January 26, 2010
This past Saturday, my roommate and I went to our local coffee shop to chat, study and drink coffee. As we ordered, the woman behind the counter mentioned that it had been a long time since she has seen us. Indeed, it had been nearly two years. It surprised me that she remembered us. Today, the BBC had an article on individuals who have a capability to remember people they meet for only a brief period. The ability is called super recognition. The article also highlighted the flip-side, called face blindness. I took the test used to diagnose face blindness and scored 96% accuracy – the average person scores 84% - so by this standard, not only am I on the road to genius, I am also a super recogniser! Today’s question is: what is face blindness?
A: Face blindness, or Prosopagnosia, is an impairement in recognising faces. Prosopagnosiacs often have difficulty recognising friends, family and even themselves. The majority of sufferers have sustained some type of brain damage such as a head trauma or a stroke, however, it is estimated that approximately 2.5% of those afflicted may have inherited the condition. You may be interested to know that Jane Goodall suffered from this imparement.
Cecilia Burman, a woman living with face blindness, compares her ability to recognise faces with other people's ability to recognise stones. You can read her experience here (she does a much better job of drawing the comparison that I can).
Also, if you are interested in testing your ability to recognise faces, you can try the same test that I did here.
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