Who are You?

Last week, I saw a reference to something called "face blindness," but didn't know what it was, so I looked it up. Turns out it's one of that group of very rare and unusual brain disorders -- analagous to color blindness, but instead of being unable to distinguish colors, the person's unable to distinguish between human faces.

Prosopagnosia (the name for this that you won't remember tomorrow) can be caused either by brain injury, or it can be (very very rarely) inherited, often with other perception disorders. It's a very specific disorder -- the pattern recognition skills of the people who have it are generally otherwise fine. This is because facial recognition gets its very own (small) section of the brain, on the right side. Normal optical pattern recognition is a left-brain skill.

It's just starting to be recognized, especially among those who are born with it, because they just don't have anything to compare it to. I was reading an article by a guy who didn't realize he had the problem until he was 49 years old. He was watching TV and after having a discussion with someone realized that the other person could tell people apart on the TV shows just by their faces. From that, he figured out that that was probably common, since so many shows were made that way.

He said at that point he tried watching people and realized that when he looked above their jawline, it was a sort of emotional disconnect... the ability to "get" them just went into a black hole. The people with it can distinguish emotion -- they can tell if you're smiling or angry generally by the shape of the mouth, but the ability to connect that set of features to an identity doesn't exist.

This link tries to make the analogy by naming a bunch of rocks and seeing if you can recognize them. It's bizarre and interesting, and a real exercize in conceptualization.