April 19, 2018 • 54 mins
What's it like to live with prosopagnosia or face blindness? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they devote an entire Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode to listener thoughts, observations and experiences.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
not too long ago, Robert and I did an episode
about prosopagnosia, or the condition often known as face blindness. Now,
(00:26):
we discussed a little bit in the episode how that
is kind of a misnomer because it's not so much
blindness but an inability to recognize and and recall familiarity
with faces in the same way that that most people can,
right right, Yeah, Like, this was something that was kind
of a challenge and coming up with landing page art
for that episode because they didn't want to go with
(00:48):
a Hannibal like face of like faceless specter kind of
an image. What I ended up doing is picking one
where you had an individual with a pixelized face, because
I felt like that granted with faceblinness or not seeing
a pixelized face, but they it is more in line
with a distortion of sensory data and inability to to
(01:10):
correctly identify somebody based on this particular area of sensory information. Yeah,
it implies scrambling of matching. Yeah, So this was a
really interesting topic to me, and I was glad we
did an episode on it. But I knew in the
episode since one of the figures we came across was
that multiple studies have done surveys and found that somewhere
around maybe between one and three percent, usually estimated around
(01:35):
two percent of the general population has some level of
developmental prosopagnosia. So one in fifty people you can expect
are going to have some level of trouble recognizing faces
within the normal range of human ability. And what this
meant is, well, we've got to have tons of listeners
who have some form of face blindness. So we asked
(01:56):
in the episode if anybody wanted to share their experience
as well. We heard from a lot of you. Yeah, indeed,
And like you said, we knew we were going to
get sense some listener feedback here, but I guess I
wasn't really prepared for just how many, because essentially the
the episode I think aired on a Thursday, and so
the entire weekend was just but mostly emails from listeners
who have some degree of face blindness. Oh, I'd say
(02:18):
by sometime on Friday, I think we'd heard from at
least a dozen people, but they just kept coming in.
So we we do have to say that we're not
going to be able to get to all of the
messages we got from everyone who got into contact with
us about face blindness or related topics. Some people reported, uh,
you know, similar related ideas that I think would also
be fun to discuss. But today we wanted to read
(02:40):
some of these messages and talk about what what ideas
get brought up in them, and also relate back to
some other some other follow up research. Yeah, and since
all the emails today are about face blindness, I took
the liberty of of taking out our mail bot, Carnie's
facial recognition software. So now he is going to identify
Joe and me purely by by smell and by touch.
(03:04):
Which one of us is the rough one? I'm going
to leave that to Carney. Carney is going to develop
his own a smell and touch profile for each of us.
This this may be disgusting, t M. I I think
I'm just getting over my my gross like alligator winter hands.
I can't like really dried out in my knuckles. Yeah, well,
(03:25):
only I had cut myself shaving this morning, which sometimes
I do I sometimes they come into the podcast studio
and I'm still bleeding um from the neck. That would
have actually helped Carney out quite a bit, I think. Well,
hopefully at least Carney can hand messages to one or
the other of us in either way they'll get read
right and and he may since none of it, neither
(03:45):
of us is bleeding, he might make an incision on
one of us, just to keep track, So just be
prepared for that. Okay. Our first message is from our listener, Lindsay,
who writes in and says, hello, Robert and Joe. I
just finished listening to your episode about face blindness. I
could relate a lot to the bits about Oliver Sacks.
Much of what he said was familiar, even if I
(04:05):
hadn't realized it before hearing your show. I've often wondered
if I have face blindness, but then usually dismiss myself
as a hypochondriac and tell myself it's because I'm not
paying enough attention to my surroundings that I can't recognize
people or place as well. Professionally, I'm an artist, so
you just assume about yourself that you must be good
at observation, right, So why can't you remember if you've
(04:28):
met someone before. It's a confusing situation to be in.
I pay a lot of attention to the slope of
people's noses, clothing styles, or their mannerisms to help me
rely on recognition. Auditory cues and context are also very useful.
The problem is much less pronounced with people I see frequently,
whereas a passing acquaintance or celebrity is much harder. It's
(04:50):
also difficult to visualize people's faces as a whole in
my mind. Sometimes I can zero in on features about
them or expressions, but my mental image of their face
is often somewhat blurry. It's odd because I have a
very good memory for other things. I'm also directionally challenged.
If I park my car to walk to a specific restaurant,
(05:11):
I often forget which way I need to walk to
get there, and so I look for queues like how
close I am to the end of the street and
how far I remember the restaurant being from the end
of the street, or I'll hope to see a distinctive
tree or building I know is across from the place
I'm going to. The issue seems exacerbated if the streets
look very similar. If they're all flat and straight at
(05:32):
right angles to one another, it's hopeless. I frequently forget
where I park in parking lots and have learned to
notice the angle I need to walk to the front
door of a store to get back to my car,
a sign that is in line with the row I
parked in, or I'll park in a similar location every
time I visit it. I've never been diagnosed with prosopagnosia,
(05:52):
so take all this with a grain of salt. I
wonder what percentage of people actually get diagnosed or just
explain away the whole situation I do with theories of
early memory loss or a short span of attention for
my surroundings brought on by the age of instant gratification. Regardless,
I hope this was insightful best. Lindsay, that was very incifle.
I especially appreciate, uh finding out that that that Lindsay
(06:16):
is an artist. Yeah, and uh, and about how there's
this sort of expectation that they would have perfect observational skills. Now,
we actually heard from more than one person who reported
having some degree of face blindness and reported being a
professional artist. I think we heard from I think at
least three people like this. Now, we do, I think,
tend to have a lot of artists out in the audience.
(06:38):
We hear from them often. Um, but yeah, I think
this is really interesting. I was reading a totally different
story that was published and wired back in two thousand
six by a writer named Joshua Davis about prosopagnosia, and
he profiled a bunch of people and one of the
people he discussed with prosopagnosia was this guy named Tom
in the story. And one interesting feature of mom was
(07:00):
that Tom was an artist and he loved doing sketches
of people of his friends and family. But when he
drew people, they didn't have faces. And he didn't think
this was weird because he thought, you know, I'm identifying
the people in the pictures, and they're identified by their
posture and things like that, why do they need faces?
Another person might look at those drawings and think, oh,
that's kind of creepy. That's like, you know, drawing people
(07:22):
without faces, like something out of the ring or something.
But like, uh, but no, I mean it made sense
to him, and you can see why it would if
you are cataloging people by visual cues other than the
minute differences in the arrangement of eyes and nose and
mouth and stuff that comes so naturally to most people,
you know it. I have to think of it in
(07:43):
terms of of writing too, Like one might easily jump
through the conclusion, oh, well, you uh you write fiction. Uh,
you must have just a great grasp of of human
psychology and character, or or you must have just you know,
uh fu too graphic memory of the world around you
so that you can uh describe it, um, you know,
(08:05):
on the page. But you know, obviously there are a
number of different You look at any any writer and
compare them to another writer, and they're going to have
a different degrees of focus in detail on say a
physical setting, or even on you know, character and internal dialogue.
I think it's fair to say that some writers may
(08:26):
write about people because they don't have some sort of
spectacular insight into how they work, and maybe they're mystified
by people, and therefore like this is their way of
trying to really dissect it and figure out what's going on. Well,
to go back to a similar episode we've done in
the past, when we did an episode on a phantasia
the Blindness of the Mind's Eye, The lack of inner imagery.
(08:49):
We heard from lots of listeners who they said, I
have a fantasia and here's what it's like. And we
heard from more than one writer of fiction who who
lacked uh inner maagory. And you might think, like, how
can you write a story if you can't picture a
scene in your head? But they did, And in fact,
you might imagine how some people who don't picture scenes
in their head could have other ways of organizing information
(09:13):
in their brains that actually could lend themselves very well
to crafting narration. Yeah, yeah, I could see where it
would be a strength in some cases, because I feel
like in my own writing, oftentimes I'll have to such
a crystal clear image in my head of what a scene,
should you know, look like in the mind's eye, and
I'm chasing that and it's an exercise of chasing that
(09:36):
mental image and making the paper replicated. And if I
were not chasing that specific image, then then it would
be a different exercise, but perhaps one that is more
in line with reaching the reader. Yeah. If you start
with the visual image of a scene and then you
try to put that visual image into writing for the reader,
your writing is actually a second generation copy of what
(09:58):
you've imagined. It's like a vh AS copy of a
copy or not a copy of a copy of the original.
But the person who has a fantasiation and imagines a
scene in words to begin with, the reader is actually
getting the original copy of the imagination. Yeah, it really
turns everything on its head. Yeah. No. One more thing
I want to mention before we move on to the
(10:18):
next email is that, obviously Lindsay is expressing what a
lot of people express, which is uncertainty. Right, do I
meet the criteria for having face blindness? And do do
I really have face blindness? Or am I just sort
of at the lower end of the normal spectrum for
recognizing faces. Obviously, we're not psychiatrists or neurologists. We can't
(10:39):
diagnose you for you, but there are tests that you
can just take on the internet that give you some
indication of whether you might have a clinical case of
face blindness now or Again. Absolutely not suggesting that you
come to a conclusion about this just based on a
test on the internet. You should talk to a medical professional.
You should see a psychiatrist or neurologist. But I think
(11:00):
these tests can at least give you a better starting
place for considering whether it's worth bringing up. One example
would be the twenty item Prosopagnosia Index, which is by Shaw, Gall, Sodan, Bird,
and Cook. It was published on a domain called Trouble
with Faces dot org, and you can look this up
if you want, the twenty item Prosopagnosia Index, and it
(11:21):
includes questions like the following. Do you find it noticeably
easier to recognize people who have distinctive facial features? This
came up in the last episode, you know, the distinctive
mustache or the mole or something like that. Do you
often mistake people you've met for strangers when people change
their hairstyle or wear hats. Do you have problems recognizing
(11:44):
them without hearing people's voices? Do you struggle to recognize them?
Do you have anxiety about face recognition that has led
you to avoid certain social or professional situations? Here's a
key one we've seen reported a lot. Do you ever
find it hard to follow movies because of difficulties recognizing characters?
(12:05):
Is it hard to recognize familiar people when you meet
them out of context? For example, meeting a work colleague
while shopping and then another really interesting one, is it
sometimes hard to recognize yourself in a photograph? Yeah, I
think those are. That's a great starting place for some
degree of self diagnosis, um be, because if you're like me,
(12:26):
you probably match up with at least one or two
of those things. You can say, oh yeah, when I
encounter people out of context, if I don't know them
very well and they just completely blank on who they are,
I wonder to what extent you can have maybe not
a clinical case of face blindness, but but have face
recognition expertise significantly increase or decrease throughout life. Because I
(12:49):
feel like I can look at items on this list
and think these used to be much more true of
me than they are today. I remember when I was younger,
like when I was a kid, I would sometimes watch
movies and have a lot of trouble following who the
characters were. I'd get people mixed up, not be able
to recognize people from one scene to another. And for
(13:12):
some reason, as I got older, that stopped being a problem.
But I wonder, I wonder how that would have Do
you think that might have occurred just through obsession? Through
because I have session with movies? Yeah, Because I feel
like like like like you and I have this in
common where we we we probably devote far too much
a space in our minds to cataloging character actors in
(13:36):
in uh in B movies. Um, but you know that's
not something that just occurred overnight. Like that is the
accumulation of years upon years of you know, wasting our
time on intermittent movie database and seeing these films. Yeah,
I mean, I feel like it's the case even for
unfamiliar actors. But I don't know that is a good question.
