easy to hunt animals.

Recognizing things is the essence of good decision making. And decision making is the essence of life.

So, yes, the odd for recognizing anything from a gigantic bunch of proteins, water, and subtle mix of heterogeneous chemicals, are very little. But, considering billions of year of billions of dices running, probability was high, don't you think ?

unclebucknasty10• 13 years ago

No, I don't think. Such order is not probable, given infinite time.

That all of this occured randomly, beginning with an explosion (involvng matter which should not have existed, by the way), is absurd.

People who argue against intelligent design may quibble with the details of a particular religion, but our attempts to scientifically describe creation are so woefully inadequate as to be no more actual science than is religion.

Randomness is one such "scientific" explanation. In fact, it is the religion of science, serving as the de facto answer for unknowns regarding creation and existence.

cristianpascu2• 13 years ago

> It's a survivor behavior.

That's not an explanation. This is not how evolution theory explains stuff.

CORRECT: Features are selected because they are useful. INCORRECT: Features occur because they are useful.

But most of the evolutionary explanations are expressed in the second way. Recognition is tightly correlated to awareness and consciousness, which in no way have been, yet, explained by evolution. Yet. Although there are voices that say that it is impossible in principle for consciousness to occur by means of mere matter.

It might be that consciousness is like 7+6 in a dice trow. No matter how many times you throw a pair of 6 faces dice, you will never get that combination.

Right now it is assumed that in the future neuroscience will show how the brain works and gives us the mind. Until then, it's an hypothesis. A belief. Not a religious belief, but part of a metaphysical view on the world, that is, there is only atoms. Not a religion, but close.

shail• 13 years ago

The headline is confusing. It should be "The Woman who can't recognize faces".

gems• 13 years ago

...

How is that confusing? Not recognizing her own face is a special case.

RexRollman• 13 years ago

I have to agree with the OP. The way the title is written, I took it to mean that she could recognize all faces except for her own.

kaybe2• 13 years ago

You can test yourself here:

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/

philh• 13 years ago

I just got two out of 18 that I was familiar with, but I'm not sure whether I was supposed to spend time thinking about it. Sometimes I was sure that I recognised the face, but couldn't place it, and said that I didn't know without really trying.

There were a few that I got wrong after thinking I knew it, and one that I got wrong after rejecting the correct answer as a hypothesis.

V gubhtug Ovyy Pyvagba jnf Fgrira Frntny; Wvz Pneerl jnf gur thl sebz Gur Fuvavat; Tnauqv jnf Rvafgrva; naq V qrpvqrq Znetrerg Gungpure jnf cebonoyl abg Znetrerg Gungpure. Ohg V tbg Xrnah Errirf naq Trbetr Ohfu.

eitland• 13 years ago

Honest question: These guys mention using the results for research. They must know they are skewing their results quite significantly by singling out anyone who is a) aware that the result of this test can be embarrasing b) not comfortable linking their name to such a test with?

I'd guess according to this test face blindness is far less common than previously assumed : )

kaybe2• 13 years ago

As I understood it, they're basically searching for people with prosopagnosia for further research. They also mention somewhere that some people with prosopagnosia can do well in the test (I assume if those people have seen the famous faces enough it can work for light cases.)

pbo• 13 years ago

This reminds of a fascinating book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.

One of the most interesting stories is about a man who lost his ability to intuitively recognize things and needs to reason about their features to find out what they are.

  This is my shoe, no?
  No, it is not. That is your foot. There is your shoe.
  Ah! I thought that was my foot.

Whole excerpt here: http://www.odysseyeditions.com/EBooks/Oliver-Sacks/The-Man-W...

lobster_johnson2• 13 years ago

One of my favourite non-fiction books. His other books, such as Awakenings, are also wonderful.

ryanmolden• 13 years ago

Currently reading Hallucinations. His coverage of such bizarre conditions as Akinetopsia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia) make his books great reads for the casually curious and really make it concrete how much of our reality is formed primarily in our heads.

eatitraw• 13 years ago

I wonder if it is possible to train people with such condition to successfully recognize faces.

I have some difficulties recognizing faces(not nearly as huge as describe in the article), and I think my ability improved during last couple of years.

DigitalTurk• 13 years ago

I would imagine that to be the case.

