Magazines. Television. Movies.

 

It all looks like the same model, posing in the ads.  It’s as though there’s one guy and one woman. Beauty is the perfect average person. It’s impossible, because I am face blind, to tell the beautiful people apart. This is, in my book, a privilege: if you are beautiful, you have to work harder to distinguish yourself! You can’t count on your looks. I can’t count on your looks. Literally.

 

The New Yorker was on my table, and RP said, “Tony Soprano,” and he started singing the moon song that opens each episode. I said, “Huh?” I looked down at the cover, more closely. I still didn’t see it.

 

“That’s Tony,” RP said. “See? You don’t see that?”

 

Nope. Nothing. Nada. Just a generic man in generic pants exiting a brown room. I could not see how you could ever get Tony Soprano out of that. RP felt sad for me because he knows I like the show. I pored over that image. “How do you get Tony? How do you know that?”

 

Cartoons and caricatures and drawings and paintings are harder, I think, for face blind, because they are extracting the parts of the face that stand out. But we aren’t very aware of the original features to begin with, so exaggerating them does not help. A reformulated face is just another face we’ve never seen before.

 

Same with Wired. RP said “Al Gore,” and shook his pointed head judgmentally and ruefully. I looked at the magazine’s cover, which had been sitting on my couch for a week. I saw the words AL GORE printed across the front of the magazine, large block letters. I had assumed inside there was text on Al. It never once occurred to me the giant face, ears and hair cropped mostly away, on Wired’s cover was Al. I’d just thought it was some random face. It never occurred to me that others would see this face as a recognizable person, a famous person.

 

It’s like a language. RP and everyone else I know all speak Face-ian. I do not speak Face-ian and I can’t learn it—I have a learning disability that blocks me from ever speaking a word of Face-ian.

 

In a way, it’s like being a kid, and your parents are talking adultlanguage at the dinner table after you’ve drifted away; you’re playing nearby. You hear words like “mortgage” and “quagmire” and “taxes” and “watering restrictions” but they just pop up, whatever. You aren’t really listening. You are playing. There is so much interesting stuff to look at down on the floor, such great pursuits. You don’t really see a need to learn the language—it never occurs to you that you are really missing out on anything. There’s so much more to see from where you’re positioned. You would never think of trading places. 

I wonder how I can find out more about the languages face blind people are fluent in. If there’s a way to discover and measure our secret codes, our subtle ways of  knowing, the microperceptions, Gait-ian, Voice-ian. 

Caricatures, it occurs to me now, are Face-ian spoken in a funny accent, deliberately put-on.

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How come I yelled out of my car at 8 am on Saturday morning, when she was crossing the lonely street? And knew her? Miss Supposedly Face Blind.  How come I yelled HEY LAUREN like that?

Here was the scene. A couple Saturdays ago, I saw a woman crossing 9th Street.  I saw her from the back, walking away from me. At an angle that implied not a normal downtown crossing, but a going-in-the back-of the stores on 8th Street as an employee might.  Who else, with this Lauren-like shape and gait and hair, would be going downton when it was still closed? Towards a shop where a person fitting this description perfectly worked?  

I rolled down my car window.  With a degree of confidence.

“Lauren, you’re in the class, come by and get your slip!”  The person acted like Lauren would act. Surprised but going along with it. “Okay!” she said. She kept walking.

So how did I know (pretty sure) it was Lauren?

Context. Gait. Hair. Good guessing. AKA excellent Sherlockian type reasoning skills. Luck.  Long time to gather information as person was walking along sidewalk, and I was in car with excellent sightlines, no distractions. Pure genius.

The person walked how Lauren walks (she leans forward, keeps her head down, walks kind of hard, kind of hell bent, same energy as her beautiful prose–she’s not a minimalist. There’s a lot going on. She gets where she’s going. Purposeful prose = purposeful walker.)

And, I knew, from many, many, many purchases over a period of four semesters, made at a certain downtown shop, Lauren is employed downtown. Lauren’s a hard worker. I could totally imagine her up early, not hung over, working hard on Saturday morning at this particular (and delicious) shop. Where’d I have seen her many times.  Who else would be going to the shop through the back before it was opened?