(13:57):
I again, I'm I'm not suggesting that any point I
had anything like a diagnosable case of face blindness, because
a lot of these other criteria don't ring true to
me at all. But I remember it being the case
in movies in the past for me, and not the
case anymore. So. One takeaway from that is, even though
you shouldn't diagnose yourself on an internet test alone without
(14:18):
seeing a medical professional, you definitely shouldn't diagnose yourself just
based on the answer to one question. All right, here's
one for us. This comes to us from Theodore. Hey, guys,
I saw today's episode and knew it was gonna be awesome.
I have a mild sort of face blindness that works
in some weird ways. I was actually surprised to you
guys didn't reference your episode on the Theater of the Mind.
(14:41):
That would be the A Fantasia episode um more, because
I have always felt my own version of face blindness
is very similar to that. When I see people I know,
I actually do not struggle to recognize them too much,
but my ability to picture people's faces is what is impaired. Strangely,
I have also noticed that I have an inverse relaationship
between how well I know someone and how well I
(15:02):
can picture their face. For example, Robert, I have seen
you in some YouTube videos and online. Your face I
can pull up fairly easily. However, my mother, who I
have known my whole life, I really struggle to picture
her face. That's interesting. I work as a parker coach
and personal trainer in my career. The face blindness has
I think actually helped me. Since I do not naturally
(15:25):
use facial clues as much, I have developed a natural
affinity to pick up on people's body movements. This makes
recognizing various movement patterns very easy. I can identify a
person by their collapsed arch long before their nose shape.
I have never experienced the problems of spatial awareness, you
guys that also mentioned I have always had a pretty
good sense of direction. Training Parker for seven years has
(15:47):
only enhanced that I can look at a space for
a few minutes and later recall it in exacting detail.
Thanks for another great episode THEO. Now, as we talked
about originally, these associated condition such as like having a
difficulty with identifying geographical locations or spatial topography, that's not
always associated with face blindness, but it does seem to
(16:09):
be somewhat covariant, you know. And I also can't help
but wonder about the difference between saying, say, seeing my
face online for seeing his mother, mother's face, like the
face of one's mother or another close family member. Is like,
there's just so much more data there, so much more
situational data, uh changing data over time. Is that individual
(16:33):
ages and goes through various uh you know styles even
but for like the host of a podcast, like, how
much visual data is there? Really? And it's there and
it's limited. It's not personal data. It's what a few
varying headshots over the course of a decade, a few
videos you've caught here and there with very similar lighting.
(16:55):
So it doesn't sound that surprising to me. I mean,
I must say I'm surprised by it is really interesting. Um,
I see what you're saying, though, Like you might have
an easier time picturing something that there is a more
uniquely identifiable source for if you've just seen it once,
then something that you've got a lot of data you're
(17:17):
trying to average. Though that sounds like that would not
fall under like normal face processing. That does sound unusual
to me. But I wonder if there is a distinctive
difference between essentially remembering a photo of a person and
remembering that person's face, you know, because because like when
I when I think back on say, people I've known
that that have passed on, um, you know, I can
(17:40):
recall their face pretty clearly, But I I second guess
myself more sometimes about the details, uh, as opposed to
say a picture, say a famous Hollywood actor from you know,
the ninety forties or something I can picture. I can
picture Clark Gable like that, and I really don't have
any difficult culty in bringing to mind, at least the
(18:02):
most prominent headshot of Clark Gable in my mind. But
would you recognize Clark Gable without a mustache? I might not,
that's the thing, But I but that, Yeah, I just
have so much there's just so much less data than
I'm calling upon. I'm basically remembering probably I'm probably remembering
his IMDb or Wicked profile picture. You know. Yeah, it
does make you wonder if they're actually different sort of
(18:24):
subsets of categorization pathways within the brain for different classes
of faces. Do do we class famous faces any different
than we class personally familiar faces? Do those operate differently
or do we use the same architecture for both? Take
Michael Fassbinder for instance. Alright, always an interesting face to
look at, always a joy to watch him act, or
(18:48):
an agony, depending on the part. But he rarely looks
me in the eyes. And when he does look me
in the eye, when he does look at the camera, uh,
I know that I am looking at essentially an object.
He cannot he cannot view me back. There's no social
exchange there. Not just because he's playing a robot. Not
just because he's playing a robot and it's maybe a
(19:09):
pie zombie, but no, but because I mean, obviously this
is an overstatement of the obvious, but he cannot see me.
This is not I am. I am observing him as
a voyeur. This is only tangentially related to the subject.
But it does make me think of a study on
the Thatcher illusion. Uh So, Robert I included some images
here of this wonderful thing. If you never heard about
(19:29):
the Thatcher illusion before, you can't just listen to us
describe it. You have to, whenever you get the opportunity,
go and look up what this looks like. The Thatcher
illusion is this principle first detective by Thompson in nineteen
eighty and it's defined by the authors of a studio
and I mentioned just briefly and plos one from sixteen
by Huts and Carbon, And it's defined by these authors
(19:52):
as the case where quote participants instantly perceive an upright
face with inverted eyes and mouth as gre task, but
fail to do so when the face is inverted. So
if you take a normal face you flip the eyes
and the mouth upside down on it. It is incredibly revolting.
And that we're not just talking about the eyeballs themselves,
(20:14):
but this also involves the eyebrows and the eyelashes. Yeah,
but if you do the exact same So if you
turn a do the exact same thing, but with the
face upside down. So you turn the face upside down
and then again rotate the eyes and the mouth upside
down relative to the face. You can't tell any difference
between that and a normal face, So they look almost
(20:35):
exactly the same unless you really study hard. Yeah, if
you're just if you're just inverting the the eyes and
the mouth, the character looks like a demon. Otherwise you're
just like, oh yeah, now that same faces upside down.
You have to really look at it to notice that
there's something altered altered there. But this study in particular
was trying to see how does this work with familiar faces,
(20:56):
And the example they used was famous faces, because you
can general account on people to be familiar with very
famous faces. But they were trying to see if familiarity
with faces might play a role in the speed of
processing these types of images, and they found what they
were looking for did not hold. Participants in this study
were not any faster at processing grotesque inverted eyes and
(21:19):
mouth on famous faces, though the authors say it might
have been different if they'd used personally familiar faces rather
than famous faces. They acknowledge that that could be a
flaw in their their study design. But at the same time,
while not faster, participants were more accurate quote in deciding
if famous faces were grotesque or not when they were inverted,
probably due to better knowledge of what the people look
(21:41):
like when presented normally. And in interpreting this, they say
quote altogether, famous faces seemed to be processed in a
more elaborate, more expertise based way than non famous faces,
whereas non famous inverted faces seemed to cause difficulties in
accurate and sensitive processing. And that's in listening to me
because of the invocation of generalized expertise in the different
(22:04):
kinds of face recognition, and it recalls the studies we
mentioned in the original Face blind this episode by Isabel
Gauthier and her colleagues showing that expertise in recognizing objects
like birds or cars, non face objects, recruits processing from
this region of the brain, the fusiform face region, which
is the one we think of as the key to
(22:24):
allowing primary facial recognition. Alright, on that note, let's take
a quick break and when we come back we'll do
some more listener mail. Thank thank you, thank you, alright,
We're back. Alright. Our next listener mail comes to us
from Emily. Emily writes, Hey, guys, big fan of the show,
first time sending listener mail. Feel free to use my
story in listener mail on the show with first name
(22:46):
only if you find it interesting. We do, so we're
using it. Emily says, I didn't realize it for many years,
but I think I have had a relatively mild but
still noticeable case of face blindness for my whole life.
I wouldn't say I have old blown face blindness, but
I think my facial recognition processing software works somewhere below average.
Besides taking me forever to get into TV shows because
(23:09):
I have a hard time keeping characters straight. The first
season of Game of Thrones was tough. It has caused
me mild embarrassment more than a few times, a handful
of which I will recount here. One I started a
job in high school, working at a bustling office, and
on either the first or the second day, I realized
that I couldn't recognize my manager, despite the fact that
(23:30):
she had just hired and hired me and onboarded me.
People were on their feet for most of the day,
so I couldn't just go back to her office and
check because she wasn't there. She was a middle aged
woman who looked sort of like the other middle aged
women in the office, and I simply could not recognize her,
no distinguishing characteristics. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone
who she was because I thought it would make me
(23:52):
look really stupid. Two during college, I came home on
a break and ran into a tall, bearded man wearing
a beanie while I was in own. I gave him
a weird look when he came up to me and
started talking to me, until I realized it was my
own brother, who had not had a beard the last
time I saw him a few months earlier. Three. A
few months ago, I was preparing to give testimony at
(24:13):
a hearing at the Statehouse for work. There were a
few dozen people also in the audience. A man in
a suit sat down next to me and started talking
to me as if he knew what I was going
to comment on. I was a little freaked out, and
I asked him if we'd met before. Immediately he said
who he was and who he worked for. It turned
out he was someone who I had met several times
and corresponded with regularly via email for work. I did
(24:36):
not recognize him wearing a suit and in a situation
where I wasn't expecting to see him. I was extremely
embarrassed and told him I had quote some face blindness,
but I'm not sure if he believed me. I was
nervous about the possibility that he would tell my boss
about my faux PAB, but I don't think he did,
and nothing ever came of it. I told several people
about the last incident, and they all thought it was
(24:56):
really weird. This makes me feel like I probably have
some degree of actual face blindness rather than just being
a near average level of forgetful. I have an easier
time recognizing people by their voices and physicality like gate
posture or gestures, so I try to rely on that
as well as physical characteristics that stand out a lot,
at least until I get to know people better. I
(25:17):
need to have several face to face interactions with people
before I will be able to recognize them reliably. Not
sure if this qualifies as any form of prosopagnosia, but
I thought you might like to hear about it. I
enjoyed the episode on the topic keep up the great work. Well, Emily,
I'd say again, don't take our word as a as
a medical diagnosis, but it sounds like you're describing some
of the classic indicators that are included on these inventories. Yeah.
(25:41):
I found a tidbit about Game of Thrones particularly interesting
because I could see where that would be confusing because
it's essentially, uh, just a whole bunch of scruffy white
dudes that you have to keep track hop right, Um,
and they're they're not necessarily like dressing in ways that
Q is all that distinctive to us, right, A lot
of them are just wearing furs and leather and stuff. Now,
(26:02):
one uh television series mini series slash movie that that
I would be very interested to hear someone with face
blind this comment on is the adaptation of the Mahabarata
that came out in nine nine from Peter Brooks. This
is an excellent retelling of the of the Hindu epic. Uh.
(26:24):
And he did an interesting thing with the casting and
said he cast each key character in the saga with
a different international actor, So all their characters are from
different races, they have different accents, uh And and of
course they're all um outstanding stage actors, so they have.
They tend to have very distinctive facial features as well.
