"Jane Goodall also has a certain degree of prosopagnosia. Her problems extend to recognizing chimpanzees as well as people—thus, she says, she is often unable to distinguish individual chimps by their faces. Once she knows a particular chimp well, she ceases to have difficulties; similarly, she has no problem with family and friends. But, she says, 'I have huge problems with people with "average" faces. . . . I have to search for a mole or something. I find it very embarrassing! I can be all day with someone and not know them the next day.'... Face recognition is crucially important for humans, and the vast majority of us are able to identify thousands of faces individually, or to easily pick out familiar faces in a crowd.... People with prosopagnosia... need to be resourceful and inventive in finding strategies for circumventing their deficits: recognizing people by an unusual nose or beard, for example, or by their spectacles or a certain type of clothing. Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and, of course, context and expectation are paramount—one expects to see one’s students at school, one’s colleagues at the office, and so on. Such strategies, both conscious and unconscious, become so automatic that people with moderate prosopagnosia can remain unaware of how poor their facial recognition actually is, and are startled if it is revealed to them by testing (for example, with photographs that omit ancillary clues like hair or eyeglasses)."
From "Face-Blind/Why are some of us terrible at recognizing faces?" by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker, August 23, 2010). I'm rereading this today because the NYT ran an article today – "The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian’" — about "the phenomenon of casual Asian-face blindness" that may be holding back Asian-Americans in the workplace. I blogged that here.
The suggestion that there's racism in the inability to recognize faces needs to be handled carefully, because there are 2 forms of discrimination in conflict. It may be discrimination to be bad at recognizing Asian-American coworkers, but vigilance about this human frailty may amount to a failure to accommodate the disabled — those with prosopagnosia. Quite aside from the specific disability, we're all on a spectrum when it comes to facial recognition. Many of us are bad at it, and some people are fantastic at it. Be careful about throwing accusations of racism around in this area of radically diverse ability.
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5 comments:
K writes:
"Lord Salisbury who was the British Prime Minister in the 1880's and 90's has this. There were many large parties associated with the job and his children liked to come up to him at the parties and try to get introduced without him recognizing him."
Tim writes:
"I’ve got a touch of it. Mostly harmless—I spent over 15 years in NYC without any famous-people sightings, because there probably aren’t five famous people I’d recognize if I saw them on the street. My wife (who has health anxiety) once was in a panic that dementia was setting in with me when I didn’t recognize a neighbor at the dog park. But I’d never seen her at the dog park and her hair was messed up."
MJB Wolf writes:
Yes I guess that would be a spectrum and I would place myself at the end opposite Goodall as I have always had a distinct ability to recognize people in old photos or disguised as characters in a movie. And I tend to overuse the excuse “I know your face but am so bad at names” to excuse my disability to recall the name attached to familiar faces. But once I truly know someone or connect their face and name it stays accessible in my long term memory.
In a related issue I was blessed with a quite common face and am very often confronted with the same declaration from strangers who think they know me because they have met someone who looks like me, maybe even also a Mike! But my own nearly eidetic memory tells me we have not met.
Sonia writes:
"My husband is like your commenter MJB Wolf--he is at the opposite end of the facial recognition spectrum, with an uncanny ability to recognize faces. He once recognized a friend of mind that he had never met in person--he had only seen her in my photographs--from 20 feet away in the crowded Dane County farmers market on the square. He elbowed me for a minute before I recognized her myself.
"On the other subject, of not recognizing asian faces as distinct, I agree with the commenters that argued this is not a anti-asian thing, it's just a mental muscle that we as humans need to "train." I am blond and light skinned, and when I lived in Guatemala, the locals were always confusing me with other blond, light-skinned women. If you are trained in the habit of looking at blond, light-skinned people, you know what distinguishing features to look for in that class of people. The same thing goes for people with straight black hair."
Patrick writes:
"My theory about at least some instances of this ("All black people look alike") is that if you work in an office made up of white people and a single black guy, you don't need to look very closely at the black guy's face to remember him. Pretty clear that the black guy is Bob (say), you don't need to look at the face, so you don't see distinguishing features. Work in an office of all black people, I'm sure you are then looking at faces so you can identify people and noticing that they are all distinctive in some way."
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