I was so happy to recognize her.

Face blind people are often exceedingly friendly (”why do you gush?” one student asked me) or shut down, aloof, ignoring everyone because it’s hard being wrong a lot and being uncertain all the time.

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My dear friend T wants to know. She’s curious not confrontational. And I want to tell her. But I have no clue. I know I didn’t recognize her by her face. So how?

 

I recognize people all the time. I’m not sure how it works. I’m not sure when I am recognizing someone and I am not sure that I am getting it right. My version of recognizing a person is slow, awkward, nervous, unreliable. It’s like you are watching HDTV and I’m pressed up against a big old radio.

 

I am guessing. I work by ear, intuition, and motion analysis. I’m never sure. It’s messy and inexact and fascinating.

 

Here are some features of the face blind recognition process:

 

It’s much, much slower, I think, than your recognizing. Imagine a struggling reader, sounding the words out, aloud. That’s what it felt like, last night, at my book opening when I saw my friend T. (This is A’s term, “book opening,” which I love and am going employ frequently. My new poetry book is out, and last night we had a party to celebrate at an art gallery—a book opening! Lovely! But lots of people to miss, to know, to not know…hello…who are you…)

 

At the book opening, a woman came up and said “We should all be in nametags for you.” If she said who she was, I didn’t catch it. Then she said who she was, and I was shocked. She looked nothing like this person she claimed to be. Not even a little bit. But I had to believe her. I had to just roll with it. This is a feature of the face blind recognizing system: I’m surprised when I recognize someone; I’m equally as surprised when I don’t.

 

So then at the party, my dear friend P. said who she was. Which always seems unnecessary, and awkward and I feel weird about it, but it’s so great! This is what it is like when someone says who they are, even though it seems like I’m knowing them: I don’t have to do the work. It’s a crutch for my fusiform gyrus. A raft, a coupon, a cheat sheet—I can just dive into the interaction, I am spared the tentative guessing moments; it’s like you are working on a really hard long division problem (that would be any long division problem at all) and someone gives you the answer. (Thanks, P!) 

A note on P’s husband, M. I knew it was him because he was standing next to her in a way that husbands stand next to their wives at art openings or book openings. A gimme. But if he had just been standing alone in a corner, not next to her, I would have had no idea who he was. I would have seen a stranger. 

There’s a lot of faking. When someone smiles at me, I go with it. I am not sure at first who they are, but it usually becomes clear once they start speaking and moving and we are interacting. I know how people sound, how they gesture, and how they talk to me, what they say, how they just are reveals volumes. Stephen H has this way of imperceptibly bobbing—it’s slightly elfin, very adorable and that’s how I always know him. His signature gait. (My editor ED has a great gait signature, too. And my mom, Jake, and Mike the Bike guy. EZ.)

 

So, I think I was primed to recognize T and her husband because I caught them walking in: motion, gait. They don’t wear shoes that change their gait, T and her husband. Consistency is what the face blind person thrives on. Other reasons I recognized T and her husband last night at the party: he has very distinctive firm, declarative wise owl-type glasses, and a good clear outline (supremely tall person); she has distinctive hair (black telephone cords of gorgeousness) which if she doesn’t pull it back, is my main T. recognizing handle. And, I saw her first from the side (more telephone cords hair showing, less face). And, I knew to be expecting them. The stars aligned. I didn’t run up to her, but when a T-like person smiled at me in a really affectionate, I-know-you-well way, I felt about 84% confident this was my friend. All this happens in about a sixth of a second.

 

When two people are together, a couple, it’s easier. (However, at the opening, I recognized B but not his wife H.) But usually couples are much easier to identify than sole survivors. It’s like a dyslexic just assuming a phrase based on the first word. The spouse is a nice go-with, good guess.

But I think that the main thing that helped me recognize T on Friday night was she was wearing a blue polar fleece jacket that I myself have borrowed from her on two occasions when I got cold on a walk—I know that jacket and think of it as “my” T jacket. I’m fond of the jacket. It’s almost like she was in my jacket. 

