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.