Sharona Pearl

There's a lot of ways to seem like you're bad at face recognition.

So it could be that you're face blind and you have prosopagnosia.

But it could be that you have trouble understanding emotions and communication.

And that makes it hard for you to make sense of faces, right?

So people with autism sometimes might...

also seem like they have face blindness, and so it has kind of a long tail on that spectrum, but in fact they don't, although there is, you know, face blindness is a little overrepresented amongst the autistic community, but there are other ways to seem like you're not great at recognizing faces, and folks who have excellent memories or pay a lot of attention when they're interacting with others may seem like they're more super recognizers, but they're not.

They're relying on a different set of skills.

So that's a really astute question because we were talking earlier about this question of tacit knowledge and things that we do without even know that we're doing it.

It took a really, really long time for people who think about the brain and think about faces to understand that face recognition was even a thing or a category because

there was no kind of crisis.

There was no moment where people could do a thing and couldn't.

So folks who just were face blind felt like they were stupid or not trying hard or everybody else had a superpower that they didn't.

But they didn't have framing or language for it.

So the first forms of face blindness that were categorized as such in 1947, although there's a longer history in certain ways, were people who had what's called acquired prosopagnosia.

So that means that they could recognize faces and then something happened, a traumatic brain injury, a fever, a fall, and then they couldn't anymore.

And that was the way that it became entered into the record as a category.

And even though 1% to 2% of the population is probably born with what they call developmental prosopagnosia, it took something like

20 to 30 years after that initial acquired case was established for folks to even find people who were born with it because it's so hard to name or label.

But yes, it does seem to be the case that some people are born completely face-blind.

Well, probably infants can also recognize their mother's smell and voice and other kinds of cues.