So, I don’t know you by face, I don’t know you right away, I absolutely don’t know you for certain, and I don’t you know the same way you know me.

In most interactions, I roll with the “Hello” and let there be more space for more to come in after that—my brain doesn’t go “Tammy! Babe! So great to see you!”  That never happens.  My brain takes tentative steps in the direction of identification. “We’ve got a blue polar fleece jacket, a R-like husband, good hair samples, and a general moves-like-T incoming. Prepare for a T. greeting scenario! Check!” But I don’t launch the T greeting planes until after she speaks and I know for sure. 

I stay really open-minded until after we’ve started talking to each other. So often, I’m wrong. I have to stay in a place where I can change my mind instantly based on the information that’s streaming in.  (This seems like a really good thing for someone who is a writer.) I never run across rooms to greet people. They come to me and by the time we’re in the talking phase, I feel like somehow it’s going to work out. But I’m not ever certain. The students who came told me in advance they were coming, and in two cases, who they were coming with, so I employed my clumping-couples strategies. That’s how I got Anna W. I knew she’d be there and I knew with whom.

 

Last night is I was giving a reading so it was appropriate for me to stand around and people come up to me. That makes it easier. It gives me more time to gather the clues and get the appropriate response strategies lined up, fueled, and ready to launch.

 

But I spend evenings such as these very uncertain who is who. Some people are easier than others. Some people introduce themselves (Thank you Matt, John B, Katie—cute hat—and

Elizabeth—why are you so hard to recognize?). Some don’t say. Some don’t have any idea what any of this is about. (Until recently I was in that last category myself.) When I go home from an event, I’m exhausted.

 

Most of the time, I just pretend I know who is who and it either becomes clear, or it doesn’t. It’s easy to pretend. People don’t remember names so they aren’t expecting you to say their names. You can easily fake you know someone, just as you fake knowing their name. Faking is very, very draining. Before I “came out” as face blind, before I knew about the disorder, I faked entire conversations, long conversations. Long, long meaningful conversations. It horrifies me to remember this. I get flushed and sweaty thinking about it—I faked some important conversations. I kept thinking I’d get it, the clues would come in, but sometimes they never did. Now, I’m trying not to pretend. I am making myself ask.

 

Last night, when I was already well into the interaction, several times I asked people, when I caught myself faking, “Who are you?”

 

This is the art involved in being face blind: when to ask. I have to wait a certain amount of time to figure who a person is. When should I bag it, and just ask? When should I keep trying, using all my complicated strategies? What makes this so incredibly tricky is I do not know if I am talking to a stranger or a familiar person. I do not know if I am supposed to know.  (But I can tell a lot by how they act towards me.)

My whole life I’ve pretended I know who every one is. I never wanted anyone to know, ever, that I was not able to really do this. Again, it feels so much like being an adult dyslexic. All along, if anyone acted like they knew me, I acted like that back. It’s hard to stop doing that altogether. Nowadays, I’m trying to catch the exact moment when I’m past the point of info-gathering, and well into whole-hog faking. It’s an interesting place to notice what’s going on. I have to fake friendliness, knowing-ness, recognition, long enough to pull the person into my air space, so I can get the data I need. I can’t afford to act like everyone appears to be a stranger (though they do, at first, and sometimes for a long time). The way I recognize people is wholly based on the fact that I have to fake for a moment—like with T. I went with her smile, smiled back, trusting it would all be revealed, and it was. This is all very challenging and weird. 

Last night, a man came up to me all friendly and open and personal—I could sense he knew me well, and I would have figured it out when he and I exchanged words, but it was just so much quicker and easier for me that he was willing to say who he was. Before he reached me, he called out, “It’s John.” I didn’t have to work it out by long division, fuzzily partly erased by wondering. Thanks, John. Then, later, I recognized his wife: her perfume, and by now I was expecting her anyway. There is no possible way John came to my book opening under his own steam: he was brought there by his dear spouse, my J. Because of John, I already had her J. file open. So, I “recognized” John’s wife easily. Just not in the way you do.

My sense is you just walk about knowing who’s who. And face blind people have this incredibly intricate system set up in a control tower, with like forty guys working the phones, tacking up charts and pulling files with the history of everything we know about a person, their entire wardrobe, the movement analyses records….

