This week we are trying to get back to psychology for a little bit.

I thought I’d start with faces.

Overall humans are extraordinarily good at recognizing faces, and this cannot be a surprise. After all, we all need to know who is friend and who is foe. As a matter of fact there is reason to think there is a special hunk of the brain that is specialized for just this purpose. It’s call the fusiform face area, or FFA. Scientists have believed for years that damage to the FFA is what causes the pattern, sometimes also called face blindness, more properly called prosopagnosia.

People with this disorder cannot recognize their friends, or, for that matter, their spouses or children, or for that matter themselves. They will in some cases think that someone is staring at them, when in fact they are looking at a mirror.

It has become clear, though, that many people have prosopagnosia from birth with no detectable brain damage. One famous case was Oliver Sacks, another remarkable case is the artist Chuck Close. Think about his portraits. They are made up of a mosaic of little tiny pieces because he is unable to recognize the whole Gestalt.

http://www.mosaicartnow.com/2010/07/prosopagnosia-portraitist-chuck-close/

A further key point is that prosopagnosia is NOT all or none. Many people have degrees of this limitation and get through life by recognizing friends or family by focusing on particular items like jewelry or ponytail; they are only lost if these things change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxqsBk7Wn-Y

If you are curious to know if you have hints of prosopagnosia, point google at “Cambridge Face memory test” and in 20 minutes you know where you stand.

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experiments/facememorytest/startup.php