Terms like colour blindness and selective blindness are fairly common, but have you ever heard of <keyword id="21438985" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="face-blindness" source="keywords">face blindness</keyword>? Also known as <keyword id="21509437" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="prosopagnosia" source="keywords">prosopagnosia</keyword>, this disorder prevents individuals from identifying or recognising faces. Imagine not being able to distinguish between faces!<br /><br />Most people with prosopagnosia are born with it, and it affects approximately 1 in 50 people. To make matters worse, this condition often persists throughout their lives. Naturally, those who struggle with <keyword id="20095213" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="facial-recognition" source="keywords">facial recognition</keyword> experience challenges in forming relationships, leading to <keyword id="20163594" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="mental-health-issues" source="keywords">mental health issues</keyword> and <keyword id="20040558" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="social-anxiety" source="keywords">social anxiety</keyword>. <br /><br />To delve deeper into this disorder, researchers conducted a study—published recently in <em><keyword id="20124775" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Cerebral-Cortex" source="keywords">Cerebral Cortex</keyword></em>—where they scanned the brains of over 70 participants while they watched scenes from the popular TV series ‘<keyword id="20023654" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Game-of-Thrones" source="keywords">Game of Thrones</keyword>’.<br /><br />The choice of ‘Game of Thrones’ had nothing to do with Arya Stark’s encounters with the <keyword id="22539470" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="faceless-men" source="keywords">Faceless Men</keyword> and the Many-Faced God. Instead, the show was chosen for its international appeal and strong characters with nuanced personalities. The aim was to create a realistic scenario, as previous studies on facial recognition mechanisms in the brain have often used static 2D images in laboratory settings.<br /><cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="There’s more to facial recognition than meets the eye" comment="subhead" text="There’s more to facial recognition than meets the eye"><span data-til="noop">There’s more to facial recognition than meets the eye</span></cmsannotation><br />The study involved participants who were neurotypical as well as those who suffered from prosopagnosia. Among both groups, half of the participants were familiar with the show's complex characters, while the other half had never seen the series.<br /><br />When lead characters appeared on screen, MRI scans revealed that neurotypical participants familiar with the characters showed increased brain activity in regions associated with non-visual knowledge about the characters, such as their identities and background information. However, these connections were significantly weaker in neurotypical participants who had never watched the series.<br /><div type="Article" hostid="261" msid="110997522" title="When TV shows end, fans experience grief similar to losing a partner or close friend: Study" mstype="2" mssubtype="0"></div>To further explore the importance of these <keyword id="21837003" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="brain-regions" source="keywords">brain regions</keyword> for face recognition, the researchers repeated the study with participants who had prosopagnosia. In line with their difficulty recognising faces, participants with prosopagnosia did not exhibit the same familiarity effects in the brain regions observed in neurotypical participants. The connections between visual and non-visual regions were also reduced.<br /><br />Excited with these results, study’s senior author Professor Tim Andrews explained: “They suggest that our ability to recognise faces relies on what we know about people, not just what they look like.<br /><br />“While it was believed that we recognise faces by learning their visual properties—such as features, configuration, and texture—our study indicates that it involves connecting a face with knowledge about the person, including their character traits, body language, our personal experiences with them, and our feelings towards them.”<br /><div type="Article" hostid="261" msid="111106128" title="GOT spin-off &amp;#39;A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms&amp;#39;—set for 100 years after &amp;#39;House of the Dragon&amp;#39;—begins production" mstype="2" mssubtype="0"></div>Overall, this research enhances the understanding of how prosopagnosia is linked to reduced <keyword id="22539469" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="neural-connections" source="keywords">neural connections</keyword>, making it challenging to associate faces with personal knowledge, which is crucial for recognition. The findings also shed light on how the neural mechanisms behind face recognition, or the lack thereof in prosopagnosia, can offer insights into the condition and inform potential therapeutic strategies.<br /><br />The researchers plan to conduct further studies to explore in more detail how activity across different brain regions enables us to recognise faces, and what factors can disrupt this process.<br />

Heard of face blindness? Researchers just used ‘Game of Thrones’ to better understand the disorder

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A 28-year-old woman went 'face blind' after she caught COVID.</li><li>She was no longer able to identify the face of her dad and could only recognize him by his voice.</li></ul><p>A 28-year-old couldn't recognize her family after she got "face blindness" as a symptom of<a href="https://www.insider.com/thousands-of-people-had-long-term-stomach-troubles-after-covid-2023-3"> long-COVID</a>, according to a study.</p><p>Annie, a customer service representative and part-time portrait artist, caught <a href="https://www.insider.com/guides/health/best-over-the-counter-medicine-for-mild-covid-symptoms">COVID</a> in March 2020, and got symptoms including diarrhea, a fever, and fainting after coughing too much, the authors of the research published in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945223000448" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cortex</a> said. The authors didn't include Annie's last name in the study.</p><p>After two weeks she returned to work, feeling significantly better.  Seven weeks after she initially got ill, Annie's symptoms returned and this time she also felt disoriented and that "something was off with faces."</p><p>But it wasn't until she saw her family in June for the first time since being ill that she realized she couldn't recognize her father or distinguish him from her uncle.</p><p>"My dad's voice came out of a stranger's face," she said.</p><h2>People with face blindness identify people from their hair, clothing, and voice</h2><p>Face blindness or prosopagnosia is a<a href="https://www.insider.com/covid-stopped-having-dreams-seeing-images-aphantasia-2022-9"> neurological disorder</a> that can stop a person from recognizing family, close friends, and even themselves and is estimated to affect one in 50 people, according to the <a href="https://www.faceblind.org/research/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Prosopagnosia Research Center</a>. Last year, actor <a href="https://www.insider.com/brad-pitt-believes-he-has-undiagnosed-prosopagnosia-or-face-blindness-2022-6">Brad Pitt</a> said he thought he had it, and felt ashamed when he couldn't recognize a person's face.</p><p>Acquired prosopagnosia is when a person gets the condition after previously being able to recognize faces earlier in their life, like in Annie's case, and tends to come from brain damage such as from head trauma, a stroke, or a degenerative disease, the Prosopagnosia Research Center said.</p><p>If a person has prosopagnosia, they will rely on non-facial features to identify a person such as their hair, clothing, and voice. </p><p>Prosopagnosics can also struggle to follow the plot of television shows and movies because they cannot keep track of the characters.</p><h2>Annie sometimes drove in the wrong direction </h2><p>The Cortex study looked into the effects of <a href="https://www.insider.com/long-term-covid-sufferers-are-killing-themselves-heres-why-2021-4">long-COVID</a> in 54 people and found that the majority struggled with visual recognition, like Annie did.</p><p>The people in the study also struggled with navigation, 20% of whom struggled with finding their way home. </p><p>Annie said she got lost often and struggled to find the correct aisles in her local grocery store. She said she had to drop a pin on Google Maps to find her parked car and sometimes found herself driving in the wrong direction to her destination.</p><p>The group also struggled to identify objects, recognize voices, memorize phone numbers, read, and identify faces.</p><p>Annie said she relied on voice to identify people.</p><p>Trouble with identifying faces affected Annie's part-time job as a portrait artist too. She would previously draw a face and only look at the reference photo every 15-30 minutes, but depended on a photo when drawing after getting COVID.</p><p>She said: "Faces are like water in my head" as she found it difficult to remember them, like trying to draw a Chinese character from memory with no knowledge of the Chinese alphabet.</p>

