Have you ever met someone a few times, enough that you should know them, and suddenly, beyond your comprehension, their name has completely vanished from your memory? You see them, and you think to yourself, “yup, that’s them” but when you try to conjure up their name, nothing. Could you imagine if instead of names, it was faces we couldn’t recognize? Today’s episode concerns neurological disorders. This video is not meant to be used for diagnosis, so if you have any questions, it’s best to talk to your doctor. And with that out of the way, Let’s get into it! Zoe Hunn, a presumably normal British teenager, was hanging out with her friends when they learned of a modelling contest hosted by a local department store. They decided to sign up, and asked if she was going to as well, but she was initially hesitant. Looks didn’t really matter to her. She didn’t even know if she was attractive for that matter. All of Hunn’s friends signed up for the contest, so she gave into peer pressure and signed up as well. Little did she know but she would go to win first place. What’s worse is that Hunn went on to be signed by agency Models 1 and continued to appear in magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and ads across Europe. The thing is, whenever she looked at ads she had modelled for, she wasn’t able to differentiate herself from anyone else. Her face looked exactly the same as any other face she’d ever seen. She might be able to infer with context clues, like clothes, or body type, that it was herself she was looking at, but otherwise, it was a mystery to her. Hunn went to a doctor to see if she could find the cause behind her unique condition. She told them that she was a rapidly rising model, and much of the fun that comes with that fame was unavailable to her. When others would go out to parties and have fun, she would stay home. “Everyone looks the same” she said, “it’s hard to emotionally connect with anyone”. The doctor heard this, and recommended counselling for shyness. A year later, at a theatre festival in Edinburgh, she met a tall mime with white hair and vivid black eyebrows. She describes him as the first person she felt she’d ever “seen”. Later that night, at a bar near the festival, Hunn recognized him! An unprecedented event for her. She had never recognized anyone before. Not even herself. She immediately sauntered over to him and told him that his performance made her laugh. She discovered his name was Mick, and that was it for her. She was in love. One day, after their happily ever after, Hunn found an article in a British magazine covering a condition known as faceblindess. She read the symptoms and found that they all applied to her! It was like being found innocent of a crime. It was like the sun had come out from behind the clouds. She now had a name for what she had been experiencing. Hunn was suffering from a disorder called prosopagnosia, or “Faceblindness”, which is defined by an inability to recognize faces you’ve seen before, including those faces which you may spend a great deal of time with, like friends or one’s spouse. A major complaint of those with faceblindness is a difficulty in following the plots of tv and movies, because keeping track of the identity of the characters is difficult. One of our writers actually has some first hand experience with faceblindness here on the Brew Crew! Yeah! I dated a woman for a little while who suffered from faceblindness after a traumatic brain injury. She got into a car crash about a year before I met her, and throughout our relationship she’d forget what my face looked like whenever I left the room. Fortunately it was mild, so whenever she saw me again, she would recognize me. It’s weird, but faceblindness doesn’t affect your ability to build loving relationships. It’s just a different road to the same destination. Thanks! No problem, I’m gonna go back into the hole now. But still the question is, why does faceblindness even occur? Doctoral student Brad Duchaine, after a long night of drinking, decided to sleep it off on the roof watching the sky, and promptly fell asleep. He awoke after tumbling off the side, and, after a quick trip to the emergency room, learned that he had developed an inexplicable inability to recognize faces, even those belonging to himself or his own parents. Inspired by the story of a teenage boy who was born with the same disability, he set out to codify the symptoms and side effects of this strange condition. What Duchaine discovered however, would further complicate the science behind faceblindness, and neuroscience as a whole. Duchaine met with Bill Choisser, a lawyer who had lived with faceblindness since birth, and asked him a series of questions testing his ability to discern the difference between similar objects. The first test asked Choisser to memorize the details of a specific house. Duchaine then showed him pictures of 150 other houses and, at random intervals, threw in pictures from the original house, which Choisser recognized every time. This suggested to Duchaine that the brain’s “storage” spaces for faces were different from those used to process and recognize other objects which bear similarities. Michael Tarr, head of the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, believes the source of this condition is a glitch in the fusiform face area, or FFA, located in the brain’s Inferior Temporal Cortex. The advance of MRI technology has revealed that prosopagnosia can come from “atypical development” of this particular area of the brain, so any sort of disruption between the FFA and the rest of the brain could lead to faceblindness. So far, we have identified two different types of faceblindness. The first, called Developmental Faceblindness, is caused by the aforementioned “atypical” growth of this particular area of the brain. It’s essentially just a developmental disability. The second, called Acquired Faceblindness, is the result of traumatic brain injury, stroke, and degenerative disease. There is no cure for prosopagnosia, unfortunately. The brain is a fantastically complicated organ, and while we do know that something is going wrong with the FFA, we don’t exactly know how it’s gone wrong, and therefore can’t even start to figure out how to fix it. If you do suffer from this condition, there are a number of coping mechanisms you can use. Prosopagnosia affects the recall of facial memory, and does not affect other forms of recognition. So you can still use context clues to determine who is who. Headway, the Brain Injury Association, in an infosheet on prosopagnosia, suggests a number of techniques to identify individuals without relying on their faces. Observational techniques include Using jewelry to distinguish between individuals. Looking for hairstyles or specific haircuts. Looking at body shape and height. Identifying a specific gait, or the way someone holds themselves. Isolating parts of speech, cadence, and accents. Remembering unique tics and mannerisms. As with most medical science, we’re learning more every day. With the development of more advanced imaging technology we can more accurately identify the causes behind specific forms of prosopagnosia, and other neurological disorders. Unfortunately, progress is often slow, and when it comes to individuals suffering from illnesses that we don’t know much about yet, the time it takes to develop new techniques or treatments can be more time spent suffering. Living with disability is difficult on the best of days. Faceblindness especially because so much of our culture, our social mores, are informed by facial recognition. We live in a visual culture, and it’s hard for the abled to even comprehend a world that isn’t uniquely constructed to cater to them. At the end of the day, it’s all about empathy. Listen to the people around you, and try to understand what it’s like to be them.