Witness how many people report being unable to distinguish people from ethnicities that they're not used to interacting with.

epochwolf• 13 years ago

Yup. Until I moved to the west coast all Indians looked like the same person to me.

thirdtruck• 13 years ago

Stories like these leave me dwelling on what the majority of the population may fail to notice due to hard-wiring. For example: a small percentage of people see a wider range of color than average.

Does "situational blindness" or "system-level blindness" exist on a neurological level?

WA• 13 years ago

There's this "mirror test" [1] where they put animals in front of a mirror. If they recognize themselves, they are considered to be aware of themselves.

This woman is either not aware of herself or her condition is a strong indicator that the mirror test might not be such a good idea at all. Definitely an interesting implication.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

laumars• 13 years ago

I've always considered The Mirror Test a deeply flawed experiment because it relies on a number of assumptions that are difficult (in my non-expert opinion at least) to guarantee.

For examples, babies are tested with a sticker, it's assumed that a baby's lack of motivation to remove the aforementioned sticker is proof that they baby is not yet self aware. Yet that's assuming that the child isn't just curious about his or her own appearance (as at that age they might not be familiar with their own image) so that the sticker is inconsequential to them.

lobster_johnson2• 13 years ago

I had an interesting case of momentary face blindness once. It was unnerving. I was elbowing my way through a very busy bar area (it was early and I had just started drinking) and eventually there was a person in front of me who started going to the left just when I went left, and vice versa, as often happens when you walk in a crowded place. After a few left/right attempts I suddenly realized that the person was, in fact, myself, and that I had reached a mirror that covered the entire end of the room. (The bar's bouncer was standing behind me and had watched the whole thing and was laughing very hard.)

The thing is, since I did not expect to see myself, I did not recognize myself. I believe that for one brief moment I truly saw myself as other people see me. We go through our lives being so psychologically connected to our outer selves, and being briefly disconnected feels very spooky.

alexholehouse• 13 years ago

I'm mildly face blind. Generally speaking it doesn't cause any problems - occasionally I spend the first 25 minutes of films wondering who is who and what's going on, and having missed the opening of The Departed I watched most of the film thinking Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg were the same person.

However, there have also been some excruciatingly embarrassing situations where I've re-introduced myself (or ignored) people I actually know, although typically I've only met them a couple of times. Bizarrely, I'm worst with caucasian blonde women.

bane• 13 years ago

I think I am a bit face-blind too, and it seems to be mostly with women as well. I'm almost completely thrown off when a woman does a complete makeover. I find myself flustered by actresses quite often, having almost no idea if I should know who this person in the film is or not.

I can usually tell the difference between the various actresses in the same film, but across films I definitely have trouble.

But I have had trouble with some films that have multiple young brunette male actors (in their 20s to early 30s). There's been more than one movie where I didn't realize two different characters were two characters until it was almost over (or one of them died and the other kept on kicking). A second watching usually gets me sorted out.

I frequently weirded out by people who can look at a random candid photo of a famous person in a disguise and know who it is. The folks who work at TMZ blow me away.

shubhamjain• 13 years ago

I am not only mildly face blind, I sometimes just can't recall names. I had the face test and I just realized that I had forgotten the name of lead actor of Rocky (S. Stallone), Ex- President of USA, Saturday Night Live star, Taxi Driver's Lead actor and what not.

canadev• 13 years ago

There's a really good scifi short story about something called calliagnosia, by Ted Chiang. (Calliagnosia is a condition in which a person can not recognize beauty in a persons face. Not sure whether it was invented for the story or not.)

Here is a crappy PDF of it: http://www.clarku.edu/welcome/placement/pdf/reading.pdf

I'd suggest picking an anthology with the story up if it interests you. I read it in "Best of Scifi 2002" or something like that.

frankiejr• 13 years ago

60 Minutes did a two-part segment on this last year, if anyone is interested:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417242n

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417240n

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

I remember being in a very interactive week-long seminar where one of the 30 participants was a white guy with a beard. A few days into it I realized he was two guys. Just before the end of the week I realized he was (at least) three guys.

dylanz• 13 years ago

This post creeps me out just a little bit, because I watched "Faces in the Crowd" last night (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1536410/), and I have never even heard of face blindness before. Waking up and checking HN to see this post is slightly spooky. That is all. Oh, and I personally wouldn't recommend the movie.

The Woman Who Can't Recognize Her Face

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