A woman couldn't recognize her dad after catching COVID: 'Faces are like water in my head'

Prolonged symptoms of <keyword id="8763838" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="COVID-19" source="Orion">COVID-19</keyword> may be associated with difficulty recognising faces, a little-known condition called face blindness, and navigational problems, according to a study. Previous studies have shown that COVID-19 can cause a range of neurological problems, including the loss of smell and taste, and impairments in attention, memory, speech, and language, known as "brain fog". <br /><br /> The latest research, published in the journal Cortex, is the first to report prosopagnosia, or face blindness, following symptoms consistent with COVID-19. <br /><br /> The condition that can make people fail to recognise familiar faces, has been estimated to affect between 2 and 2.5 per cent of people in the world. <br /><br /> The researchers assessed the case of Annie, a 28-year-old customer service representative and part-time portrait artist in the US, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March 2020 and suffered a symptom relapse two months later. <br /><br /> "When I first met Annie, she told me that she was unable to recognise the faces of her family," said <keyword id="16888434" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Marie-Luise-Kieseler" source="Orion">Marie-Luise Kieseler</keyword>, a graduate student at <keyword id="224383" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Dartmouth-College" source="Orion">Dartmouth College</keyword> in the US, adding Annie now relies on voices to recognise people. <br /><br /> Annie also experienced navigational deficits after having COVID-19. She has had difficulty remembering where particular sections in her grocery store are and relies on Google maps and its pin function to remember where she parks her car. <br /><br /> "The combination of prosopagnosia and navigational deficits that Annie had is something that caught our attention because the two deficits often go hand in hand after somebody either has had brain damage or developmental deficits," said study senior author Brad Duchaine, a professor at Dartmouth. <br /><br /> "That co-occurrence is probably due to the two abilities depending on neighbouring brain regions in the temporal lobe," Duchaine said in a statement. <br /><br /> Dr. Vinit Suri, Senior Consultant, Neurology, Indraprastha <keyword id="56368" type="DOMAIN" weightage="20" keywordseo="apollo-hospitals" botkeyword="" source="ET" sourcekeytype="COMPANY" meta.keywordsubtype="EQ" meta.aliasname="apollo hospitals" meta.entityname="Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd." meta.entityid="62" meta.seoname="apollo-hospitals-enterprise-ltd">Apollo Hospitals</keyword>, New Delhi noted that the exact mechanisms by which long <keyword id="8764262" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="covid" source="Orion">Covid</keyword> may cause face blindness are not yet fully understood, but there are several possible explanations. <br /><br /> "Firstly, long Covid can cause a range of neurological symptoms which may affect the brain regions responsible for face recognition, causing difficulty in processing visual information and recognising familiar faces," Suri told PTI. <br /><br /> "Secondly, Covid-19 can cause inflammation and damage to the blood vessels, which can lead to reduced blood flow to the brain. This can cause brain damage and cognitive impairments, including face blindness," he added. <br /><br /> The research team conducted a series of tests with Annie to evaluate her problems with face recognition and determine whether she also has difficulties with other perceptual or cognitive abilities. <br /><br /> In one test, Annie was sequentially presented with 60 images of celebrity faces and was asked to name them. Annie correctly identified 29 per cent of the 48 celebrities whom she was familiar with as compared to most people, who can correctly identify 84 per cent of familiar celebrities. <br /><br /> The second test was a doppelganger test. Annie was shown a celebrity's name and then presented with images of two faces: the face of a celebrity and that of someone similar, and was then asked to identify which face was the famous person. <br /><br /> She identified the celebrity in 69 per cent of the 58 trials, as compared to 87 per cent in the control group. <br /><br /> "Our results from the test with unfamiliar faces show that it wasn't just that Annie couldn't recall the name or biographical information of a famous person that she was familiar with, but she really has trouble learning new identities," said Kieseler. <br /><br /> The research team also obtained self-reported data from 54 individuals who had long COVID with symptoms for 12 weeks or more, and 32 persons who had reported that they had fully recovered from COVID-19. <br /><br /> Most respondents with long COVID reported that their cognitive and perceptual abilities had decreased since they had COVID. <br /><br /> "It was not just a small concentration of really impaired cases but a broad majority of people in the long COVID group reported noticeable difficulties doing things that they were able to do before contracting COVID-19 without any problems," Kieseler said. <br /><br /> "Our study highlights the sorts of perceptual problems with face recognition and navigation that can be caused by COVID-19 -- it is something that people should be aware of, especially physicians and other health care professionals," Duchaine added. <br /><br /> Dr. <keyword id="13873597" type="DOMAIN" weightage="20" keywordseo="atul" botkeyword="" source="ET" sourcekeytype="COMPANY" meta.keywordsubtype="EQ" meta.aliasname="atul" meta.entityname="Atul Ltd." meta.entityid="14027" meta.seoname="atul-ltd">Atul</keyword> Prasad, Principal Director &amp; HOD Neurology, BLK-Max Super Speciality Hospital, New Delhi said this is the first report of long COVID-causing prosopagnosia. <br /><br /> "The more we study the virus, the more we realise how much damage it can cause during acute infection and now after infection has settled," Prasad told PTI. <br /><br /> Suri noted that not all people with long Covid will develop face blindness, and the severity and duration of symptoms can vary widely. <br /><br /> "Further research is needed to better understand the relationship between long Covid and face blindness and to develop effective treatments and interventions for those affected," he added.<br /><br /><strong>SEE ALSO:<br /><a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/israeli-shekel-devalues-by-8-3-in-less-than-2-months/articleshow/98857874.cms">Israeli shekel devalues by 8.3% in less than 2 months</a><br /><a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/chatgpt-suffers-mega-outage-chat-history-unavailable-for-most-users/articleshow/98857703.cms">ChatGPT suffers mega outage, chat history unavailable for most users</a></strong>

