Sharona Pearl

So if it's your mother, your lover, your brother, you see them a lot, they mean something to you, you're going to be able to recognize them more readily.

But I love that you mentioned, Mike, somebody that I saw on TV, because they're also people we have these parasocial relationships with.

They don't know us, but we know them.

So if we've had a meaningful encounter with them, we might also have a better ability to recognize them.

But people on the extremes of this face recognition spectrum, people who are completely face blind,

all the way up to people who are what we call super recognizers.

And it does sound like something that the Marvel or DC universe came up with, but it's actually a neurological condition.

Those folks have the ability to recognize faces independent of their relationship or interaction with that person.

Now, you might hear about super recognizers and hear that they never forget a face.

I think that's not strictly accurate.

I think it's more reasonable to say that their ability to recall a face is unrelated to the relationship or encounter that they've had.

And that's basically true of face-blind people as well, except for face-blind people, their ability to recall those faces is zero.

And for super recognizers, it is extremely high.

Correct.

Correct.

So they're really good at high school reunions because not only can they recognize folks, but they can actually age them over time.

They...

are basically the walking internet movie database so they can recognize minor characters and extras and say oh hey that was vampire number two and buffy the vampire slayer now interestingly those folks don't necessarily have a great memory per se right and they might not recall names but for situational understanding of where that face appeared their recall is pretty impressive

That's absolutely the case.

And mostly because names do tend to be a function of memory, whereas faces are actually a different neurological process and a really complicated one that's connected in some ways to recall and memory, but actually has a lot to do with how we build images in our mind.