(26:47):
But I wonder how someone who has difficulty with faces
and has difficulty with something like Game of Thrones would
process something like this adaptation. Well, yeah, it seems like
if you have a more diverse cast that would help
with like keeping the characters straight. I should also say,
don't be afraid to have every character in your film
or TV show, uh, feature a different hair color. Don't
(27:07):
stop it just the usuals either, Like just throwout some pink,
some some blue, whatever you need to do to get
the job done. Have a space turn and everything. All right.
Here's another one. This one comes to us from Ben
Hi Rob and Joe big Fan here from London, UK.
I just finished listening to the episode on prosopagnosia and
felt compelled to write in as it happens, my sister
(27:27):
has prosopagnosia and didn't even realize it until a few
years back. It's funny you mentioned Jane Goodall in the
episode two, because I met her once when living in
Beijing and brought it brought up her prosopagnosia with my
sister and it was then that something clicked for her.
We both completed a series of facial recognition tests online,
where I scored about average thirty two out of fifty
(27:50):
or thereabouts, while my sister scored precisely zero. She says
she's had it forever but didn't realize it was an
actual condition. She can always recognize myself and other close
family members, but she says she remembers other people by
their hairstyle or other defining features. If these features change,
such as suddenly shaving your head, she won't recognize them
(28:11):
next time they meet, especially if they meet accidentally somewhere. Also,
her job means she has to continually travel around while
holding events, and she always has people coming up to
her and addressing her by name. Her cheats for dealing
with this is to just reply hey man, buddy, sir,
dude with a smile and buy some time to try
and work out who they are. I'm not sure if
(28:33):
prosopagnosia is on a sliding scale, but my sister hasn't
had any massively detrimental consequences from having this condition. She
just says faces are all the same and she's developed
a killer bluffing ability in social situations. Anyway, fascinating condition
and serendipitous episode. Keep up the great work. Well, thanks
for getting in touch, Ben, Yeah, that's interesting. We had
(28:56):
talked in the episode about ways that often when somebody
has some kind of neurological impairment or some limited ability
in one way, other neural systems will kick in to compensate. Now,
one thing we talked about with people with prosopagnosia is
that often if you have trouble recognizing faces, you can
become hyper aware of other types of body cues Like
you mentioned gate posture, all those kinds of things. You
(29:17):
notice those far better than a person with normal facial
recognition skills would. But I hadn't thought before about how
other compensation skills could kick in apart from perceptive and
recognition based ones like bluffing ability. I mean, that is
a cognitive skill that I I know, like, I would
not be good at that, But I wonder if I
(29:38):
had had to spend my entire life honing that skill,
I might be a very different person. I might be
much better at, like trying to figure things out on
the fly based on little conversational cues about how to
get to a name Yeah, I mean it's interesting to
to just think about how un adapted one would become
to working around these different blockages. Yeah, by the way,
(29:59):
fun fun at Joe. I actually cannot tell A C.
D C songs apart. I like them when I hear them,
but to me, it's it's all the same. It's like
the faces for Ben's sister. What about the A C,
D C songs that have distinctive markings. Um, I mean,
I guess lyrically, like if if I'm if I hear
it and they hit something in the chorus, then yes,
(30:21):
I could maybe tell by the lyrics, but I definitely
wouldn't be able to tell by the music. Even though
again I like the music, it just all kind of
sounds the same to me. There are a lot of
rock songs that sound the same. I mean the same
way that. Broadly speaking, there are only so many ways
you can arrange a couple of eyes and nose in
a mouth. There're only so many ways you can do
four chords. In general. Comments on machismo, It's kind of
(30:42):
like if you look at the hair metal bands of
the eighties and nineties, certainly a lot of that music
is going to sound the same UH. To really differentiate them,
you do have to go on visual clues, right or
but the bands all look the same. Yeah, you do
run into a problem there. Then you have to look
at what kind of fonts they used in their UH
(31:03):
in their band name. Okay, there you that becomes the
determining factor, all right. Our next email comes from our
listener Jeff. Jeff writes, I've always had profound face blindness,
but was an adult before I knew such a thing
was well a thing. There's a subjective problem. Brains and
perception are first person. What's it like to be Jeff?
For me? As a young child, I was amazed by
(31:25):
other kids they had this ability to instantly recognize people.
As an older child, I realized with a sinking feeling,
that it was not some magic they had, but a
deficit I had. And I tried to recognize people. I
look hard at features and try to mentally map them
without avail. I recollect, feeling depressed that I just couldn't
try harder. I did learn to know my friends by
(31:47):
their particular behaviors, especially gates and profiles. I got good
at this as a child. There is the help of
fairly regular dress, so there was the friend who wore
turtleneck shirts and one who always wore dress pants and
never jeans. Red hair being uncommon in my group was
a cue, but it was always hard. In context was
(32:08):
the major aid I knew if I went to a
particular house, my friend, maybe his sister, and maybe one
of his friends might be there. Always when I controlled
the context through meetings, I was okay. Parties were stifling,
as was the quote greater world, as anyone could be anybody,
it presents his social shyness introversion, or conversely as being
(32:31):
aloof or stuck up at failing to properly greet folks
strangers abound. Recognition in another person's eyes is fear, and
I learned the etiquette of an enthusiastic, nameless, neutral greeting.
I could go on about it, I mean, my late
fifties and still deal with it. My personal doctor chided
me the other day when I apparently had not greeted
(32:52):
her as she walked her dog. Context my sister, visiting
from out of town, appeared at a bookstore and says hi,
with no wreck cognition from me. Context lots can be
done with paying attention to characteristics other than faces, builds, hair, gait, voice,
and other subtle idiosyncrasies. I like to think it's made
(33:12):
me notice such things and have a better, if somewhat
narrower attention. It doesn't bother me much these days. Here's
the only message I can offer. Kids who have this
don't know it. This is what it's like to be Jeff.
Parents likely have no clue. It's really hard to characterize
and know that there's anything odd to report. If a
deficit has noticed, it may very well be misattributed to
(33:34):
some other problem with social skills, intelligence, or even autism.
I found out about it on my own as an adult,
learning about it from reading about the mind and brain.
It would have been nice if young Jeff could have
been told that it really was a thing. I think
Jeff makes some really good points here. I mean, it
seems like there could be profound benefit from just increasing
(33:54):
awareness of this. Yeah, like I could, I can see
how this You could start folding this in to um
to some of your educational efforts with with young kids.
You know that there you could have story books about
this that that people are going to process the world
around them in slightly different ways. Yeah. I even I
found a study about the psychosocial consequences of prosopagnosia from
(34:18):
the Journal of Psychosomatic Research from two thousand and eight
by Lucy Yardley at all and basically, this looked at
the psychological and social consequences of living with developmental prosopagnosia.
It consisted of telephone interviews with twenty five people who
scored as face recognition impaired on the Cambridge Face Recognition Test,
and the results were that all participants described recurring social
(34:42):
problems caused by their inability to recognize faces, and this
led to consequences like chronic anxiety about offending people, feelings
of guilt, embarrassment, failure. Of course, there's nothing to feel
guilty about, right, but people felt bad like they were
doing something wrong by not being able to recognize people
bill Most, but not all, reported feelings of like having
(35:03):
avoided social situations, including work meetings and social gatherings because
of fear they had about their inability to recognize faces.
And this could lead to all kinds of problems in life.
Right like you, you could end up dependent on help
from others or with a restricted social circle, or cause
problems with your opportunities and employment, or it could undermine
(35:25):
yourself confidence. And a pretty good remedy for this is,
like we're saying, increasing awareness and increasing awareness in both directions, right,
Like making people aware that this is a condition that
might be present in other people, and that they should
try to be helpful in accommodating with somebody who doesn't
recognize your face is not necessarily because they're aloof for
their rude and you should judge them that this might
(35:46):
just be something that they don't have the same ability
that you have at And then the other side would
be making people aware that they might have the condition
and helping increase diagnoses of people who have it so
they can can explain the situation to other us and
avoid these kinds of misperceptions. Yeah, I mean, I think
a lot of it does come down to um to
(36:07):
sort of informing your empathy, informing your theory of mind
so that you're not just duplicating your basic mind state
when you're trying to to figure out how another person
is viewing the world. All right, on that note, we're
going to take another break, and when we come back,
we'll hit some more listener mail than All right, we're back.
So this one comes to us from Hugh. Hugh rights
(36:30):
in and says, hey, guys, I'm a longtime listener, even
if I have no idea about most of your sci
fi references. Oh well, we appreciate that. Well, that's okay.
We try not to include so many that it it
makes it difficult for for non sci fi fans, non
horror fans, or what have you to follow the episode.
I hope we don't fail too hard at that. Uh.
(36:51):
Hugh continues, I've just heard your episode on face blindness.
I think I may have the opposite of this. When
I see a complete stranger in the street, I think
it's someone I know. I'm typing this on the train
and I saw a guy who I thought was my
old housemate from years ago. Of course it wasn't him.
I tend to group faces into sets. The guy on
the train had all the facial mannerisms of my housemate.
(37:14):
I instantly thought it was him. It's more specific than
just crop red hair and glasses. The problem is, I'm
pretty outgoing. When I see someone who has all the
facial mannerisms of someone I used to know, like my
friend's brother I met once, I'll go over and say hi,
often to my wife's embarrassment. I guess I'm just good
at spotting averagely accurate doppelgangers. Anyway, while in my eyes
(37:37):
you both look like many other people. Uh, in my ears,
nobody makes a podcast like this. Keep up the great work.
Hugh from Sydney. Oh, thanks, Hugh. Uh. You know this
got me thinking too about this in a number of
emails about uh, the other information that one can process
to identify an individual. And I wonder we did and
(38:00):
so much on faces that I imagine other people have
had the situation as well. Where you are you're almost
certain you see someone you know, but their positions so
that you cannot see their face. Perhaps you're in an
exercise class, or you're seated formally, you know, in a
theater or a restaurant, and you can't. But but you
(38:20):
have this feeling that you cannot be for sure unless
you have some unless you see their face, unless you
have essentially facial confirmation of the individual. Uh. And it's
an interesting thing to feel because then when they finally
look your way, you're like, oh, yeah, that was of
course them. I knew it was them, but I could
not deal. I was sure until I actually saw them
(38:43):
and even made eye contact with them. So we had
this recently when we were in New York at the
One Strange Rock Front, when I from behind was eight
nine percent sure that this that this guy with the
cane with the skull on the end was the magician
and skeptic James Randy, but I could be positive. It
took us a while to confirm. Yeah, yeah, But I
(39:05):
have that happened with just people I know or people
that I don't know super well. But say I I
go to some of the same like social functions with them,
and if I can't see that face, there's just like
I I can't stop thinking about it, like I I
have to see their face. And that's where it can
get awkward if it's on the train and you're in
that situation where you've just looped them more or less
into the category of individuals like this, and then you're like,
(39:27):
all right, I'm gonna go look at this person's face.
And then you look at them and it's a complete stranger,
and then you feel like you're a stalker. That is
a bad feeling. Indeed, now, following up from what Hugh said, again,
I want to be very clear that we are not
trying to offer diagnoses of people based on their emails,
so you should not take this as a medical diagnosis.