Long Covid infection linked with risk of developing 'face blindness' says study

<ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="12027462" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="brad-pitt" source="Orion">Brad Pitt</keyword> told <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-august-cover-profile%20GQGQ">GQ</a> he might have an undiagnosed condition that keeps him from recognizing faces.</li><li>NIH defines prosopagnosia as a <a href="https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/prosopagnosia">neurological disorder</a> that causes an inability to recognize faces.</li></ul><p>Brad Pitt said his reputation for being aloof and self-absorbed might be tied to an undiagnosed medical condition.</p><p>The Oscar-winning actor told <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/brad-pitt-august-cover-profile">GQ</a> he might suffer from prosopagnosia, or "face blindness." The National Institutes of <keyword id="11894571" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="health" source="Orion">Health</keyword> defines prosopagnosia as a <a href="https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/prosopagnosia">neurological disorder</a> that causes an inability to recognize faces.</p><p>Pitt said he wants to remember peoples' faces and feels "ashamed" when he can't. "Nobody believes me!" he told the magazine.</p><p>Depending on the disorder's severity, people can have difficulty recognizing a familiar face or distinguishing a face as being different from an object, per NIH. One in 50 people has the disorder, according to the <a href="https://www.faceblind.org/research/">Prosopagnosia Research Center</a>.</p><p>Prosopagnosia can result from stroke or brain injury, or appear at birth as a genetic condition. NIH said children born with prosopagnosia "never had a time when they could recognize faces." </p><p>Pitt has previously speculated about having prosopagnosia. In a <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/interviews/a22679/brad-pitt-cover-interview-0613/">2013 interview</a> with Esquire he said he has offended people because of his difficulty remembering the faces of people he meets. </p><p>Pitt told Esquire that year he was planning to get tested for prosopagnosia, and <a href="https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2013/may/may22_faceblindness.html">Carnegie Mellon</a> extended an offer to have his brain imaged and examined by a neuroscientist.</p><p>"So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them," Pitt said in 2013. "But it's a mystery to me, man. I can't grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view. I am going to get it tested."</p><p>Pitt has maintained a reputation for <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a28519423/how-is-brad-pitt-so-cool/">being "cool"</a> throughout his lengthy career, but he's been embroiled in controversies following his divorce from the actress Angelina Jolie. </p><p>Jolie accused Pitt of <a href="https://www.insider.com/brad-pitt-joint-custody-angelina-jolie-report-2021-5">child abuse</a> in 2016. The Federal Bureau of Investigation later <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-is-looking-into-child-abuse-allegations-against-brad-pitt-2016-9">cleared</a> Pitt of child-abuse allegations.</p><p>Following his split, Pitt said he had <a href="https://www.insider.com/brad-pitt-alcoholics-anonymous-quit-drinking-after-angelina-jolie-breakup-2019-9">alcohol dependence</a> and he's been sober for nearly six years.</p>

Brad Pitt thinks he has undiagnosed 'face blindness' and that's why he seems aloof and self-absorbed

