Sharona Pearl

Somebody who's profoundly face blind sends their kid to daycare in the morning in one outfit, and their kid, as kids do, needs a change of clothing.

That parent might not be able to recognize their kid at pickup.

Thanks so much, Mike.

It's really exciting to be talking to you.

I didn't intend to become a scholar of the face per se, because like you say, it's one of those things that's ubiquitous, but isn't really a category.

And the things that we study and the things that we know tend to be categories.

But I just got really, really interested in the stakes for the face as the most basic unit of how we understand our own humanity and build relationships.

And also as a site where we actually impose a lot of assumptions, biases, and then naturalize them and say, actually, it's not me.

It's the face.

So it's not really a skill in the sense of something that you can get better at or train yourself in.

As you gestured toward, there are some people who absolutely cannot do this at all.

They have something called prosopagnosia or face blindness.

And they are absolutely unable to look at a face and then when they see that face again, understand that it is the same person.

And asking them to work on that, to try a little harder is akin to asking somebody who's colorblind to really focus.

And then maybe you'll be able to see the color.

So in that sense, it's not really a skill.

But having said that, for most people...

Most of us are mostly good at recognizing faces in the sense that if we see someone and then we see them again, we have the idea that they are related to that specific person.

Now, we can be better or worse at it.

And for most of us, how good we are at it in any given situation has a lot to do with the kind of interaction we had with that person.