Sharona Pearl

And some folks just don't have the ability to do that for faces.

But having said that, face-blind people have developed, tend to have developed a whole host of really impressive adaptations like voice recognition and gait recognition.

They tend to have really good awareness and attunement to things like hairstyles and clothing and general ways that people manifest in the world.

But if a face-blind parent, someone who's profoundly face-blind, and remember, it's a spectrum, so...

The bottom 1 to 2% of the population, I shouldn't say bottom, 1 to 2% of the population on the extreme end of face blindness are going to have much less ability than those on the bottom 5%, 10% and so on and so forth.

But if 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.

Yes.

And in fact, one of the most well-known face-blind people, Oliver Sacks, who made a career out of tracking the unusual and the odd and the kind of quirky things that can happen to our brains.

Who himself didn't realize that he was face blind until later middle age as he described it.

Talks about sometimes waving to somebody and realizing it's himself.

Or seeing what he thought was his own reflection and starting to groom his beard only to see someone looking at him oddly.

Because it was not in fact him.

Scientists believe that about 1 to 2% of the population is profoundly face-blind.

That's 1 in 50 people, so quite a lot.

And then by the logic of that spectrum, 1 to 2% of the population would be super recognizers.

Having said that, there are a couple of caveats.

First of all, the kinds of super recognizers who are being deployed, and they absolutely are, and we can talk about this, in criminal justice and police forces to make sense of face recognition technology, are not the top 1% to 2%.

They're probably the top 1% to 2% of the top 1% to 2%.

The people who can really, really have this fantastical ability are really quite a discrete number.

And also...