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/589dbb873149a101788b4c85-2400/undefined" alt="young woman outside thinking looking at camera" data-mce-source="Unsplash/Alex Lambley" data-link="https://unsplash.com/collections/540080/thinking-feeling-pensive-people?photo=i2AmfpRO0Cc" /><p class="source"><span><a href="https://unsplash.com/collections/540080/thinking-feeling-pensive-people?photo=i2AmfpRO0Cc">Unsplash/Alex Lambley</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>Some people have a condition that makes it difficult for them to recognize familiar faces, even those of friends and family. Sometimes they may even have issues recognizing themselves. This is called prosopagnosia.</strong></li><li><strong>Prosopagnosia is estimated to affect about 1% of the population.</strong></li><li><strong>It's not necessarily linked to brain damage or any other intellectual problem; the prolific author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was a prosopagnosic.</strong></li><li><strong>Merriam-Webster added prosopagnosia to the dictionary earlier this week.</strong></li></ul><p>I've seen a lot of faces that I can't forget.</p><p>No, I'm not talking about being in love, as The Beatles lyrics might imply. Instead, I may be a super-recognizer, meaning that other peoples' faces get strangely seared into my brain - even those of complete strangers. It's not that I necessarily want to remember them - I just can't seem to help it.</p><p>And I'm not alone. Josh P. Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Greenwich in England who studies the phenomenon, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/london-police-super-recognisers-id-faces-surveillance-2016-10">told me</a> he estimates some <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/london-police-super-recognisers-id-faces-surveillance-2016-10">1% of the population</a> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/super-recognizer-remember-faces-quiz-2016-8">could qualify</a> as super-recognizers. (Keep in mind, Davis said - "if you do very well then you <em>may</em> be a super-recognizer" - if you want to know for sure, you can inquire with his team about additional testing.)</p><p>But it turns out that another 1% of the population appears to fall into a category that might be best-described as the <em>opposite</em> of super-recognition.</p><p>These face-blind people, or "prosopagnosics," a term that neuroscientists have used to refer to them for several years but was only officially <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prosopagnosia">added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary this month,</a> essentially cannot recognize familiar faces.</p><h2>'Prosopagnosia' is essentially face blindness</h2><p>The word prosopagnosia, which combines the Greek words "prosopon," or face, with "agnos," or lack of knowledge, dates back to when researchers first identified the "condition" in people with brain damage to a specific area of the brain called the <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/17/11/4302.full">fusiform face area</a>, or FFA, about 30 years ago. Scientists believe the FFA <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/17/11/4302.full">is thought to play a key role in our ability to identify a face</a>.</p><p>Prosopagnosics, they found, had severe <a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm">difficulties recognizing familiar faces</a> - even, sometimes, their own.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57fcc635dd0895c3338b468e-2003/gettyimages-88194627.jpg" alt="Oliver Sacks" data-mce-source="Chris McGrath/Getty Images" data-mce-caption="Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks at Columbia University June 3, 2009 in New York City. Dr. Sacks, who was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in 2007, is the author of several bestselling books. His 1973 book 'Awakenings' was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams and his latest book is 'Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain'." /><p class="source"><span>Chris McGrath/Getty Images</span></p><p class="caption">Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks.</p></div><p></p></div></div>But you don't have to have experienced brain damage to have prosopagnosia.</p><p>More recently, researchers have diagnosed the condition in perfectly healthy people who appear to be born with it. The deficit, called "developmental prosopagnosia," doesn't appear to negatively affect other intellectual efforts in these people.</p><p>Oliver Sacks, the renowned neurologist and prolific writer, for example, was a prosopagnosic. He wrote extensively about his condition in the book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Eye-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307473023">The Mind's Eye</a>."</p><p>"I am much better at recognizing my neighbors' dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbors themselves," Sacks <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Eye-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307473023">wrote</a>.</p><h2>'Super-recognition,' on the other hand, is a superior ability to pick out a familiar face</h2><p>In the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904192/">first paper to mention the phrase "super-recognizer</a>," published in 2009, University College London cognitive neuroscientist Brad Duchaine, along with Harvard psychologists Ken Nakayama and Richard Russell, outlined the experiences of four people who claimed to have an unusually good ability to recognize faces. In addition, the researchers presented the world's first test designed to identify these so-called super-recognizers, the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/super-recognizer-remember-faces-quiz-2016-8">you can take online now</a>.</p><p>All four subjects in the paper described eerie instances in their past in which they had recognized apparent strangers: family members they hadn't seen for decades or actors they'd glimpsed once in an ad and then seen again in a movie. Each person in the study said that for years they'd felt as if something were wrong with them. One of the participants, for example, told the researchers she tried to hide her ability and "pretend that I don't remember ... because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do."</p><p>For the first time, the Cambridge test suggested to these people that they weren't alone - that their abilities weren't merely in their head but quantifiable, testable, able to be proved and put down on paper.</p><h2>What we know - and don't know - about facial recognition</h2><p>Research suggests that facial super-recognition is fundamentally different from traditional memory in several key ways. First, the ability doesn't appear to be able to be learned or enhanced with training. Second, it appears to have a neurological and structural basis.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57fcc635dd0895c3338b4690-475/face_recognition.jpg" alt="Face_recognition" data-mce-source="Wikimedia Commons" data-link="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_recognition.jpg" /><p class="source"><span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_recognition.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>But there's still a lot we don't know about super-recognition - and about facial recognition more broadly.</p><p>In <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0150972">a recent study in the journal PLoS One</a>, for example, researchers studied two so-called memory champions, people who had competed extensively in memory contests and had even been recognized by the Guinness World Book of Records for their memorization skills. When the researchers studied these people's facial-recognition abilities, however, their results were merely average. In other words, the researchers concluded, something about facial processing was fundamentally different from memory - and it couldn't be learned by any training or class. Instead, it seemed to be innate.</p><p>And if people are born with their facial-recognition abilities, then they <a href="http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2138695">most likely have a neurological basis in the brain</a>, researchers say. A super-recognizer, for example, might have a slightly larger fusiform face area than a face-blind person, or the person might show more activity in this area when looking at images of a face. "Any time there's a psychological difference there has to be a neurological basis," said Duchaine, the University College London cognitive neuroscientist. "Just like you'd say, OK, that car is faster than that other car. Is there a difference in their engines? Well yes of course there is."</p><p>Still, Duchaine and other researchers lack the data to confirm this. All of the existing studies of super-recognizers are based on very small samples of people - anywhere from <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805230/">just two individuals</a> to <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3858904/">a half-dozen people</a>. Several of the researchers have presented their hypotheses about super-recognizers at conferences and presentations, but many of these haven't yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.</p><p>So what exactly <em>are</em> prosopagnosia and super-recognition? Skills? Signs of intelligence? Quirky developmental traits?</p><p>That's something that remains to be seen.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neuroscientists-brain-pushing-athletes-limit-red-bull-endurance-project-red-bull-2015-8">Neuroscientists are trying to understand how the brains of elite athletes work </a></h3>        <div>            <div>    <script src="http://player.ooyala.com/v3/6e12e8b3387a44daacfb73afba25a76e"></script>    <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="BjMngwdzq6WuWS8mvejuzJcelbqM8z3X" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>    <script>    if (typeof RunFunctions === 'undefined') { var RunFunctions = []; }     RunFunctions.push(function()    {         var ooyalapopvideo = OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer_popvideo', 'BjMngwdzq6WuWS8mvejuzJcelbqM8z3X',{ autoplay: 'false' });     });    </script>    <noscript><div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div></noscript></div>        </div>        <script>(function() { function createPlayer() { OO.ready(function() { RunFunctions.forEach(function(ooyalaFunction) { ooyalaFunction(); }); RunFunctions = [];}); } createPlayer(); }()); </script>    </div>

