August 5, 2012 4:00 PM
Imagine you couldn't recognize people's faces, and even your own family looked unfamiliar. Lesley Stahl reports on face blindness, a puzzling neurological disorder.
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I may be a super recognizer although with age It may have diminished a bit.
I always thought as an air force brat it was a gift I had to help compensate for moving yearly and having to make new friends in different lands. It made me feel like I was at home in any country or town to know faces and know where and how I met them. I still have that recall from my youth and have asked my online brat network if they too have this gift.
Earlier this ski season, I fell skiing moguls, while wearing a ski helmet, and landed on the right side of my head. I experienced the loss of facial recognition for a time, although not complete. Having seen the facial artist on Charlie Rose in his brain series I knew what I was experiencing. I could not see new people I had met and file those faces. I saw my boss and did not recognize him for some reason. I thought I was just not concentrating enough. I believe my facial recognition has returned to normal with time.
I was not surprised that your report revealed that the site for facial recognition was on the right of the brain. I did not know but assumed that this must be the site since that was the side I fell on. I did very well with your super recognizer test, although on the aging side I was not good. Thanks for your report as it has put some puzzle pieces together for me.
Gay Garner
This was an excellent report. I've been married 33 years to a man who has struggled with this his entire life, and I'm just the opposite, and recognize practically everyone I've ever known, even as they age. We have a daughter who is not as bad as my husband, but who has always relied on people's voices 90% of the time to be sure she knows who the person is if she has any doubts. But she and I have also addressed this throughout her life by helping her focus on things about people that stay the same (like grins or manner of movement) that help her always identify the person. However, the reason I'm writing is that both my husband and daughter also have what is called APD or auditory processing disorder, which, like face-blindness is also a neurological problem.
Due to APD, both my husband and daughter have difficulties with both long and short term memories, difficulty with tasks like spelling, and have gone through their lives "hanging back" at all times to watch others to try to determine what they've "missed" from our increasingly oral world.
My daughter is better with APD than my husband, but only because I recognized a problem when she was 3-1/2 (she's 25 now) and when I mentioned it to her pediatrician at her 4 year app't, he'd just read a journal article on APD (it had only recently been "discovered") so knew what we needed to do to quantify and qualify the dimensions of her disorder. My husband only learned he had the genetic disorder because she was diagnosed; but his symptoms were actually more pronounced than hers, just always ignored through his life because no one any any basis for diagnosis. (Until she was diagnosed, I'd always just assumed he was ignoring me. After the diagnosis, I realized I had to start asking him what he'd "heard" me say to determine if any of it got through to him).
Anyway, I have to wonder if one neurological disorder kind of "begets" another. My daughter has gone through life with much better attitude and aptitude than my husband because we learned so early on what we needed to do to help her with APD. And as far as the face recognition problems for her, she's "rolled with it" much better than my husband simply because she's used to compensating for the other neurological problem.
So, my question is, do any of the other test subjects in this report possibly also suffer from companion neurological disorders? And for that matter, do any of their children have less problems from this face recognition problem if their spouses are much better at recognizing faces?
My husband doesn't forget people just a few minutes later, like some of the test subjects, but he recognized none of the famous faces that were shown, whereas I got all of them immediately. He thought he wasn't as bad as the test subjects because he "knew" he would recognize our daughter, until I took her senior picture and put a white border around everything but her face. Then he admitted that if he didn't know it was a picture of her he probably wouldn't be sure who it was.
Like I said before, excellent report. And for our family--something we would love to learn more about to help future generations.
Sincerely,
Joan Rhine
jmrhine@gmail.com