It is not, but what you're describing does sound like
(39:49):
it's sort of matches a known condition I think we
mentioned in the original episode known as hyper familiarity for
unknown faces or h FF, and just to talk about
a quick study on this published in Plos one called
neurofunctional signature of Hyperfamiliarity for Unknown Faces. The definition is
that quote. It is a rare selective disorder that consists
(40:12):
of the disturbing and abnormal feeling of familiarity for unknown faces,
while recognition of known faces as normal. So it's not
that you can't recognize people. You can recognize people normally,
but you're also constantly recognizing people who are not the
people you think they are. So this was a case
study of g N who is a sixty eight year
(40:33):
old woman with selective hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces, and the
authors did a multimodal brain imaging study on what happened
when she saw and recognized or did not recognize familiar
and unfamiliar faces that use CT scanning and f m
r I together with behavioral measures to to see what
was going on, and behaviorally, she had essentially much lower
(40:56):
discrimination sensitivity between familiar and unfamiliar faces and normal controls.
And in light of this lower discrimination, basically her brain
was biased toward classifying faces as familiar. So what was
actually happening in the brain? While the authors say that
there appeared to be atrophy and low functioning of the
(41:16):
left hemisphere temporal regions, so the left side of the
brain is underperforming compared to what it would normally be
doing and in recognizing faces. And then at the same time,
quote hyperfamiliarity feelings were selectively associated with enhanced activity in
the right medial and inferior temporal cortices. So it looks
(41:36):
like the face recognition process involves regions of both the
left and the right hemisphere and that they do different
things there. If the left hemisphere is underperforming, the right
hemisphere takes over and contend to over bias in favor
of saying, hey, I know this person now. Why would
there be this hemisphere division? Well, the authors write that
the temporal areas of the left hemisphere are you usually
(42:00):
used to analyze and encode unique facial features, whereas the
right hemisphere tends towards a quote more global but less
efficient encoding of facial traits. So it sounds like the
right hemisphere is more often used to encode and react
to a kind of general impression of a face, whereas
the left hemisphere tends to pick out specific identifiers and
(42:23):
features for higher accuracy, And so the authors write that
quote the greater reliance on the right hemisphere therefore facilitates
spurious feelings of familiarity and misattribution of personal relevance to
unknown faces. These erroneous familiarity feelings cannot be counterbalanced or
corrected by more precise associations in the left hemisphere between
(42:45):
visual facial cues and specific knowledge pertaining to a unique identity,
and therefore lead to a liberal decision criterion concerning face
familiarity recognition. And in addition to just being the fact
that Hugh seems to be describing something to describing some
degree of hyper familiarity of faces, it also goes along
with what he's saying about grouping faces into sets of
(43:07):
kinds of faces. If if what's going on in his
brain is that he might be over relying on the
right hemisphere uh to sort of like get these general
impressions of faces and under relying on the specific unique
characteristics that more accurately identify a face. All right, now,
here's our next two or rather interesting because they both
(43:29):
relate to migrains and face blindness. I found these particularly fascinating.
This one comes to us from Amelia. Hi, guys, I'm
just listening to your podcast about prosopagnosia or face blindness,
and when you mentioned other types of agnosia, you mentioned
finger agnosia, which was very interesting to me. I have
suffered from migraine headache since I was a teenager, and
(43:50):
one of the first symptoms I get of an imminent
migrain is that my hands look like someone else's. You
know how normally, when you're doing something, you can see
your hand ends, but your brain doesn't really pay much
attention to them, a bit like your brain seeing your
nose all the time but ignoring it. Well, when I'm
about to have a migraine and see my hands, it's
like I'm seeing someone else's hands doing whatever it is
(44:12):
they are doing. My brain is obviously still controlling them
and they are doing what I'm asking them to do,
but there is some kind of disconnection in the brain
that doesn't recognize them as my hands. I am very
interested in all the symptoms of migraines due to my
own personal experience of them and the weirdness of it all.
But I had never heard of anyone else having this.
Hands aren't my own symptom that I get, it's all.
(44:34):
It also doesn't seem to affect any other part of
my body, just my hands. In contrast to this, I am,
as far as I can tell when comparing myself to friends,
above average at recognizing faces. Just thought you'd be interested
in this weird symptom I have with best wishes, Amelia. Now, Amelia,
that is really interesting and we we will address that
(44:54):
right after. We also read this email from our listener Ross,
who also brought up my rains in migraine. Aura Ross writes, Hey,
Joe and Robert, my name's Ross. I'm a new listener
to your program and I found that it's perfect for
working on art too. I'm an illustrator and an animator,
and I love to put on your show while I'm
working on projects. Here's another artist. Your last show about
(45:16):
face blindness was super interesting and hit close to home
for me. While I don't suffer from prosopagnosia in the
sense that you talked about. I do, however, suffer from
complex migraines. While experiencing a migraine episode, I will have
a whole slew of neurological symptoms before the pain even starts.
This phase of the episode, I've come to understand it's
called the migraine aura, and while it's a pretty trippy experience,
(45:38):
it's a good way to know whether I should find
a dark and quiet place to lie down before the
real fun stuff starts. My aura symptoms include blind spots,
mental fog, numbness in my face and hands, and, strangely enough,
something close to prosopagnosia. Over the years, I've noticed that
while I'm having aura symptoms, I'm temporarily unable to visualize
specific faces in my mind's eye, or even recognize my
(46:01):
friends and family if they're in front of me. Though
I can't see much of anything with the blind spots.
It's rather disconcerting, especially since so much of my profession
relies on drawing faces. However, after about an hour and
a half, all the symptoms will go away and the
headache will start. I thought it was interesting when you
brought up the caricature artists, wondering if any have face blindness.
(46:21):
While my face blindness is always temporary, I always regain
my pretty uncanny ability to recognize faces. I'm one of
those people who has a knack for recognizing actors with
no lasting damage. My artistic abilities are also unimpacted by
my occasional bouts with migrains, and I find that, if anything,
I'm better at observing faces, knowing what it's like not
(46:41):
having that ability. I'm nowhere near savvy enough to research
why this may be. But hey, you could do a
show on migrains. Loved the show and I look forward
to hearing the next one. Now, that was really fascinating.
I I've I don't think we've ever done a proper
episode of stuff to blow your mind on migrains and effects,
but we should, because I'm always amazed and new when
(47:03):
I stumbled upon information about it. Yeah, and Amelia and Ross,
you should know that the things you describe are in
fact represented already in the medical literature. So I was
able to find at least a couple of studies mentioning
things like this. There was a study in two thousand
six by sand Or at all in Cephalagia, which is
a pure viewed medical journal about headaches. That was a
(47:23):
case report of a fifty eight year old left handed
man who reported prosopagnosia in association with migraine aura, so
he'd get the migraine aura and he'd lose his ability
to recognize faces. There was another study from two thousand seven,
also in Cephalagia, by Vincent and Haji Khani, and this
was about how migraines have the power to in fact
affect all kinds of cortical physiology and induce all kinds
(47:46):
of dysfunctions. So the authors questioned people who had migraine
with aura and migraine without aura, and they found that
seventy two point two percent of migraine with aura patients
and forty eight point six percent of migraine without or
A patients had symptoms including at least some of the
following prosopagnosia, dis chromatopsia, which is the inability to see
(48:07):
some colors or some general impairment of color vision, and
then also ideational apraxia, which is defined as quote loss
of ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute motor actions involving
the use of tools or objects, so suddenly like you
couldn't use a screwdriver or a knife for something. This
(48:28):
next one might be very applicable to Amelia alien hand syndrome.
Multiple people report alien hand syndrome as a result of
migraine aura or migraine without aura, and this would, uh,
this would be basically what Amelia is describing, the feeling
that a hand you have is not in fact your
own hand. And also difficulty recognized, recognizing and and calling
(48:51):
to mind proper names. So this to me also really
makes it seem like it would be worthwhile to cover
migraines and migraine aura in general in an episode that
they can have such why ranging effects throughout the brain. Yeah, indeed,
I think we should definitely come back to it. And
also I mean we we know we're going to have
a large selection of listeners who have stories about about
migraines and migraine auras to report. Uh, in fact, you
(49:14):
can maybe we should just ask people to go ahead
and emails about those migraines and symptoms that you encounter
so that we can have those ahead of the episode
we wind up doing on it. All Right, we have
one last bit of listener mail to hit before we
sign off for today. Uh doesn't mean that these will
be the only face blindness emails that we read. When
(49:37):
we get around to doing our next listener mail episode,
we may have some more that we roll out as well,
in addition to unrelated emails. But this one comes to
us from Kyle. Kyle says, Hey, guys, big fans, Stuff
to blow your mind is my favorite of your podcast selection.
Keep up the awesome work. So this is kind of odd,
but after listening to your episode on face blindness, you
(49:57):
would have mentioned other agnosis such as finger and hand
blind no, and thought this would be a funny story.
I've recently been getting into virtual reality with the HTC Vibe,
which is in itself incredibly mind blowing. But after my
first month with the headset, and it's a convincing replacement
of reality, I completely lost awareness of my hands. I
(50:18):
was spending so much time and environments where your hands
were invisible that my brain retrained itself. Apparently, for maybe
a month, I couldn't associate my hands in the real
world with my own. I felt like someone else's hands
waving in front of my face. I guess this maybe
falls under body dysmorphia or phantom limb phenomenon, but possibly
(50:39):
but it may relate to finger agnosia. Anyways, it was
a crazy experience. It apparently happens to a lot of people.
I was worried for so long, but it eventually wore off.
Take care of guys. Kyle, Well, that is interesting. I
had not heard anything of this before, and I know
we have a number of listeners who are really into
virtual reality these days, so I would love to hear
(51:02):
from other folks who have had strange occurrences with invisible hands.
I have seen four demonstrations of the way that perception
and just general perceptual stimuli can change your relationship with
a part of your body. One example would be this experiment.
If you've never seen it done before, I think I've
mentioned it in the podcast before that um, someone can
(51:26):
replace your hand, Like you put your hands on the
table and one of your hands is behind a wall
where you can't see it, and instead the person performing
the experiment puts a rubber hand on table, uh that
looks like it could be your hand, and they train
you to think of it as your hand by touching
or stimulating your real hand while also giving you the
(51:48):
visual cues that they're touching or stimulating the fake hand,
like like the rubber hand and the real hand that
is out of sight or both rubbed with a feather
at the same time at the same time. Yeah, and
then after a minute or so of this, if somebody
hit it's the rubber hand with a hammer, you will
freak out like you think like your hand has just
been hit and it you. You can essentially quite quickly
(52:08):
train your brain to recalibrate its own sense of where
and what its body is. It's crazy. It's just another
one of those experiments that really drives home the true
nature of our perception, uh and our our understanding of reality.
All right, So there you have it. UH. An entire
listener Mail episode devoted the face blindness. Again, these were
(52:30):
not all of the emails we received. Now, there's a
lot of good stuff we couldn't get to, and we'll
and we'll likely receive some some additional emails. So again,
the next time we do a listener mail, we're averaging
about one a month. Really, that seems like a good
way to tackle and stay ahead of the wonderful um
emails that that that all of you send. Us the
next time we'll we'll try and hit some more of these.
(52:52):
In the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is our mothership. That's where
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(53:15):
take much time on your part and it really helps
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stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(53:47):
of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com?