A surprising number of people can't recognize faces - sometimes even their own

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57fcc635dd0895c3338b468e-2003/gettyimages-88194627.jpg" alt="Oliver Sacks" data-mce-source="Chris McGrath/Getty Images" data-mce-caption="Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks at Columbia University June 3, 2009 in New York City. Dr. Sacks, who was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in 2007, is the author of several bestselling books. His 1973 book 'Awakenings' was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams and his latest book is 'Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain'." /><p class="source"><span>Chris McGrath/Getty Images</span></p><p class="caption">Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks.</p></div><p></p></div></div>"I am much better at recognizing my neighbors' dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbors themselves," renowned neurologist and prolific writer Oliver Sacks <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Eye-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307473023">wrote in his book "The Mind's Eye</a>."</p><p>Sacks was a prosopagnosic, someone who has <a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm">difficulties recognizing familiar faces - even, sometimes, their own</a>. The condition, prosopagnosia, is a word that combines the Greek words "prosopon," or face, with "agnos," or lack of knowledge.</p><p>In the 1990s, researchers identified a region of the brain <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/17/11/4302.full">that is thought to play a key role in our ability to identify a face</a>. They named it the <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/17/11/4302.full">fusiform face area</a>.</p><p>Some people who've experienced brain damage to that region suffer from prosopagnosia, but more recently, researchers have diagnosed the condition in people without brain damage as well. This type of prosopagnosia is known as developmental prosopagnosia - its sufferers appear to be born with it. Nevertheless, the deficit doesn't appear to negatively affect other intellectual efforts in those people.</p><p>Initially, researchers assumed that there were only two groups of people when it came to facial recognition: prosopagnosics, or people who were face-blind, and everyone else.</p><p>They no longer think it's quite that simple.</p><h2>Super-recognition</h2><p>The <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904192/">first paper to mention the phrase "super-recognizer"</a> was published in 2009. In it, Harvard psychologists Ken Nakayama and Richard Russell and University College London cognitive neuroscientist Brad Duchaine outlined the experiences of four people who claimed to have an unusually good ability to recognize faces. In addition, the researchers presented the world's first test designed to identify these so-called super-recognizers, the <a href="http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experiments/facememorytest/startup.php">Cambridge Face Memory Test</a>.</p><p>All four subjects in the paper described eerie instances in their past in which they had recognized apparent strangers: family members they hadn't seen for decades or actors they'd glimpsed once in an ad and then seen again in a movie. Each person in the study said that for years they'd felt as if something were wrong with them.</p><p>One of the participants, for example, told the researchers she tried to hide her ability and "pretend that I don't remember ... because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57fcc635dd0895c3338b468f-2400/istock_000048627796_large.jpg" alt="Eyeball" data-mce-source="iStock" /><p class="source"><span>iStock</span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>For the first time, the Cambridge test suggested to these people that they weren't alone - that their abilities weren't merely in their head but quantifiable, testable, able to be proved and put down on paper.</p><h2>What we know - and don't know - about facial recognition</h2><p>Research suggests that <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/london-police-super-recognisers-id-faces-surveillance-2016-10">facial super-recognition is fundamentally different</a> from traditional memory in several key ways. First, the ability doesn't appear to be able to be learned or enhanced with training. Second, it appears to have a neurological and structural basis.</p><p>In <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0150972">a recent study in the journal PLoS One</a>, for example, researchers studied two so-called memory champions, people who had competed extensively in memory contests and had even been recognized by the Guinness World Book of Records for their memorization skills. When the researchers studied these people's facial-recognition abilities, however, their results were merely average. In other words, the researchers concluded, something about facial processing was fundamentally different from memory - and it couldn't be learned by any training or class.</p><p>Instead, it seemed to be innate.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57fcc635dd0895c3338b4690-475/face_recognition.jpg" alt="Face_recognition" data-mce-source="Wikimedia Commons" data-link="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_recognition.jpg" /><p class="source"><span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_recognition.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>And if people are born with their facial-recognition abilities, then they <a href="http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2138695">most likely have a neurological basis in the brain</a>, researchers say. A super-recognizer, for example, might have a slightly larger fusiform face area than a face-blind person, or the person might show more activity in this area when looking at images of a face.</p><p>"Any time there's a psychological difference there has to be a neurological basis," Brad Duchaine, a neurologist at the University College London, told Business Insider. "Just like you'd say, OK, that car is faster than that other car. Is there a difference in their engines? Well yes of course there is."</p><p>Still, Duchaine and other researchers lack the data to confirm this. All of the existing studies of super-recognizers are based on very small samples of people - anywhere from <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805230/">just two individuals</a> to <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3858904/">a half-dozen people</a>. Several of the researchers have presented their hypotheses about super-recognizers at conferences and presentations, but many of these haven't yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.</p><p>In other words, there's still a lot we don't know about super-recognition - and about facial recognition more broadly. And we're just beginning to uncover some of the answers.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/neuroscientists-brain-pushing-athletes-limit-red-bull-endurance-project-red-bull-2015-8">Neuroscientists are trying to understand how the brains of elite athletes work </a></h3>        <div>            <div>    <script src="http://player.ooyala.com/v3/6e12e8b3387a44daacfb73afba25a76e"></script>    <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="BjMngwdzq6WuWS8mvejuzJcelbqM8z3X" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>    <script>    if (typeof RunFunctions === 'undefined') { var RunFunctions = []; }     RunFunctions.push(function()    {         var ooyalapopvideo = OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer_popvideo', 'BjMngwdzq6WuWS8mvejuzJcelbqM8z3X',{ autoplay: 'false' });     });    </script>    <noscript><div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div></noscript></div>        </div>        <script>(function() { function createPlayer() { OO.ready(function() { RunFunctions.forEach(function(ooyalaFunction) { ooyalaFunction(); }); RunFunctions = [];}); } createPlayer(); }()); </script>    </div>

We're just beginning to understand the human brain's remarkable capacity to recognize faces

