Have you heard of face blindness?
60 Minutes on Sunday night did a story on face blindness (also known as prosopagnosia). I suspect you probably take your ability to identify people by their face for granted, but not everyone is so blessed. People who suffer from face blindness cannot use facial features such as eyes, nose, lips or face shape to recognize a face. Instead, they rely on hair style, clothing style, gait, voice, etc. to identiy people in their life.
Scientists estimate 1 in 50 people suffer from this disorder, and they are either born this way, or lose the ability after a stroke or injury.
How do you recognize a face of a friend or family member?
How do you differentiate your dad’s facial features from your uncle, or the man next door?
How would tell someone to identify that this man is Bob and not Bill? And that Bill is not John, or Tim, or Zack!
Are you scratching your head?
We do a lot of powerful things with our subconscious mind, don’t we?
You don’t have to think about how you know Susan from Sandy, or Bill from Bob, or your co-worker from your neighbor. You just do it naturally and intuitively. You recognize the subtle differences that make up each face. But scientists don’t know how we do that. And when you think about it–it is complex.
How would tell a face blind person how you read people’s identity through their faces so they could identify 100 different men or women?
I somewhat liken face blindness to what I do. I see so many subtle elements that people communicate that others don’t, and I can tell you in a very challenging to communicate those subtleties to other people. You think all people see them, but they don’t.
Next time you run into someone that doesn’t seem to recognize you–give them a little extra space. They may suffer from face blindness.
I too related it to what you do. I have thoughts on this and more when I get the chance.
It’s amazing what our brains do without us thinking. There’s a condition similar to prosopagnosia which is called agnosia, which is where people don’t recognise objects or colours. They can look at a car and not understand what it is called, or what it is used for. If people have akinetopsia, they can’t percieve movement. They just view their world in snapshots, like still images in a flipbook. It just shows how complicated our brains are, even for things we take for granted.
I think one of the things I find interesting is the “we don’t know what we don’t know” aspect. The fact that many didn’t know it was a “condition” until it was pointed out. It was thought of as just a weaker ability. I understand this thinking. I’m also curious as to how effective corrective training is.
Two stories (myths/legends?) came to mind the other day when discovering facial blindness. These are stories that when I first heard, I thought were preposterous, regardless I let them roll around in my brain over the years, thinking “Can I, in any way, see this to be true?” I’m not even sure if it’s relatable to facial blindness, but I think so. There might be similarities in how the brain works.
The first one is that when Columbus landed the natives could not see the ships. They had never seen ships before, and to them, anything out there was just part of the ocean.
The other is similar in that the natives also saw a man on a horse as one complete creature as horses weren’t native to The Americas.
Whether true or not, these serve as an example on how the brain might “macro” something and not discern the details; especially if you don’t know something exists or are not taught. I guess that’s my point. Just brainstorming.
I don’t see either of those as plausible, although with some caveats for the ships. I could see them not recognizing those as a potential threat. I think they would look most like an island with trees, which would be unusual to see just appear one day, but you wouldn’t necessarily associate it with foreign people coming, or being a threat while it’s still out at sea.
The man on a horse thing I don’t buy at all. While horses were not something they’d be familiar with, there are plenty of other animals that they would be, and for sure they’d have seen human beings before since they were human beings. The human being template and animal template would allow them to see this as a man riding some strange new animal, I think, rather than one complete creature. I find it hard to imagine that none of them had ever tried to ride any other animal before. While I believe they didn’t have domesticated cattle or anything else, it just seems unlikely that they couldn’t have imagined a man sitting on an animal enough to recognize it when they finally saw it. That one particularly seems silly.
What I suspect is more likely, if this has a historical basis at all, is that this was a result of someone hearing an explanation and misinterpreting what was meant due to a social bias (as many of the pilgrims viewed the native Americans as mere savages to begin with) where they presumed they had a simpler mind and wouldn’t have been capable of understanding what they were seeing, and attributed their misinterpretation to that rather than to a miscommunication. Given what I’ve observed in even modern times, this seems the more likely explanation to me. The other explanation has some basis in that we don’t understand what we have no basis of knowledge for, but it’s too simplistic and seems to ignore some fundamental facts about the way the human brain processes information. We’re hardwired to compare things to each other, and draw inferences and identify patterns, to the point that we’re well known to identify patterns where none exists. To me, those stories— particularly the horse one— take a part of reality and go in the complete opposite direction to the rest of reality.
I could certainly be wrong though, as I’ve only ever heard people relate the ship one, but never within any proper academic historical context. What I mean by that is that while I’ve heard those claims before, I’ve never heard them from a real historian who’s spent the time actually studying those specific areas. I didn’t take the time to look that up yet either, but have you heard them from actual historians or just as anecdotes like I have?