Think it doesn't, It doesn't. Foo
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
not too long ago, Robert and I did an episode
about prosopagnosia, or the condition often known as face blindness. Now,
(00:26):
we discussed a little bit in the episode how that
is kind of a misnomer because it's not so much
blindness but an inability to recognize and and recall familiarity
with faces in the same way that that most people can,
right right, Yeah, Like, this was something that was kind
of a challenge and coming up with landing page art
for that episode because they didn't want to go with
(00:48):
a Hannibal like face of like faceless specter kind of
an image. What I ended up doing is picking one
where you had an individual with a pixelized face, because
I felt like that granted with faceblinness or not seeing
a pixelized face, but they it is more in line
with a distortion of sensory data and inability to to
(01:10):
correctly identify somebody based on this particular area of sensory information. Yeah,
it implies scrambling of matching. Yeah, So this was a
really interesting topic to me, and I was glad we
did an episode on it. But I knew in the
episode since one of the figures we came across was
that multiple studies have done surveys and found that somewhere
around maybe between one and three percent, usually estimated around
(01:35):
two percent of the general population has some level of
developmental prosopagnosia. So one in fifty people you can expect
are going to have some level of trouble recognizing faces
within the normal range of human ability. And what this
meant is, well, we've got to have tons of listeners
who have some form of face blindness. So we asked
(01:56):
in the episode if anybody wanted to share their experience
as well. We heard from a lot of you. Yeah, indeed,
And like you said, we knew we were going to
get sense some listener feedback here, but I guess I
wasn't really prepared for just how many, because essentially the
the episode I think aired on a Thursday, and so
the entire weekend was just but mostly emails from listeners
who have some degree of face blindness. Oh, I'd say
(02:18):
by sometime on Friday, I think we'd heard from at
least a dozen people, but they just kept coming in.
So we we do have to say that we're not
going to be able to get to all of the
messages we got from everyone who got into contact with
us about face blindness or related topics. Some people reported, uh,
you know, similar related ideas that I think would also
be fun to discuss. But today we wanted to read
(02:40):
some of these messages and talk about what what ideas
get brought up in them, and also relate back to
some other some other follow up research. Yeah, and since
all the emails today are about face blindness, I took
the liberty of of taking out our mail bot, Carnie's
facial recognition software. So now he is going to identify
Joe and me purely by by smell and by touch.
(03:04):
Which one of us is the rough one? I'm going
to leave that to Carney. Carney is going to develop
his own a smell and touch profile for each of us.
This this may be disgusting, t M. I I think
I'm just getting over my my gross like alligator winter hands.
I can't like really dried out in my knuckles. Yeah, well,
(03:25):
only I had cut myself shaving this morning, which sometimes
I do I sometimes they come into the podcast studio
and I'm still bleeding um from the neck. That would
have actually helped Carney out quite a bit, I think. Well,
hopefully at least Carney can hand messages to one or
the other of us in either way they'll get read
right and and he may since none of it, neither
(03:45):
of us is bleeding, he might make an incision on
one of us, just to keep track, So just be
prepared for that. Okay. Our first message is from our listener, Lindsay,
who writes in and says, hello, Robert and Joe. I
just finished listening to your episode about face blindness. I
could relate a lot to the bits about Oliver Sacks.
Much of what he said was familiar, even if I
(04:05):
hadn't realized it before hearing your show. I've often wondered
if I have face blindness, but then usually dismiss myself
as a hypochondriac and tell myself it's because I'm not
paying enough attention to my surroundings that I can't recognize
people or place as well. Professionally, I'm an artist, so
you just assume about yourself that you must be good
at observation, right, So why can't you remember if you've
(04:28):
met someone before. It's a confusing situation to be in.
I pay a lot of attention to the slope of
people's noses, clothing styles, or their mannerisms to help me
rely on recognition. Auditory cues and context are also very useful.
The problem is much less pronounced with people I see frequently,
whereas a passing acquaintance or celebrity is much harder. It's
(04:50):
also difficult to visualize people's faces as a whole in
my mind. Sometimes I can zero in on features about
them or expressions, but my mental image of their face
is often somewhat blurry. It's odd because I have a
very good memory for other things. I'm also directionally challenged.
If I park my car to walk to a specific restaurant,
(05:11):
I often forget which way I need to walk to
get there, and so I look for queues like how
close I am to the end of the street and
how far I remember the restaurant being from the end
of the street, or I'll hope to see a distinctive
tree or building I know is across from the place
I'm going to. The issue seems exacerbated if the streets
look very similar. If they're all flat and straight at
(05:32):
right angles to one another, it's hopeless. I frequently forget
where I park in parking lots and have learned to
notice the angle I need to walk to the front
door of a store to get back to my car,
a sign that is in line with the row I
parked in, or I'll park in a similar location every
time I visit it. I've never been diagnosed with prosopagnosia,
(05:52):
so take all this with a grain of salt. I
wonder what percentage of people actually get diagnosed or just
explain away the whole situation I do with theories of
early memory loss or a short span of attention for
my surroundings brought on by the age of instant gratification. Regardless,
I hope this was insightful best. Lindsay, that was very incifle.
I especially appreciate, uh finding out that that that Lindsay
(06:16):
is an artist. Yeah, and uh, and about how there's
this sort of expectation that they would have perfect observational skills. Now,
we actually heard from more than one person who reported
having some degree of face blindness and reported being a
professional artist. I think we heard from I think at
least three people like this. Now, we do, I think,
tend to have a lot of artists out in the audience.
(06:38):
We hear from them often. Um, but yeah, I think
this is really interesting. I was reading a totally different
story that was published and wired back in two thousand
six by a writer named Joshua Davis about prosopagnosia, and
he profiled a bunch of people and one of the
people he discussed with prosopagnosia was this guy named Tom
in the story. And one interesting feature of mom was
(07:00):
that Tom was an artist and he loved doing sketches
of people of his friends and family. But when he
drew people, they didn't have faces. And he didn't think
this was weird because he thought, you know, I'm identifying
the people in the pictures, and they're identified by their
posture and things like that, why do they need faces?
Another person might look at those drawings and think, oh,
that's kind of creepy. That's like, you know, drawing people
(07:22):
without faces, like something out of the ring or something.
But like, uh, but no, I mean it made sense
to him, and you can see why it would if
you are cataloging people by visual cues other than the
minute differences in the arrangement of eyes and nose and
mouth and stuff that comes so naturally to most people,
you know it. I have to think of it in
(07:43):
terms of of writing too, Like one might easily jump
through the conclusion, oh, well, you uh you write fiction. Uh,
you must have just a great grasp of of human
psychology and character, or or you must have just you know,
uh fu too graphic memory of the world around you
so that you can uh describe it, um, you know,
(08:05):
on the page. But you know, obviously there are a
number of different You look at any any writer and
compare them to another writer, and they're going to have
a different degrees of focus in detail on say a
physical setting, or even on you know, character and internal dialogue.
I think it's fair to say that some writers may
(08:26):
write about people because they don't have some sort of
spectacular insight into how they work, and maybe they're mystified
by people, and therefore like this is their way of
trying to really dissect it and figure out what's going on. Well,
to go back to a similar episode we've done in
the past, when we did an episode on a phantasia
the Blindness of the Mind's Eye, The lack of inner imagery.
(08:49):
We heard from lots of listeners who they said, I
have a fantasia and here's what it's like. And we
heard from more than one writer of fiction who who
lacked uh inner maagory. And you might think, like, how
can you write a story if you can't picture a
scene in your head? But they did, And in fact,
you might imagine how some people who don't picture scenes
in their head could have other ways of organizing information
(09:13):
in their brains that actually could lend themselves very well
to crafting narration. Yeah, yeah, I could see where it
would be a strength in some cases, because I feel
like in my own writing, oftentimes I'll have to such
a crystal clear image in my head of what a scene,
should you know, look like in the mind's eye, and
I'm chasing that and it's an exercise of chasing that
(09:36):
mental image and making the paper replicated. And if I
were not chasing that specific image, then then it would
be a different exercise, but perhaps one that is more
in line with reaching the reader. Yeah. If you start
with the visual image of a scene and then you
try to put that visual image into writing for the reader,
your writing is actually a second generation copy of what
(09:58):
you've imagined. It's like a vh AS copy of a
copy or not a copy of a copy of the original.
But the person who has a fantasiation and imagines a
scene in words to begin with, the reader is actually
getting the original copy of the imagination. Yeah, it really
turns everything on its head. Yeah. No. One more thing
I want to mention before we move on to the
(10:18):
next email is that, obviously Lindsay is expressing what a
lot of people express, which is uncertainty. Right, do I
meet the criteria for having face blindness? And do do
I really have face blindness? Or am I just sort
of at the lower end of the normal spectrum for
recognizing faces. Obviously, we're not psychiatrists or neurologists. We can't
(10:39):
diagnose you for you, but there are tests that you
can just take on the internet that give you some
indication of whether you might have a clinical case of
face blindness now or Again. Absolutely not suggesting that you
come to a conclusion about this just based on a
test on the internet. You should talk to a medical professional.
You should see a psychiatrist or neurologist. But I think
(11:00):
these tests can at least give you a better starting
place for considering whether it's worth bringing up. One example
would be the twenty item Prosopagnosia Index, which is by Shaw, Gall, Sodan, Bird,
and Cook. It was published on a domain called Trouble
with Faces dot org, and you can look this up
if you want, the twenty item Prosopagnosia Index, and it
(11:21):
includes questions like the following. Do you find it noticeably
easier to recognize people who have distinctive facial features? This
came up in the last episode, you know, the distinctive
mustache or the mole or something like that. Do you
often mistake people you've met for strangers when people change
their hairstyle or wear hats. Do you have problems recognizing
(11:44):
them without hearing people's voices? Do you struggle to recognize them?
Do you have anxiety about face recognition that has led
you to avoid certain social or professional situations? Here's a
key one we've seen reported a lot. Do you ever
find it hard to follow movies because of difficulties recognizing characters?
(12:05):
Is it hard to recognize familiar people when you meet
them out of context? For example, meeting a work colleague
while shopping and then another really interesting one, is it
sometimes hard to recognize yourself in a photograph? Yeah, I
think those are. That's a great starting place for some
degree of self diagnosis, um be, because if you're like me,
(12:26):
you probably match up with at least one or two
of those things. You can say, oh yeah, when I
encounter people out of context, if I don't know them
very well and they just completely blank on who they are,
I wonder to what extent you can have maybe not
a clinical case of face blindness, but but have face
recognition expertise significantly increase or decrease throughout life. Because I
(12:49):
feel like I can look at items on this list
and think these used to be much more true of
me than they are today. I remember when I was younger,
like when I was a kid, I would sometimes watch
movies and have a lot of trouble following who the
characters were. I'd get people mixed up, not be able
to recognize people from one scene to another. And for
(13:12):
some reason, as I got older, that stopped being a problem.
But I wonder, I wonder how that would have Do
you think that might have occurred just through obsession? Through
because I have session with movies? Yeah, Because I feel
like like like like you and I have this in
common where we we we probably devote far too much
a space in our minds to cataloging character actors in
(13:36):
in uh in B movies. Um, but you know that's
not something that just occurred overnight. Like that is the
accumulation of years upon years of you know, wasting our
time on intermittent movie database and seeing these films. Yeah,
I mean, I feel like it's the case even for
unfamiliar actors. But I don't know that is a good question.