 

At the restaurant next door to the gallery, before the opening, a woman and a man were at the table next to me—I didn’t think I knew them and wasn’t planning to speak. I’m sure I smiled and said hello, but I wasn’t working on it –wasn’t trying quickly to read the jacket? Shoes? Context? Couple outline? Plus they were not moving and so it was unlikely I’d get too far. The guys in the control tower took a coffee break. They were out back, smoking cigarettes. Then the woman said, “Hi Heather, it’s Lindsey” and I could see of course it is. The control tower guys flung themselves back into their stations and got really busy; we know Lindsey! We know Lindsey! But I didn’t recognize her date, was it her old boyfriend—was it a new guy? The old guy? Could be awkward, so I just pretended I knew him and just tried to act normal.  (Really, he looks like a whole new boyfriend but apparently he is not or else she is calling the new boyfriend by the old boyfriend’s name.)

 

Later, when we were all in the gallery, a stranger-woman was telling me I didn’t wear the dress from the poem, as I’d said I would and I had no idea who she was; then I remembered the conversation. She was the gallery manager. I didn’t recognize her. Nothing familiar in her movement, dress, or voice had helped me identify her. It will take more exposures. It was the content of her conversation I remembered.

When you see someone, you go by the face and you konw the whole person. I work by other parts—flimsy, loose, unreliable, interesting, complex moving parts.

 

Whenever someone asks me “how did you recognize me?” some part of me fears they don’t believe prosopagnosia is real. And, some of my friends, when I first told them I had it said to my face, “No, you do not have that.” Other face blind people have had the same experience. Their friends deny the

existence of the disorder.

 

It’s hard to understand recognition processes. I live in a very different model and I do not know exactly how to explain it because I can’t imagine what you get from a face that I do not—I can’t get my mind around what it is you see that I do not.

 

Faces look very, very similar to me. I’m recognizing you by everything about you that is not your face. There’s quite a lot to choose from; however, the stuff around your face changes a lot more than your face does. You do not, for example, match different noses to your outfits.

So, thanks for telling me who you are. I know it feels weird, and unnecessary. But it’s so relaxing for me to be certain and so rare. When you tell me who you are, it lets me focus on other things besides who the heck is this. Like how nice you are. How fun it is to be with you.  

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Oh it’s a terrible terrible moment!  No writing in seven days. I feel as though a major organ, like my liver, has been taken from my body and any moment now, I’m going to lose my heart, my head.  It’s a ditch of despond, an air of despair, a hard month.  Back to basics. I’m buying some hair conditioner, travel size, and a 79 cent notebook this afternoon at Meijer and I have my list of magic always-work assignments from Abigail Thomas (see blogroll). I’ll write this afternoon: about my dad and the Weird Perfect Collision– Jacob is reading the part of Gloucester in King Lear.  I can also write a little bit about trying to watch Casablanca again, a movie I have never ever been able to watch with much comprehension and I just figured out why: I can’t tell Victor Laszlo apart from Rick.  Crucial, crucial insight.  Also, a lot of men in uniform. Very very advanced viewing for face blind people. What cracks me up is how hard I try to watch these movies, how I keep forgetting I am not going to follow things easily. It takes me awhile to figure out who is who, by what they say, what they are doing.  Ingrid is with BOTH MEN! Tricky.

This is the thing about face blindness. We never know when it’s happening–everything always looks like how it looks.  There’s not a question mark above the heads of the People Who Are Being Confused with Other People, any indication this may not be who you think it is.  I never feel confused at the time. I watch Casablanca and think, okay, new character, all will be revealed in good time.  It all looks normal. 

The not writing every day is confusing and frustrating and hard to sort out. I’m not recognizing myself.  I’m unhappy with my work. I read it aloud this morning and of course I hate it–it doesn’t sound like how I thought it would. 

This is the riptide of not writing.  You get sucked away from the Good Thing and it will take at least three days of work/writing/swimming to get back. Note to self: swim with the current not against it.

Hello, Georgia!