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/5577265f6bb3f7dc08e55ae8-928/memento-4.jpg" alt="Memento" data-mce-source="&amp;quotMemento&quot;/Newmarket Films" /><p class="source"><span>"Memento"/Newmarket Films</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>I've seen a lot of faces I can't forget.</p><p>No, I'm not talking about being in love, as the Beatles lyrics might imply. Instead, I may be a super-recognizer, meaning other peoples' faces get strangely seared into my brain - even those of complete strangers. It's not that I necessarily want to remember them; I just can't seem to help it.</p><p>And I'm not alone. <span>Josh P. Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Greenwich in England who studies the phenomenon, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/are-you-a-super-recognizer-test-tells-if-youre-121678964207.html">told Yahoo Health</a> that he estimates some 1% of the population could qualify as super-recognizers. </span></p><p>Davis developed <strong><a href="https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT">a brief online test for super-recognizers, and you can take it now.</a></strong> </p><p>Keep in mind, Davis notes: "If <span>you do very well then you <em>may</em> be a super-recognizer." If you want to know for sure, you can inquire with his team about additional testing.</span></p><h2><span>A 'creepy' ability</span></h2><p><span>In 2009, a team of neuroscientists from Harvard did one of the first studies of super-recognizers. In it, they looked at just four people </span>who claimed to have an unusually good ability to recognize faces. </p><p>All four subjects <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904192/">told the researchers about instances when they'd recognized practical strangers</a>: family members they hadn't seen for decades or actors they'd glimpsed once in an ad and then seen again in a movie. They felt like there was something wrong with them.</p><p>One of the people in the study told the researchers she tried to hide her ability and "pretend that I don't remember [people] ... because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do."</p><p>What the researchers wanted to know, then, was if there were more super-recognizers out there. So they came up with a series of tests (<a href="https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT">like this one</a>) designed to find out if other people had their subjects' uncanny abilities. Sure enough, they found a few more super-recognizers. But they still haven't found very many. All of the studies of super-recognizers to-date are based on tiny samples of people - anywhere from <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4805230/">just two individuals</a> to <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3858904/">a half-dozen people</a>. For that reason, it's tough to draw too many definitive conclusions about the ability. </p><p>Still, research suggests that super-recognizing is fundamentally different from memory, and isn't a skill that can be sharpened with training, like some aspects of traditional memorization can. </p><p>In <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0150972">a recent study in the journal PLOS ONE</a>, researchers studied two so-called "memory champions" - people who'd competed extensively in memory contests and had even achieved recognition in the Guinness World Book of Records for their memorization abilities. When they studied their face-recognition abilities, the memory champs' skills were merely average. "T<span>hese findings lend support to the idea that face processing abilities are at least to a certain extent hard-wired," the researchers wrote in their paper.</span></p><figure contenteditable="false" data-uri="nymag.com/scienceofus/components/mediaplay-image/instances/cioxie9la00af97y6o11mg0ia@published" data-editable="inlinestuff"></figure><h2>There's something special about faces</h2><p>In the 1990s, researchers identified a region of the brain called the <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/17/11/4302.full">fusiform face area (FFA) that is thought to play a key role in our ability to identify a face</a>.</p><p>Some people with damage to that region experience a condition that is essentially the opposite of super-recognizing, called prosopagnosia or face blindness. Others appear to be born with it. People with prosopagnosia have <a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm">difficulties recognizing familiar faces - even, sometimes, their own</a>. Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was a famous prosopagnosia sufferer, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Eye-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307473023">wrote about his condition in the book, "The Mind's Eye."</a> </p><p>"I am much better at recognizing my neighbors' dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbors themselves," Sacks <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Eye-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307473023">wrote</a>. </p>      <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tips-for-remembering-peoples-names-memory-hacks-2015-1">How to remember people's names</a></h3>        <div>            <div>    <script src="http://player.ooyala.com/v3/6e12e8b3387a44daacfb73afba25a76e"></script>    <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="w4b3lnZToW-wkFNMf0fMxYiRo3LGebUI" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>    <script>    if (typeof RunFunctions === 'undefined') { var RunFunctions = []; }     RunFunctions.push(function()    {         var ooyalapopvideo = OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer_popvideo', 'w4b3lnZToW-wkFNMf0fMxYiRo3LGebUI',{ autoplay: 'false' });     });    </script>    <noscript><div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div></noscript></div>        </div>        <script>(function() { function createPlayer() { OO.ready(function() { RunFunctions.forEach(function(ooyalaFunction) { ooyalaFunction(); }); RunFunctions = [];}); } createPlayer(); }()); </script>    </div>

There's a test that tells you if you're a 'super-recognizer' of faces, and you can take it right now

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/52d43b1c6bb3f7c00166520a-992-744/new-meeting-cocktail-introduction.jpg?maxX=480" border="0" alt="new job meeting cocktail introduction" width="480" /><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dellphotos/11345781033/">Flickr/DellInc</a></span></p></div><p></p></div>Ever have trouble recognizing people's faces? If so, you're not alone, but some people struggle with face-recognition much more than others.</p>
<p>It's estimated that 2% of the world's population suffers from face blindness, or prosopagnosia, a neurological condition preventing people from recognizing faces. That's one person in every 50, <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/hey-dont-i-know-you/">Radiolab reports</a>.</p>
<p>Although most of us don't suffer from prosopagnosia, we all struggle with face-recognition in varying degrees. This was demonstrated to audience members at the <a href="http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/">World Science Festival</a> when they tested their face-recognition abilities with an interactive quiz.</p>
<p>The crowd was shown the faces of 10 celebrities, with their hair blocked out, for 15 seconds each. They were asked to write down the name of each celebrity or, if they couldn't recall the name, a description of who they are.</p>
<p>Here is one of the faces they were asked to recognize:</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/533f26776da8113b27b7c935-1200-706/screen%20shot%202014-04-04%20at%205.37.49%20pm.png" border="0" alt="face blindness, prosopagnosia, Barack Obama" width="800" /><p class="source"><span>YouTube/World <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword> Festival</span></p></div><p></p></div><br />Here's another that might be a bit harder:</p>
<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/533f26cbecad04554cb7c933-1200-706/screen%20shot%202014-04-04%20at%205.29.08%20pm.png" border="0" alt="face blindness, prosopagnosia, Stephen Colbert" width="800" /><p class="source"><span>YouTube/World Science Festival</span></p></div><p></p></div><br />By a show of hands, some people in the audience revealed they had only recognized one or two of the celebrities. Only 10 audience members said they had recognized every celebrity.</p>
<p>I took this test and recognized seven of the celebrities. Watch the full video below to take the test yourself and see how many faces you can recognize.</p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7s6kQdyyxOE"></iframe></p>
<p><span>According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), people with </span><a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm">prosopagnosia</a><span> may be unable to recognize a familiar face, differentiate between unknown faces, or tell the difference between a face and an object. Some people with higher degrees of impairment may even be unable to recognize their own face and the faces of close family and friends.</span></p>
<p><span>Prosopagnosia even prevents some people from recognizing the faces of their own children or significant others.</span></p>
<p><span>Prosopagnosia may be caused by abnormalities, damage, or impairment in a part of the brain that helps with facial perception and memory, according to NINDS. The condition is not related to memory, vision, or learning disabilities. </span></p>
<p><span>Although it can be caused by stroke, brain injury, or neurodegenerative diseases, some healthy people are born with prosopagnosia, which appears to run in families. People with prosopagnosia adapt by relying on other ways to identify people, such as voice, clothing, and distinct physical characteristics.  </span></p>