(13:57):
I again, I'm I'm not suggesting that any point I
had anything like a diagnosable case of face blindness, because
a lot of these other criteria don't ring true to
me at all. But I remember it being the case
in movies in the past for me, and not the
case anymore. So. One takeaway from that is, even though
you shouldn't diagnose yourself on an internet test alone without
(14:18):
seeing a medical professional, you definitely shouldn't diagnose yourself just
based on the answer to one question. All right, here's
one for us. This comes to us from Theodore. Hey, guys,
I saw today's episode and knew it was gonna be awesome.
I have a mild sort of face blindness that works
in some weird ways. I was actually surprised to you
guys didn't reference your episode on the Theater of the Mind.
(14:41):
That would be the A Fantasia episode um more, because
I have always felt my own version of face blindness
is very similar to that. When I see people I know,
I actually do not struggle to recognize them too much,
but my ability to picture people's faces is what is impaired. Strangely,
I have also noticed that I have an inverse relaationship
between how well I know someone and how well I
(15:02):
can picture their face. For example, Robert, I have seen
you in some YouTube videos and online. Your face I
can pull up fairly easily. However, my mother, who I
have known my whole life, I really struggle to picture
her face. That's interesting. I work as a parker coach
and personal trainer in my career. The face blindness has
I think actually helped me. Since I do not naturally
(15:25):
use facial clues as much, I have developed a natural
affinity to pick up on people's body movements. This makes
recognizing various movement patterns very easy. I can identify a
person by their collapsed arch long before their nose shape.
I have never experienced the problems of spatial awareness, you
guys that also mentioned I have always had a pretty
good sense of direction. Training Parker for seven years has
(15:47):
only enhanced that I can look at a space for
a few minutes and later recall it in exacting detail.
Thanks for another great episode THEO. Now, as we talked
about originally, these associated condition such as like having a
difficulty with identifying geographical locations or spatial topography, that's not
always associated with face blindness, but it does seem to
(16:09):
be somewhat covariant, you know. And I also can't help
but wonder about the difference between saying, say, seeing my
face online for seeing his mother, mother's face, like the
face of one's mother or another close family member. Is like,
there's just so much more data there, so much more
situational data, uh changing data over time. Is that individual
(16:33):
ages and goes through various uh you know styles even
but for like the host of a podcast, like, how
much visual data is there? Really? And it's there and
it's limited. It's not personal data. It's what a few
varying headshots over the course of a decade, a few
videos you've caught here and there with very similar lighting.
(16:55):
So it doesn't sound that surprising to me. I mean,
I must say I'm surprised by it is really interesting. Um,
I see what you're saying, though, Like you might have
an easier time picturing something that there is a more
uniquely identifiable source for if you've just seen it once,
then something that you've got a lot of data you're
(17:17):
trying to average. Though that sounds like that would not
fall under like normal face processing. That does sound unusual
to me. But I wonder if there is a distinctive
difference between essentially remembering a photo of a person and
remembering that person's face, you know, because because like when
I when I think back on say, people I've known
that that have passed on, um, you know, I can
(17:40):
recall their face pretty clearly, But I I second guess
myself more sometimes about the details, uh, as opposed to
say a picture, say a famous Hollywood actor from you know,
the ninety forties or something I can picture. I can
picture Clark Gable like that, and I really don't have
any difficult culty in bringing to mind, at least the
(18:02):
most prominent headshot of Clark Gable in my mind. But
would you recognize Clark Gable without a mustache? I might not,
that's the thing, But I but that, Yeah, I just
have so much there's just so much less data than
I'm calling upon. I'm basically remembering probably I'm probably remembering
his IMDb or Wicked profile picture. You know. Yeah, it
does make you wonder if they're actually different sort of
(18:24):
subsets of categorization pathways within the brain for different classes
of faces. Do do we class famous faces any different
than we class personally familiar faces? Do those operate differently
or do we use the same architecture for both? Take
Michael Fassbinder for instance. Alright, always an interesting face to
look at, always a joy to watch him act, or
(18:48):
an agony, depending on the part. But he rarely looks
me in the eyes. And when he does look me
in the eye, when he does look at the camera, uh,
I know that I am looking at essentially an object.
He cannot he cannot view me back. There's no social
exchange there. Not just because he's playing a robot. Not
just because he's playing a robot and it's maybe a
(19:09):
pie zombie, but no, but because I mean, obviously this
is an overstatement of the obvious, but he cannot see me.
This is not I am. I am observing him as
a voyeur. This is only tangentially related to the subject.
But it does make me think of a study on
the Thatcher illusion. Uh So, Robert I included some images
here of this wonderful thing. If you never heard about
(19:29):
the Thatcher illusion before, you can't just listen to us
describe it. You have to, whenever you get the opportunity,
go and look up what this looks like. The Thatcher
illusion is this principle first detective by Thompson in nineteen
eighty and it's defined by the authors of a studio
and I mentioned just briefly and plos one from sixteen
by Huts and Carbon, And it's defined by these authors
(19:52):
as the case where quote participants instantly perceive an upright
face with inverted eyes and mouth as gre task, but
fail to do so when the face is inverted. So
if you take a normal face you flip the eyes
and the mouth upside down on it. It is incredibly revolting.
And that we're not just talking about the eyeballs themselves,
(20:14):
but this also involves the eyebrows and the eyelashes. Yeah,
but if you do the exact same So if you
turn a do the exact same thing, but with the
face upside down. So you turn the face upside down
and then again rotate the eyes and the mouth upside
down relative to the face. You can't tell any difference
between that and a normal face, So they look almost
(20:35):
exactly the same unless you really study hard. Yeah, if
you're just if you're just inverting the the eyes and
the mouth, the character looks like a demon. Otherwise you're
just like, oh yeah, now that same faces upside down.
You have to really look at it to notice that
there's something altered altered there. But this study in particular
was trying to see how does this work with familiar faces,
(20:56):
And the example they used was famous faces, because you
can general account on people to be familiar with very
famous faces. But they were trying to see if familiarity
with faces might play a role in the speed of
processing these types of images, and they found what they
were looking for did not hold. Participants in this study
were not any faster at processing grotesque inverted eyes and
(21:19):
mouth on famous faces, though the authors say it might
have been different if they'd used personally familiar faces rather
than famous faces. They acknowledge that that could be a
flaw in their their study design. But at the same time,
while not faster, participants were more accurate quote in deciding
if famous faces were grotesque or not when they were inverted,
probably due to better knowledge of what the people look
(21:41):
like when presented normally. And in interpreting this, they say
quote altogether, famous faces seemed to be processed in a
more elaborate, more expertise based way than non famous faces,
whereas non famous inverted faces seemed to cause difficulties in
accurate and sensitive processing. And that's in listening to me
because of the invocation of generalized expertise in the different
(22:04):
kinds of face recognition, and it recalls the studies we
mentioned in the original Face blind this episode by Isabel
Gauthier and her colleagues showing that expertise in recognizing objects
like birds or cars, non face objects, recruits processing from
this region of the brain, the fusiform face region, which
is the one we think of as the key to
(22:24):
allowing primary facial recognition. Alright, on that note, let's take
a quick break and when we come back we'll do
some more listener mail. Thank thank you, thank you, alright,
We're back. Alright. Our next listener mail comes to us
from Emily. Emily writes, Hey, guys, big fan of the show,
first time sending listener mail. Feel free to use my
story in listener mail on the show with first name
(22:46):
only if you find it interesting. We do, so we're
using it. Emily says, I didn't realize it for many years,
but I think I have had a relatively mild but
still noticeable case of face blindness for my whole life.
I wouldn't say I have old blown face blindness, but
I think my facial recognition processing software works somewhere below average.
Besides taking me forever to get into TV shows because
(23:09):
I have a hard time keeping characters straight. The first
season of Game of Thrones was tough. It has caused
me mild embarrassment more than a few times, a handful
of which I will recount here. One I started a
job in high school, working at a bustling office, and
on either the first or the second day, I realized
that I couldn't recognize my manager, despite the fact that
(23:30):
she had just hired and hired me and onboarded me.
People were on their feet for most of the day,
so I couldn't just go back to her office and
check because she wasn't there. She was a middle aged
woman who looked sort of like the other middle aged
women in the office, and I simply could not recognize her,
no distinguishing characteristics. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone
who she was because I thought it would make me
(23:52):
look really stupid. Two during college, I came home on
a break and ran into a tall, bearded man wearing
a beanie while I was in own. I gave him
a weird look when he came up to me and
started talking to me, until I realized it was my
own brother, who had not had a beard the last
time I saw him a few months earlier. Three. A
few months ago, I was preparing to give testimony at
(24:13):
a hearing at the Statehouse for work. There were a
few dozen people also in the audience. A man in
a suit sat down next to me and started talking
to me as if he knew what I was going
to comment on. I was a little freaked out, and
I asked him if we'd met before. Immediately he said
who he was and who he worked for. It turned
out he was someone who I had met several times
and corresponded with regularly via email for work. I did
(24:36):
not recognize him wearing a suit and in a situation
where I wasn't expecting to see him. I was extremely
embarrassed and told him I had quote some face blindness,
but I'm not sure if he believed me. I was
nervous about the possibility that he would tell my boss
about my faux PAB, but I don't think he did,
and nothing ever came of it. I told several people
about the last incident, and they all thought it was
(24:56):
really weird. This makes me feel like I probably have
some degree of actual face blindness rather than just being
a near average level of forgetful. I have an easier
time recognizing people by their voices and physicality like gate
posture or gestures, so I try to rely on that
as well as physical characteristics that stand out a lot,
at least until I get to know people better. I
(25:17):
need to have several face to face interactions with people
before I will be able to recognize them reliably. Not
sure if this qualifies as any form of prosopagnosia, but
I thought you might like to hear about it. I
enjoyed the episode on the topic keep up the great work. Well, Emily,
I'd say again, don't take our word as a as
a medical diagnosis, but it sounds like you're describing some
of the classic indicators that are included on these inventories. Yeah.
(25:41):
I found a tidbit about Game of Thrones particularly interesting
because I could see where that would be confusing because
it's essentially, uh, just a whole bunch of scruffy white
dudes that you have to keep track hop right, Um,
and they're they're not necessarily like dressing in ways that
Q is all that distinctive to us, right, A lot
of them are just wearing furs and leather and stuff. Now,
(26:02):
one uh television series mini series slash movie that that
I would be very interested to hear someone with face
blind this comment on is the adaptation of the Mahabarata
that came out in nine nine from Peter Brooks. This
is an excellent retelling of the of the Hindu epic. Uh.
(26:24):
And he did an interesting thing with the casting and
said he cast each key character in the saga with
a different international actor, So all their characters are from
different races, they have different accents, uh And and of
course they're all um outstanding stage actors, so they have.
They tend to have very distinctive facial features as well.
(26:47):
But I wonder how someone who has difficulty with faces
and has difficulty with something like Game of Thrones would
process something like this adaptation. Well, yeah, it seems like
if you have a more diverse cast that would help
with like keeping the characters straight. I should also say,
don't be afraid to have every character in your film
or TV show, uh, feature a different hair color. Don't
(27:07):
stop it just the usuals either, Like just throwout some pink,
some some blue, whatever you need to do to get
the job done. Have a space turn and everything. All right.
Here's another one. This one comes to us from Ben
Hi Rob and Joe big Fan here from London, UK.
