Malcolm and Lucie discover that they experience something very differently. If you suspect you might have a problem recognizing faces and you want to get involved in the research they’re doing at Dr. Joe DeGutis’s lab, go to: www.faceblind.org And if you’re curious about your own facial recognition abilities, these online tests are a good place to start: https://www.troublewithfaces.org/test-yourself-1 https://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experiments/facememorytest/startup.phpSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What misunderstanding is discussed in the Missy incident?
And this is the part that made me think of you, Malcolm, face blindness. Because I've heard that you also might be a little face blind yourself.
Yes, yes, that's true. This happens to me all the time. I won't remember if I need to be exposed to a face, a person on multiple occasions before their face becomes meaningful or even there. I don't know whether their face is becoming meaningful or that I'm developing so many other ways of recognizing them that I feel on safer ground.
Like you're not just going to remember someone that you've met once or twice in passing.
No, there's no chance that I will. It's actually funny because I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop and I see this guy who runs the wine shop across the street. His name is Michael. I'd known Michael for years. And I see Michael, or I think it's Michael, and I see a Slender Man in his 50s, about 5'9", with glasses and a baseball cap, across the street from the wine shop.
And I think, oh, that's got to be Michael. And I go, Michael! And the guy looks at me like really weird and comes over. And it was like my nightmare. It was like, oh, my God, no, it's not. It's just another dude who's in town who looks a lot like Michael. But that was my system failed. Yeah. It's very rare for me to risk it like that.
But I risked it because I thought if Michael thinks... I had the reverse JJ. If Michael thinks I'm ignoring him... then that's really bad because I go to the wine shop all the time and I like Michael.
See, it's interesting because this never happens to me. Like I'm often on the other side of it being like, all right, I'm just going to pretend like I don't know this person. You always remember. I always remember. And I always remember people who are completely insignificant to me, like not in any sort of like value judgment way.
It's just like, oh, I met you once at my friend's party four years ago and now you are standing next to me in line at Target.
So completely foreign. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How does Missy meet J.J. and what do they bond over?
He needed cold, hard data, not random BuzzFeed quizzes. So I hopped on Zoom with his research assistant, Kayla Kusel, and took a three-hour battery of tests designed to definitively say whether or not I was a super recognizer. All right, so the next one is called Face Name. You can go ahead and click on that link. The test started off super easy. I was breezing through.
So they're showing me that same face from, like, different angles. And I would say that is extremely easy. But things got weirder as the hours went on, and I started to get a little stressed.
Now I'm getting nervous. I'm like, I need to get these right. Which is one of the six target faces.
I had to do things like remember jobs and names of people whose faces would flash across the screen really quickly. And at one point I was matching spiky blobs with other spiky blobs. That one was so hard.
The Georges is really crazy. That made me feel like I took drugs or something. I was like, whoa, what's happening here?
Kayla and I wrapped up, and she said they'd get back to me in a few days with my results. I was eager to hear them and unsure of what they would be. By the end, I didn't think I did very well, and I was kind of embarrassed about the whole charade. What if I was just average? A few days later, the verdict was in. Degutis and I hopped on a Zoom call to go over my results.
I mean, you're kind of the complete package for a super recognizer. Wow. I feel like, I mean, maybe when you started taking the test, I was a little skeptical, but I think you're right on. I think this is really good.
Okay, I have to admit, I was over the moon at being called the complete package. I said, please, go on.
Actually, looking at your results, you were perfect on two of the diagnostic tests. You didn't get a single item wrong. You also did really well in this very impossible task where we had you try to learn 60 faces in a very short period of time, and you had to recognize them. like out of 120 faces.
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