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Information

on

Face

Blindness

Prospagnosia Research Centers at Harvard and University College London 

prosopagnosia.com 

Seeking Answers to Face Blindness

As researchers debate its cause and remedies,

those who don’t recognize others by face find ways

to cope

By Tom Valeo
September 2007

In high school, fellow students pegged Heather Sellers as aloof, even stuck-up, because she didn’t say “hi” to people she passed in the hall. She didn’t recognize them, which made her think she was bad with names and faces, or just stupid.The problem followed her into adulthood. One day she even failed to pick out her two stepsons as they emerged from school. At the time, her husband suggested she had a problem.“I just thought he was really good at recognizing people,” Sellers said, “but he said no, everyone can do that.”

Testing revealed that Sellers, a fiction writer and associate professor of English at Hope College in Michigan, is profoundly face blind. She can see parts of faces perfectly and describe them in detail. She can recognize anger, sadness and other facial expressions. But she can’t assemble her perceptions into an image that will enable her to recognize a face the next time she sees it. When she traveled to Harvard to be tested by Brad Duchaine, who studies face blindness, or prosopagnosia, she scored worse than 99 percent of the population.

“But I was relieved to score so poorly,” Sellers said. “I realized I’m simply incapable of performing this task that others can do so easily.”

Duchaine, now at University College in London, also performed brain scans on Sellers and found she displayed no activity at all in the fusiform gyrus, believed to be crucial for facial recognition. This surprised him since most people born with prosopagnosia show at least a flicker of activity if the same face is shown to them repeatedly. But Duchaine is reluctant to blame prosopagnosia entirely on a faulty part.

“The evidence that the fusiform gyrus is solely at fault is quite weak,” Duchaine said. “I believe it’s a processing problem.”

Visual processing demonstrates the brain’s ability to integrate data from various regions into conscious perceptions. A stroke, a tumor or other form of brain damage can disrupt this integration and produce all sorts of deficits, including an inability to recognize faces.

But Sellers has no sign of brain damage. She apparently was born with a deficit, probably in the fusiform gyrus, but possibly elsewhere as well in the complex network of neural connections that a new generation of scanning technology is just starting to make visible to scientists.

Facial recognition depends on representations distributed widely throughout the brain, says Alumit Ishai, an assistant professor at the University of Zurich. The occipital cortex at the back of the brain may recognize faces in general, for example, but visual signals also travel to the amygdala and insula, which respond to facial expressions, and to the orbitofrontal cortex, where facial beauty and sexual attractiveness are assessed. Memory, obviously, comes into play as well.

In a paper titled, “Let’s Face It: It’s a Cortical Network,” soon to be published in NeuroImage, Ishai disputes the notion that the fusiform gyrus is essential for facial recognition. “A non-functional fusiform gyrus would result in severe impairments in face recognition,” she said. But some prosopagnosics display normal activity in that area and remain face blind.

People born with prosopagnosia were practically unknown until about a decade ago, but Harvard University professor Ken Nakayama believes as many as 1 in 50 people may have significant trouble recognizing faces.

“It could be a stealth condition,” said Nakayama who, with Brad Duchaine, maintains a web site (www.faceblind.org) that invites people who suspect they may have prosopagnosia to contact them. “There are no tests for prosopagnosia in schools. In that regard it may be like dyslexia, which took a while to recognize.”

Can anything be done to alleviate face blindness?

Joe DeGutis is trying to develop training exercises that will make prosopagnosics better able to recognize faces, and he has had some success. (He will report on this in the November issue of The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.)

“I’m hesitant to claim too much,” said DeGutis, who works at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Jamaica Plains, Mass. “We still need to work out why it works, and what dosage of therapy a person needs. And if improvement in the lab doesn’t transfer to everyday life, it’s worthless.”

Heather Sellers expects no benefit from future treatments because her face blindness is so profound. She is writing a memoir of her experience titled Face First, and each semester she distributes a letter to faculty and students explaining her condition and asking for understanding. In the letter she encourages people to identify themselves when they approach her.

“Even my family members and close friends have to do this,” she says in her letter. 

About Tom ValeoTom Valeo is a freelance medical writer whose article have appeared in BrainWork.

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