I just finished listening to the episode on prosopagnosia and
felt compelled to write in as it happens, my sister
(27:27):
has prosopagnosia and didn't even realize it until a few
years back. It's funny you mentioned Jane Goodall in the
episode two, because I met her once when living in
Beijing and brought it brought up her prosopagnosia with my
sister and it was then that something clicked for her.
We both completed a series of facial recognition tests online,
where I scored about average thirty two out of fifty
(27:50):
or thereabouts, while my sister scored precisely zero. She says
she's had it forever but didn't realize it was an
actual condition. She can always recognize myself and other close
family members, but she says she remembers other people by
their hairstyle or other defining features. If these features change,
such as suddenly shaving your head, she won't recognize them
(28:11):
next time they meet, especially if they meet accidentally somewhere. Also,
her job means she has to continually travel around while
holding events, and she always has people coming up to
her and addressing her by name. Her cheats for dealing
with this is to just reply hey man, buddy, sir,
dude with a smile and buy some time to try
and work out who they are. I'm not sure if
(28:33):
prosopagnosia is on a sliding scale, but my sister hasn't
had any massively detrimental consequences from having this condition. She
just says faces are all the same and she's developed
a killer bluffing ability in social situations. Anyway, fascinating condition
and serendipitous episode. Keep up the great work. Well, thanks
for getting in touch, Ben, Yeah, that's interesting. We had
(28:56):
talked in the episode about ways that often when somebody
has some kind of neurological impairment or some limited ability
in one way, other neural systems will kick in to compensate. Now,
one thing we talked about with people with prosopagnosia is
that often if you have trouble recognizing faces, you can
become hyper aware of other types of body cues Like
you mentioned gate posture, all those kinds of things. You
(29:17):
notice those far better than a person with normal facial
recognition skills would. But I hadn't thought before about how
other compensation skills could kick in apart from perceptive and
recognition based ones like bluffing ability. I mean, that is
a cognitive skill that I I know, like, I would
not be good at that, But I wonder if I
(29:38):
had had to spend my entire life honing that skill,
I might be a very different person. I might be
much better at, like trying to figure things out on
the fly based on little conversational cues about how to
get to a name Yeah, I mean it's interesting to
to just think about how un adapted one would become
to working around these different blockages. Yeah, by the way,
(29:59):
fun fun at Joe. I actually cannot tell A C.
D C songs apart. I like them when I hear them,
but to me, it's it's all the same. It's like
the faces for Ben's sister. What about the A C,
D C songs that have distinctive markings. Um, I mean,
I guess lyrically, like if if I'm if I hear
it and they hit something in the chorus, then yes,
(30:21):
I could maybe tell by the lyrics, but I definitely
wouldn't be able to tell by the music. Even though
again I like the music, it just all kind of
sounds the same to me. There are a lot of
rock songs that sound the same. I mean the same
way that. Broadly speaking, there are only so many ways
you can arrange a couple of eyes and nose in
a mouth. There're only so many ways you can do
four chords. In general. Comments on machismo, It's kind of
(30:42):
like if you look at the hair metal bands of
the eighties and nineties, certainly a lot of that music
is going to sound the same UH. To really differentiate them,
you do have to go on visual clues, right or
but the bands all look the same. Yeah, you do
run into a problem there. Then you have to look
at what kind of fonts they used in their UH
(31:03):
in their band name. Okay, there you that becomes the
determining factor, all right. Our next email comes from our
listener Jeff. Jeff writes, I've always had profound face blindness,
but was an adult before I knew such a thing
was well a thing. There's a subjective problem. Brains and
perception are first person. What's it like to be Jeff?
For me? As a young child, I was amazed by
(31:25):
other kids they had this ability to instantly recognize people.
As an older child, I realized with a sinking feeling,
that it was not some magic they had, but a
deficit I had. And I tried to recognize people. I
look hard at features and try to mentally map them
without avail. I recollect, feeling depressed that I just couldn't
try harder. I did learn to know my friends by
(31:47):
their particular behaviors, especially gates and profiles. I got good
at this as a child. There is the help of
fairly regular dress, so there was the friend who wore
turtleneck shirts and one who always wore dress pants and
never jeans. Red hair being uncommon in my group was
a cue, but it was always hard. In context was
(32:08):
the major aid I knew if I went to a
particular house, my friend, maybe his sister, and maybe one
of his friends might be there. Always when I controlled
the context through meetings, I was okay. Parties were stifling,
as was the quote greater world, as anyone could be anybody,
it presents his social shyness introversion, or conversely as being
(32:31):
aloof or stuck up at failing to properly greet folks
strangers abound. Recognition in another person's eyes is fear, and
I learned the etiquette of an enthusiastic, nameless, neutral greeting.
I could go on about it, I mean, my late
fifties and still deal with it. My personal doctor chided
me the other day when I apparently had not greeted
(32:52):
her as she walked her dog. Context my sister, visiting
from out of town, appeared at a bookstore and says hi,
with no wreck cognition from me. Context lots can be
done with paying attention to characteristics other than faces, builds, hair, gait, voice,
and other subtle idiosyncrasies. I like to think it's made
(33:12):
me notice such things and have a better, if somewhat
narrower attention. It doesn't bother me much these days. Here's
the only message I can offer. Kids who have this
don't know it. This is what it's like to be Jeff.
Parents likely have no clue. It's really hard to characterize
and know that there's anything odd to report. If a
deficit has noticed, it may very well be misattributed to
(33:34):
some other problem with social skills, intelligence, or even autism.
I found out about it on my own as an adult,
learning about it from reading about the mind and brain.
It would have been nice if young Jeff could have
been told that it really was a thing. I think
Jeff makes some really good points here. I mean, it
seems like there could be profound benefit from just increasing
(33:54):
awareness of this. Yeah, like I could, I can see
how this You could start folding this in to um
to some of your educational efforts with with young kids.
You know that there you could have story books about
this that that people are going to process the world
around them in slightly different ways. Yeah. I even I
found a study about the psychosocial consequences of prosopagnosia from
(34:18):
the Journal of Psychosomatic Research from two thousand and eight
by Lucy Yardley at all and basically, this looked at
the psychological and social consequences of living with developmental prosopagnosia.
It consisted of telephone interviews with twenty five people who
scored as face recognition impaired on the Cambridge Face Recognition Test,
and the results were that all participants described recurring social
(34:42):
problems caused by their inability to recognize faces, and this
led to consequences like chronic anxiety about offending people, feelings
of guilt, embarrassment, failure. Of course, there's nothing to feel
guilty about, right, but people felt bad like they were
doing something wrong by not being able to recognize people
bill Most, but not all, reported feelings of like having
(35:03):
avoided social situations, including work meetings and social gatherings because
of fear they had about their inability to recognize faces.
And this could lead to all kinds of problems in life.
Right like you, you could end up dependent on help
from others or with a restricted social circle, or cause
problems with your opportunities and employment, or it could undermine
(35:25):
yourself confidence. And a pretty good remedy for this is,
like we're saying, increasing awareness and increasing awareness in both directions, right,
Like making people aware that this is a condition that
might be present in other people, and that they should
try to be helpful in accommodating with somebody who doesn't
recognize your face is not necessarily because they're aloof for
their rude and you should judge them that this might
(35:46):
just be something that they don't have the same ability
that you have at And then the other side would
be making people aware that they might have the condition
and helping increase diagnoses of people who have it so
they can can explain the situation to other us and
avoid these kinds of misperceptions. Yeah, I mean, I think
a lot of it does come down to um to
(36:07):
sort of informing your empathy, informing your theory of mind
so that you're not just duplicating your basic mind state
when you're trying to to figure out how another person
is viewing the world. All right, on that note, we're
going to take another break, and when we come back,
we'll hit some more listener mail than All right, we're back.
So this one comes to us from Hugh. Hugh rights
(36:30):
in and says, hey, guys, I'm a longtime listener, even
if I have no idea about most of your sci
fi references. Oh well, we appreciate that. Well, that's okay.
We try not to include so many that it it
makes it difficult for for non sci fi fans, non
horror fans, or what have you to follow the episode.
I hope we don't fail too hard at that. Uh.
(36:51):
Hugh continues, I've just heard your episode on face blindness.
I think I may have the opposite of this. When
I see a complete stranger in the street, I think
it's someone I know. I'm typing this on the train
and I saw a guy who I thought was my
old housemate from years ago. Of course it wasn't him.
I tend to group faces into sets. The guy on
the train had all the facial mannerisms of my housemate.
(37:14):
I instantly thought it was him. It's more specific than
just crop red hair and glasses. The problem is, I'm
pretty outgoing. When I see someone who has all the
facial mannerisms of someone I used to know, like my
friend's brother I met once, I'll go over and say hi,
often to my wife's embarrassment. I guess I'm just good
at spotting averagely accurate doppelgangers. Anyway, while in my eyes
(37:37):
you both look like many other people. Uh, in my ears,
nobody makes a podcast like this. Keep up the great work.
Hugh from Sydney. Oh, thanks, Hugh. Uh. You know this
got me thinking too about this in a number of
emails about uh, the other information that one can process
to identify an individual. And I wonder we did and
(38:00):
so much on faces that I imagine other people have
had the situation as well. Where you are you're almost
certain you see someone you know, but their positions so
that you cannot see their face. Perhaps you're in an
exercise class, or you're seated formally, you know, in a
theater or a restaurant, and you can't. But but you
(38:20):
have this feeling that you cannot be for sure unless
you have some unless you see their face, unless you
have essentially facial confirmation of the individual. Uh. And it's
an interesting thing to feel because then when they finally
look your way, you're like, oh, yeah, that was of
course them. I knew it was them, but I could
not deal. I was sure until I actually saw them
(38:43):
and even made eye contact with them. So we had
this recently when we were in New York at the
One Strange Rock Front, when I from behind was eight
nine percent sure that this that this guy with the
cane with the skull on the end was the magician
and skeptic James Randy, but I could be positive. It
took us a while to confirm. Yeah, yeah, But I
(39:05):
have that happened with just people I know or people
that I don't know super well. But say I I
go to some of the same like social functions with them,
and if I can't see that face, there's just like
I I can't stop thinking about it, like I I
have to see their face. And that's where it can
get awkward if it's on the train and you're in
that situation where you've just looped them more or less
into the category of individuals like this, and then you're like,
(39:27):
all right, I'm gonna go look at this person's face.
And then you look at them and it's a complete stranger,
and then you feel like you're a stalker. That is
a bad feeling. Indeed, now, following up from what Hugh said, again,
I want to be very clear that we are not
trying to offer diagnoses of people based on their emails,
so you should not take this as a medical diagnosis.
It is not, but what you're describing does sound like
(39:49):
it's sort of matches a known condition I think we
mentioned in the original episode known as hyper familiarity for
unknown faces or h FF, and just to talk about
a quick study on this published in Plos one called
neurofunctional signature of Hyperfamiliarity for Unknown Faces. The definition is
that quote. It is a rare selective disorder that consists
(40:12):
of the disturbing and abnormal feeling of familiarity for unknown faces,
while recognition of known faces as normal. So it's not
that you can't recognize people. You can recognize people normally,
but you're also constantly recognizing people who are not the
people you think they are. So this was a case
study of g N who is a sixty eight year
(40:33):
old woman with selective hyperfamiliarity for unknown faces, and the
authors did a multimodal brain imaging study on what happened
when she saw and recognized or did not recognize familiar
and unfamiliar faces that use CT scanning and f m
r I together with behavioral measures to to see what
was going on, and behaviorally, she had essentially much lower
(40:56):
discrimination sensitivity between familiar and unfamiliar faces and normal controls.
