
The Woman Who Can't Recognize Her Face - sofperseus
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23482-mindscapes-the-woman-who-cant-recognise-her-face.html
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lobster_johnson
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.

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pbo
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...](http://www.odysseyeditions.com/EBooks/Oliver-Sacks/The-Man-Who-
Mistook-His-Wife-for-a-Hat/Excerpt)

~~~
ryanmolden
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.

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alexholehouse
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
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.

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WA
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
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.

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kaybe
You can test yourself here:

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

~~~
eitland
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 : )

~~~
kaybe
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.)

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

~~~
gems
...

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

~~~
RexRollman
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.

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

~~~
JOfferijns
"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...](http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2006/06/face-blindness-
disorder-may-not-be-so-rare/)

"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/...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/174866407X231001/abstract;jsessionid=0E1E3A1E3E97AFA7EED6DDAC3374885C.d03t02?systemMessage=Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+11+May+from+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST+%2805%3A00-07%3A00+EDT%29+for+essential+maintenance)

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shubhamjain
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.

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auctiontheory
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.

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canadev
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.

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dylanz
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.

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frankiejr
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>

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thirdtruck
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?

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ThomPete
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.

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

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

~~~
mackwic
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 ?

~~~
unclebucknasty
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.

~~~
Fargren
Have you ever seen genetic algorithms at work? Any doubts I had about
evolution being a reasonable explanation for the complexity of life vanished
when I saw how quickly systems could converge to viable solutions to problems
by mixing characteristics from the most pat members of a population.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Yes, I did research on genetic algorithms with a professor in my college
years. Wrote a few myself, played with fitness measurements, crossover
methodologies, etc. I found them fascinating as well.

The theory of evolution can certainly describe some of what we see, however,
it is woefully incomplete in its suggested role in creation theory. And while
randomness clearly has a role in nature, it has become the default go-to for
too many things which science cannot explain. Notice how the parent just
casually tossed out randomness as the "obvious" explanation for such complex
behavior, as if it was a foregone conclusion. It's anything but.

These are tremendously organized and complex systems (including the creation
of the Universe itself), for which the prime driver is supposedly randomness.
I just think it funny that people deride religious explanations as utter
silliness, while so willingly believing that randomness is responsible for,
effectively, everything we see. What is scientific about that? We even suspend
basic laws of thermodynamics regarding matter creation to accomodate our
random-centric explanations.

Better to just say, "we don't know".

~~~
wglb
I recommend [http://www.amazon.com/COMPLEXITY-EMERGING-SCIENCE-ORDER-
CHAO...](http://www.amazon.com/COMPLEXITY-EMERGING-SCIENCE-ORDER-
CHAOS/dp/0671872346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367771719&sr=8-1&keywords=complexity)
which addresses this question in fascinating detail, and of course
[http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-
Un...](http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-
Universe/dp/0393315703/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367771784&sr=1-1&keywords=the+blind+watchmaker)

~~~
unclebucknasty
Thanks for the references. I am somewhat familiar with the second, and I look
forward to diving deeper.