Good points. Yeah, just anecdotes. You’re right. The horse one is rather silly, especially as you point out, the human template was known. It would be interesting to hear if any historian has a take on the ship one. I think I’d be too embarrassed to ask though. 😉
My feeling with the Native-American story is, “just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it’s not possible, and also, just because it may be possible, doesn’t mean it happened.” I agree with the high likelihood that the story originated from social bias.
I guess my interest is in whether it’s possible. Is it possible for the brain to mask something like that? To not see the differences between an empty ocean and one with a ship? If it can do it on a small scale (such as the face), is it unreasonable to think it could do it on a large scale?
In the video, when they showed the upside-down faces, which I think essentially showed us how the condition feels, I wonder if I would have noticed a cigarette in someone’s mouth? I don’t know, but I did miss the right-side up mouth that was cut and pasted. I agree that the brain is always contrasting and comparing, but this little experiment did throw me. Regardless, everything I am saying is a very big stretch, I just like exploring that stretch occasionally. Thanks for your input!
On a personal experience note: About eight years ago while in Fort Lauderdale for the first time, I had seen something that I had never seen. I knew this immediately and what struck me was the odd feeling I had. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen every single thing in my view at one time or another, it was the arrangement. I had seen ocean cruise liners, and beaches, and people swimming on beaches before, but I had never been on a highway (A1A), looking at beachgoers with a cruise liner in the background. It was jarring. It was huge in the distance. I was only used to seeing ships in ports, and only empty oceans (for the most part) with beaches.
I enjoyed this discussion!
If I recall correctly, Colin Turnbull in The Forest People (about the Ituri Forest pgymies) said that when a friend of his left the jungle for the first time he was stunned to see a Land Rover drive towards them across open land. To him, it looked like the LR was growing bigger–he wasn’t used to perspective because he had lived in an environment where the line of sight was restricted to shorter distances. I was skeptical of that when I read it, but I found it interesting.
As a development worker in West Africa, I certainly had the experience of explaining photographs to people who were not literate and had very little (perhaps even no) experience with printed matter (& definitely no experience with tv or movies). “Here’s the head … the right arm … the left arm …” I think interpreting photographs is a skill. It’s not an automatic consequence of having eyes and knowing what people look like.
I never understood the Columbus/ships thing, but I definitely feel that the centaur perception story could be correct.
When looking at video games with young friends, I have a very low ability to figure out what is going on. They have to point things out, explain what’s happening … and I still don’t get it. I don’t think this is just lack of familiarity with the task. I think it’s a (relative) visual processing deficit that comes from my lack of video and computer gaming experience.
Ha! My husband has face blindness and it is the source of much confusion and hilarity for me. An example: recently, he and some friends, one of whom is also face blind, went to see the new movie Anomalisa, which is a modern puppet film. My husband and his fellow face-blind pal both hated the film, but everyone else loved it. It turned out that they both missed the key plot point that all the puppets (except one) HAD THE SAME FACE. They had no idea!
He and I describe people completely differently. Half the time we have no idea who the other person is talking about. He can carefully observe separate features, which I think he perceives as objects, but he doesn’t read them as a whole. Usually he will memorize something about someone’s face so he can recognize them again. And usually that feature will be one that I didn’t even notice. Or he will say something that has no meaning for me, like, “she looks like a zebra”. ???
Usually, it’s easy for him to find me in a crowd. My type of face is unusual where we live, and few people have my features. But once, we had arranged to meet at a public festival for the music of my ethnic group. A large gathering of people who all had my nose, my hair, my eyes. To his horror, he could not find me 🙂
This reminds me about a short documentary on Judit Polgar the hungarian chess grandmaster where here brain was hooked up to an fMRI (or something like that) during a speed chess game, which she is especially adept at. One thing that was pretty incredible was that the part of the brain that activates when people are looking at and recognizing faces was activating when she was looking at a position on the board. And it’s worth mentioning she is looking at a position and moving almost instantly, and the doctors were thinking that this is a huge reason why she is able to so quickly analyze position after position in such rapid succession. We do that all day with faces but we take it for granted, it’s pretty fascinating she’s using that to her advantage
On a side note, her family is quite interesting as well. Her father, an educational psychologist, raised all three of his daughters to be chess prodigies and has said “genius’ are made not born”.
I mildly suffer from this. I remember once, as a child, my father shaved off his mustache. He was sitting at home in his usual spot when I got home from school. But I thought he was my uncle, and only realized it was my dad when he spoke.
It mostly just causes issues with people I’m acquainted to & only run into every once in awhile. They recognize me, I have no clue who they are sometimes. It sucks