Take This Handy Test To See How Well You Recognize Faces

Meet the elite squad of police officers who are paid to never, ever forget a face

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/4ea0719f6bb3f7ec64000025-590-443/screen-shot-2011-10-20-at-3.17.22-pm.jpg" alt="Jennifer Anniston" data-mce-source="The Internet Movie Database" data-link="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm4272732672/nm0000098" /><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm4272732672/nm0000098">The Internet Movie Database</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Some people cannot, for the life of them, remember a face.</p><p>The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks famously wrote about this condition, known as face blindness or prosopagnosia, in his book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat."</p><p><strong>But there are other people who have an uncanny ability to remember faces, even those of total strangers.</strong></p><p>Scientists have studied these "super-recognizers," and found that they are as good at remembering faces as prosopagnosiacs are bad.</p><p>Super-recognizers are thought be rare. Josh P. Davis, a senior lecturer of psychology at the University of Greenwich in England, <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/health/are-you-a-super-recognizer-test-tells-if-youre-121678964207.html">told Yahoo Health</a> that these individuals probably make up less than 1% of the population. He also said that some London police officers are super-recognizers, and use it to identify criminals in blurry CCTV footage.</p><p>Davis developed an online test for super-reconizers, and you can take it <a href="https://greenwichuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3xDuCccGAdgbfT">here</a>. (I scored 12 out of 14, which could qualify me as a super-recognizer, pending further tests.) </p><h2>A 'creepy' ability</h2><p>The <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1261287">first case</a> of face blindness was reported in 1976. According to the <a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm">NIH</a>, it can arise from stroke, traumatic brain injury, or brain diseases, but about 2.5% of the population may be born with this condition, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16817175">studies suggest</a>.</p><p>A Harvard neuroscientist and his colleagues were studying this condition, when they were contacted by a number of people who claimed to have an incredibly good ability to recognize faces.</p><p>In 2009, they did a <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904192/">study</a> of four people who were self-proclaimed super-recognizers. The subjects included CS, a 26 year old female PhD student, CL, a 40 year old female homemaker, JJ, a 36 year old female municipal employee, and MR, a 31 year old male computer programmer.</p><p>"It doesn't matter how many years pass, if I've seen your face before I will be able to recall it," CS, a 26 year old female PhD student, told the researchers, adding that it only happens with faces.</p><p>All four subjects told the researchers about times when they had recognized people who were almost strangers, whom they had not seen for years and had since aged from a child to an adult, or gotten a different hairstyle. They also all claimed to be able to recognize actors who had only minor roles in movies, TV, or ads (for example, Sean Bean, the actor who played Boromir in the Lord of the Rings movies, had a cameo in The Martian, below.)</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/5630ca3e6bb3f75e1d492230-1409-593/sean-bean-martian.jpg" alt="sean bean martian" data-mce-source="20th Century Fox" data-link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcyfDRYKDJM" /><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcyfDRYKDJM">20th Century Fox</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The subjects in the study all said they had to hide their super ability to avoid being creepy.</p><p>As CS told the researchers:</p><p>"I do have to pretend that I don't remember [people], however, because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do when I recall that we saw each other once walking on campus four years ago in front of the quad!"</p><h2>Memorable faces</h2><p>In the study, Richard Russell of Harvard and his colleagues designed tests to measure extreme face recognition ability.</p><p>The first test involved showing people pictures of famous people before they were famous, often as children, and the subjects had to name or identify them.</p><p>But how well they performed on the famous face test could be affected by whether they had seen these famous people before. So the researchers designed a second test, which involved learning new faces.</p><p>They adapted something known as the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which involves showing people six unfamiliar male faces from three different views, and then asking them to pick that face out of three choices. It starts out easy and gets progressively more difficult, as the faces are shown from different angles, lighting conditions, and with added graininess.</p><p>To make the test harder, the researchers made a long form of the test by adding a fourth section, which was much more difficult than the short form.</p><p>They gave versions of these tests to the four super-recognizers as well as 25 regular people as controls. The super-recognizers performed above and beyond everyone else on both tests (with the exception of one subject, who was not given the long-form memory test).</p><p>On the short-form test, three of the super-recognizers received perfect scores, and the fourth made only one error. On both the short and long versions, they scored better than any of the controls.</p><p>The super-recognizers also scored better than the controls on the famous person test, except for one other subject, who scored the same as one of them.</p><p>Taken together, the findings provide "objective evidence in support of [the super-recognizers'] subjective experience of having significantly better than normal face recognition ability," the researchers wrote in the study. </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tips-for-remembering-peoples-names-memory-hacks-2015-1">How to remember people's names</a></h3>        <div>            <div>    <script src="http://player.ooyala.com/v3/6e12e8b3387a44daacfb73afba25a76e"></script>    <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="w4b3lnZToW-wkFNMf0fMxYiRo3LGebUI" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>    <script>    if (typeof RunFunctions === 'undefined') { var RunFunctions = []; }     RunFunctions.push(function()    {         var ooyalapopvideo = OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer_popvideo', 'w4b3lnZToW-wkFNMf0fMxYiRo3LGebUI',{ autoplay: 'false' });     });    </script>    <noscript><div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div></noscript></div>        </div>        <script>(function() { function createPlayer() { OO.ready(function() { RunFunctions.forEach(function(ooyalaFunction) { ooyalaFunction(); }); RunFunctions = [];}); } createPlayer(); }()); </script>    </div>

