Lucy Sullivan
speaker
311 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Lucy Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's worth noting that JJ himself is easy to spot. He was born with one arm.
A while back, JJ told some friends about these weird moments he'd always had not recognizing people. And they asked if he'd ever heard of face blindness. They said Oliver Sacks, the science writer, had it too. And that's when it clicked for JJ.
This is Dr. Joe DeGutis. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, and he studies facial recognition. DeGutis teaches at Harvard Medical School and runs a lab out of the Boston VA Hospital.
The thing about people who are quote-unquote face-blind is that they're not actually blind. They're not seeing blurs where people's faces are. They can see eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and they can read emotions and tell whether or not someone's attractive the same way we all do. The best estimates I could find suggest that around 3% of the population has some form of face blindness.
Sometimes it's the result of a traumatic brain injury, but some people are just born with it. Scientists think it could be genetic or that the network in the brain that recognizes faces just doesn't develop normally. But for most of us, a face is the trigger that calls up all the information we know about a person.
The clinical term for face blindness is prosopagnosia. Anagnosia is an inability to recognize something. Prosopagnosia uses the Greek word for face, prosopo, which also happens to be the Greek word for person. So much of who we are is wrapped up in this one part of our bodies. I want you to stop for a second. Think about your mom or your best friend or your kid.
You're not picturing their elbows, are you? I mean, maybe you are. Crazier things have happened. My point is, for most of us, it's almost impossible to decouple who someone is from their face.
This special thing that Degutis is talking about here has to do with our brains. We have a specific network that's just for recognizing faces. And it functions unlike any other kind of cognition.
Frogs use sound, birds use smell, and we humans love this one cluster of features sitting on top of our necks. We are social animals, and researchers think that's part of why humans developed this special recognition network in our brains. Because it served us. Faces have evolved to look really different from person to person, more so than any other body part.
Scientists at UC Berkeley think that this had an evolutionary purpose. It helped us socialize. Not only was it beneficial to be recognizable, but also then to be able to recognize others. Humans had to get really good at differentiating friend from foe. And we did get really good at it. Well, most of us, anyways. DeGutis told me that the ability to recognize faces is a spectrum.
And after the break, we're going to the other end of that spectrum to see what it's like for the people who never forget a face. The super recognizers. One morning, back in 1984, a little kid named Frank Vaughn was about to have a very exciting day of school.
That's Governor Bill Clinton's office, to be exact.
Frank was a scrawny nine-year-old boy with feathery blonde hair that grew out in all directions. Nerdy kid, always cracking jokes for attention. Frank said that he and his classmates were so excited about meeting the governor.
Frank remembers feeling in awe of this man sitting on a throne, barking out Pepsi orders. He said the governor greeted them all and started asking them questions. And then Clinton zeroed in on Frank.
Frank said that his teacher looked horrified at this response. He thought he was about to get in trouble like he usually did for cracking jokes.
Clinton moved on from Frank, asked some other kids questions. He lectured them about the importance of eating their vegetables and doing their homework. And then he sent the class on their way. That was that. Okay, so now we're going to fast forward 13 years later, March of 1997. Clinton is just a few months into his second term as president.
And back in his home state of Arkansas, a series of tornadoes have just destroyed the town of Arkadelphia. 25 people were killed. Dozens were injured. 1,200 buildings were leveled. It was a huge disaster. Governor Mike Huckabee declares a state of emergency. FEMA is called in. And a few days after the storm settles and the rebuilding has started, President Clinton visits Arkadelphia.
Frank Vaughn is no longer a little boy. He's a 6'1 college student attending Wachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia. That feathery blonde hair is now closely cropped in the style typical of his fellow members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Frank and his friends heard that the president was in town, so they went to try and see him.
Frank said that there were hundreds of people lining the streets of Arkadelphia doing the same.
President Clinton, ever the people person, starts making his way into the crowd, shaking hands and taking pictures with kids.
Showing 261–280 of 311 · page 14 of 16
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