And in light of this lower discrimination, basically her brain
was biased toward classifying faces as familiar. So what was
actually happening in the brain? While the authors say that
there appeared to be atrophy and low functioning of the
(41:16):
left hemisphere temporal regions, so the left side of the
brain is underperforming compared to what it would normally be
doing and in recognizing faces. And then at the same time,
quote hyperfamiliarity feelings were selectively associated with enhanced activity in
the right medial and inferior temporal cortices. So it looks
(41:36):
like the face recognition process involves regions of both the
left and the right hemisphere and that they do different
things there. If the left hemisphere is underperforming, the right
hemisphere takes over and contend to over bias in favor
of saying, hey, I know this person now. Why would
there be this hemisphere division? Well, the authors write that
the temporal areas of the left hemisphere are you usually
(42:00):
used to analyze and encode unique facial features, whereas the
right hemisphere tends towards a quote more global but less
efficient encoding of facial traits. So it sounds like the
right hemisphere is more often used to encode and react
to a kind of general impression of a face, whereas
the left hemisphere tends to pick out specific identifiers and
(42:23):
features for higher accuracy, And so the authors write that
quote the greater reliance on the right hemisphere therefore facilitates
spurious feelings of familiarity and misattribution of personal relevance to
unknown faces. These erroneous familiarity feelings cannot be counterbalanced or
corrected by more precise associations in the left hemisphere between
(42:45):
visual facial cues and specific knowledge pertaining to a unique identity,
and therefore lead to a liberal decision criterion concerning face
familiarity recognition. And in addition to just being the fact
that Hugh seems to be describing something to describing some
degree of hyper familiarity of faces, it also goes along
with what he's saying about grouping faces into sets of
(43:07):
kinds of faces. If if what's going on in his
brain is that he might be over relying on the
right hemisphere uh to sort of like get these general
impressions of faces and under relying on the specific unique
characteristics that more accurately identify a face. All right, now,
here's our next two or rather interesting because they both
(43:29):
relate to migrains and face blindness. I found these particularly fascinating.
This one comes to us from Amelia. Hi, guys, I'm
just listening to your podcast about prosopagnosia or face blindness,
and when you mentioned other types of agnosia, you mentioned
finger agnosia, which was very interesting to me. I have
suffered from migraine headache since I was a teenager, and
(43:50):
one of the first symptoms I get of an imminent
migrain is that my hands look like someone else's. You
know how normally, when you're doing something, you can see
your hand ends, but your brain doesn't really pay much
attention to them, a bit like your brain seeing your
nose all the time but ignoring it. Well, when I'm
about to have a migraine and see my hands, it's
like I'm seeing someone else's hands doing whatever it is
(44:12):
they are doing. My brain is obviously still controlling them
and they are doing what I'm asking them to do,
but there is some kind of disconnection in the brain
that doesn't recognize them as my hands. I am very
interested in all the symptoms of migraines due to my
own personal experience of them and the weirdness of it all.
But I had never heard of anyone else having this.
Hands aren't my own symptom that I get, it's all.
(44:34):
It also doesn't seem to affect any other part of
my body, just my hands. In contrast to this, I am,
as far as I can tell when comparing myself to friends,
above average at recognizing faces. Just thought you'd be interested
in this weird symptom I have with best wishes, Amelia. Now, Amelia,
that is really interesting and we we will address that
(44:54):
right after. We also read this email from our listener Ross,
who also brought up my rains in migraine. Aura Ross writes, Hey,
Joe and Robert, my name's Ross. I'm a new listener
to your program and I found that it's perfect for
working on art too. I'm an illustrator and an animator,
and I love to put on your show while I'm
working on projects. Here's another artist. Your last show about
(45:16):
face blindness was super interesting and hit close to home
for me. While I don't suffer from prosopagnosia in the
sense that you talked about. I do, however, suffer from
complex migraines. While experiencing a migraine episode, I will have
a whole slew of neurological symptoms before the pain even starts.
This phase of the episode, I've come to understand it's
called the migraine aura, and while it's a pretty trippy experience,
(45:38):
it's a good way to know whether I should find
a dark and quiet place to lie down before the
real fun stuff starts. My aura symptoms include blind spots,
mental fog, numbness in my face and hands, and, strangely enough,
something close to prosopagnosia. Over the years, I've noticed that
while I'm having aura symptoms, I'm temporarily unable to visualize
specific faces in my mind's eye, or even recognize my
(46:01):
friends and family if they're in front of me. Though
I can't see much of anything with the blind spots.
It's rather disconcerting, especially since so much of my profession
relies on drawing faces. However, after about an hour and
a half, all the symptoms will go away and the
headache will start. I thought it was interesting when you
brought up the caricature artists, wondering if any have face blindness.
(46:21):
While my face blindness is always temporary, I always regain
my pretty uncanny ability to recognize faces. I'm one of
those people who has a knack for recognizing actors with
no lasting damage. My artistic abilities are also unimpacted by
my occasional bouts with migrains, and I find that, if anything,
I'm better at observing faces, knowing what it's like not
(46:41):
having that ability. I'm nowhere near savvy enough to research
why this may be. But hey, you could do a
show on migrains. Loved the show and I look forward
to hearing the next one. Now, that was really fascinating.
I I've I don't think we've ever done a proper
episode of stuff to blow your mind on migrains and effects,
but we should, because I'm always amazed and new when
(47:03):
I stumbled upon information about it. Yeah, and Amelia and Ross,
you should know that the things you describe are in
fact represented already in the medical literature. So I was
able to find at least a couple of studies mentioning
things like this. There was a study in two thousand
six by sand Or at all in Cephalagia, which is
a pure viewed medical journal about headaches. That was a
(47:23):
case report of a fifty eight year old left handed
man who reported prosopagnosia in association with migraine aura, so
he'd get the migraine aura and he'd lose his ability
to recognize faces. There was another study from two thousand seven,
also in Cephalagia, by Vincent and Haji Khani, and this
was about how migraines have the power to in fact
affect all kinds of cortical physiology and induce all kinds
(47:46):
of dysfunctions. So the authors questioned people who had migraine
with aura and migraine without aura, and they found that
seventy two point two percent of migraine with aura patients
and forty eight point six percent of migraine without or
A patients had symptoms including at least some of the
following prosopagnosia, dis chromatopsia, which is the inability to see
(48:07):
some colors or some general impairment of color vision, and
then also ideational apraxia, which is defined as quote loss
of ability to conceptualize, plan, and execute motor actions involving
the use of tools or objects, so suddenly like you
couldn't use a screwdriver or a knife for something. This
(48:28):
next one might be very applicable to Amelia alien hand syndrome.
Multiple people report alien hand syndrome as a result of
migraine aura or migraine without aura, and this would, uh,
this would be basically what Amelia is describing, the feeling
that a hand you have is not in fact your
own hand. And also difficulty recognized, recognizing and and calling
(48:51):
to mind proper names. So this to me also really
makes it seem like it would be worthwhile to cover
migraines and migraine aura in general in an episode that
they can have such why ranging effects throughout the brain. Yeah, indeed,
I think we should definitely come back to it. And
also I mean we we know we're going to have
a large selection of listeners who have stories about about
migraines and migraine auras to report. Uh, in fact, you
(49:14):
can maybe we should just ask people to go ahead
and emails about those migraines and symptoms that you encounter
so that we can have those ahead of the episode
we wind up doing on it. All Right, we have
one last bit of listener mail to hit before we
sign off for today. Uh doesn't mean that these will
be the only face blindness emails that we read. When
(49:37):
we get around to doing our next listener mail episode,
we may have some more that we roll out as well,
in addition to unrelated emails. But this one comes to
us from Kyle. Kyle says, Hey, guys, big fans, Stuff
to blow your mind is my favorite of your podcast selection.
Keep up the awesome work. So this is kind of odd,
but after listening to your episode on face blindness, you
(49:57):
would have mentioned other agnosis such as finger and hand
blind no, and thought this would be a funny story.
I've recently been getting into virtual reality with the HTC Vibe,
which is in itself incredibly mind blowing. But after my
first month with the headset, and it's a convincing replacement
of reality, I completely lost awareness of my hands. I
(50:18):
was spending so much time and environments where your hands
were invisible that my brain retrained itself. Apparently, for maybe
a month, I couldn't associate my hands in the real
world with my own. I felt like someone else's hands
waving in front of my face. I guess this maybe
falls under body dysmorphia or phantom limb phenomenon, but possibly
(50:39):
but it may relate to finger agnosia. Anyways, it was
a crazy experience. It apparently happens to a lot of people.
I was worried for so long, but it eventually wore off.
Take care of guys. Kyle, Well, that is interesting. I
had not heard anything of this before, and I know
we have a number of listeners who are really into
virtual reality these days, so I would love to hear
(51:02):
from other folks who have had strange occurrences with invisible hands.
I have seen four demonstrations of the way that perception
and just general perceptual stimuli can change your relationship with
a part of your body. One example would be this experiment.
If you've never seen it done before, I think I've
mentioned it in the podcast before that um, someone can
(51:26):
replace your hand, Like you put your hands on the
table and one of your hands is behind a wall
where you can't see it, and instead the person performing
the experiment puts a rubber hand on table, uh that
looks like it could be your hand, and they train
you to think of it as your hand by touching
or stimulating your real hand while also giving you the
(51:48):
visual cues that they're touching or stimulating the fake hand,
like like the rubber hand and the real hand that
is out of sight or both rubbed with a feather
at the same time at the same time. Yeah, and
then after a minute or so of this, if somebody
hit it's the rubber hand with a hammer, you will
freak out like you think like your hand has just
been hit and it you. You can essentially quite quickly
(52:08):
train your brain to recalibrate its own sense of where
and what its body is. It's crazy. It's just another
one of those experiments that really drives home the true
nature of our perception, uh and our our understanding of reality.
All right, So there you have it. UH. An entire
listener Mail episode devoted the face blindness. Again, these were
(52:30):
not all of the emails we received. Now, there's a
lot of good stuff we couldn't get to, and we'll
and we'll likely receive some some additional emails. So again,
the next time we do a listener mail, we're averaging
about one a month. Really, that seems like a good
way to tackle and stay ahead of the wonderful um
emails that that that all of you send. Us the
next time we'll we'll try and hit some more of these.
(52:52):
In the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is our mothership. That's where
we will find all of the podcast episodes, as well
as links out to our various social media accounts to
also find all the podcast episodes. Wherever you get your
podcasts and wherever that is, we always encourage you, Hey,
give us a strong rating, give us as many stars
as possible, give us a glowing review. Uh. It doesn't
(53:15):
take much time on your part and it really helps
us out in the end. Big thanks as always to
our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and try Harrison. If
you would like to get in touch with us directly
to give us feedback on this episode or any other,
to let us know your thoughts about any of the
stuff we talked about today, or just to say hi,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
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(53:47):
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