A select group of people have an uncanny ability to remember faces for years

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><img src="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/55e479ee9dd7cc16008b6ff4-2003-1502/gettyimages-88194627.jpg" alt="Oliver Sacks" data-mce-source="Chris McGrath/Getty Images" data-mce-caption="Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks speaks at Columbia University June 3, 2009 in New York City. Dr. Sacks, who was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in 2007, is the author of several bestselling books. His 1973 book 'Awakenings' was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams and his latest book is 'Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain'." /><p class="source"><span>Chris McGrath/Getty Images</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist and writer whose eloquent stories about the brain explored what it means to be human, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-oliver-sacks-taught-us-about-life-2015-8">died Sunday of skin cancer that spread to his liver, at the age of 82</a>. But his contributions to our understanding of the mind live on.</p><p>His case studies of patients with rare brain disorders revealed the human side of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nimh-new-psychotherapy-initiative-2015-7">mental illness</a> and imbued his readers with a sense of wonder rarely found in dry scientific prose.</p><p>Here are just a few of the ways Sacks changed the way we view the mind.</p><h2>Unexpected awakenings </h2><p>Sacks made some of his greatest contributions to neuroscience as a neurologist at <span>Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx in the mid-1960s. There, he treated patients with a<span> rare form of encephalitis from the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/spanish-flu-virus-recreated-2014-6">1918 Spanish flu</a>, which left them trapped inside <span style="background-color: #ffffff;">catatonic</span> bodies, unable to move or respond to the world around them.</span></span></p><p><span><span>The story of these miraculous patients was the subject of the 1990 film "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077/">Awakenings</a>" starring Robin Williams, based on Sacks' 1973 memoir of the same name.</span></span></p><p><span><span>Sacks began treating these patients with a drug that was starting to be used to treat Parkinson's Disease, called L-Dopa. The drug works by increasing levels of the chemical dopamine in the brain, which is critical for controlling movement and many other mental functions.</span></span></p><p><span><span>L-Dopa revived patients decades after their caretakers and families<span style="background-color: #ffffff;"> had given up hope that these patients would ever be able to move and speak again. As <span>Sacks </span><a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20093177,00.html" title="People magazine article.">told People magazine</a><span> in 1986, </span></span></span></span><span><span><span>"I love to discover potential in people who aren't thought to have any."</span></span></span></p><p><span><span>Sadly, the patients built up a tolerance for the drug, resulting in severe physical tics and slow, halting movement. The patients eventually had to abandon the treatment, and returned to their catatonic state. But the experiment served as a remarkable testament to medicine's power to tap into the mind.</span></span></p><h2>Tales of unusual brains</h2><p>Sacks captured the public imagination with his poetic case histories of patients with strange neurological disorders, immortalized in his 1985 book "<a href="http://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/man-mistook-wife-hat/">The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat</a>."</p><p>The book includes the stories of patients like Dr. P, who suffered from a condition that made it impossible for him to recognize faces (known as <a href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm">prosopagnosia</a>), causing him to confuse the sight of his wife with a hat. Sacks himself suffered from a mild form of this impairment, which may be congenital in as<span> many as </span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19334306">2.5% of people</a><span>.</span></p><p>Other stories include that of<span> Jimmie G., a submarine radio operator who suffered from severe amnesia (called <a href="https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000771.htm">Korsakoff syndrome</a><span>)</span> and couldn't remember anything that happened after World Wa<span style="background-color: #ffffff;">r II. The condition, which is caused by brain damage from vitamin B1 deficiency, interferes with the ability to form new memories.</span></span></p><p><span>Then there was the case of <span>Stephen D., a <span>22-year-old medical student who developed an extremely keen sense of smell after binging on amphetamines, cocaine, and PCP. Later, Sacks revealed that he himself was Stephen D.</span></span></span></p><h2>A study of himself</h2><p>While Sacks enthralled us with stories about his patients, he was perhaps at his most poignant in describing his own conscious experience. </p><p>Sacks wrote a number of books chronicling these experiences, including a hiking accident that left him feeling like his leg did not belong to him in "A Leg to Stand On" (1984). His experience was similar to those suffering from a condition known as <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/alien-hand2.htm">alien hand syndrome</a>, in which a person loses their sense of ownership over a limb.</p><p>In "<a href="http://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/the-minds-eye/">The Mind's Eye</a>" (2010), a book of <span>case studies of people who have lost their ability to see or interact with the world, he describes his own experience with eye cancer (the same cancer that would eventually metastasize to his liver and kill him), recounting what it was like to lose his 3D vision.</span></p><p>Sacks' latest memoir, "<a href="http://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/on-the-move/">On the Move: A Life</a>," was published in April just before he learned that he had terminal cancer. In it, he describes his personal journey as a young neurologist, his experiments with mind-altering drugs, and the importance of writing about the human side of the brain disorders he studied.</p><p>Sacks faced even his own death with eloquence. After receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Sacks wrote several op-eds for the New York Times about the prospect of dying. </p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="313" data-total-count="4675">"I cannot pretend I am without fear," he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html">wrote in February</a>. "But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oliver-sacks-on-his-terminal-cancer-2015-2">the special intercourse of writers and readers</a>." </p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="150" data-total-count="4825" data-node-uid="1">"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."</p><p class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="150" data-total-count="4825" data-node-uid="1">Speaking for myself, the way Sacks' work has touched my life has been its own enormous privilege.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/memories-physically-affect-brain-science-columbia-university-2015-7">Scientists have found how memories physically affect your brain</a></h3>        <div>            <div>    <script src="http://player.ooyala.com/v3/6e12e8b3387a44daacfb73afba25a76e"></script>    <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="VjY2UydjplBahdCGPh-evjN6L0I8TsXj" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>    <script>    if (typeof RunFunctions === 'undefined') { var RunFunctions = []; }     RunFunctions.push(function()    {         var ooyalapopvideo = OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer_popvideo', 'VjY2UydjplBahdCGPh-evjN6L0I8TsXj',{ autoplay: 'false' });     });    </script>    <noscript><div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div></noscript></div>        </div>        <script>(function() { function createPlayer() { OO.ready(function() { RunFunctions.forEach(function(ooyalaFunction) { ooyalaFunction(); }); RunFunctions = [];}); } createPlayer(); }()); </script>    </div>

You Searched For "prosopagnosia" and got 11 results

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