Latest / Stuff You Should Know / How Face Blindness Works

Transcript

How Face Blindness Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
0:11
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
0:13
Speaker 1: and Jerry's here too, sitting in in this bowl session
0:18
Speaker 1: that we like to call stuff you Should Know to
0:20
Speaker 1: shooting the bullets, shooting the breeze. That's right, chewing the fact,
0:24
Speaker 1: sling in some facts, m slinging some facts about something
0:29
Speaker 1: that is just downright astounding if you ask me, Chuck, Yeah,
0:34
Speaker 1: when have we talked about this? Oh, buddy, we talked
0:38
Speaker 1: about it, and I think the Doppelganger episode. I feel
0:42
Speaker 1: like also in the days of YR we maybe hit
0:46
Speaker 1: it at some point briefly. Sure, probably can you transplant ahead? No, jeez, kids,
0:54
Speaker 1: digging deep. I don't know if it was in that
0:56
Speaker 1: one or not, could have been, but yeah, we've definitely
0:58
Speaker 1: talked about it. We should say prosopagnosia, which is face
1:03
Speaker 1: blindness more commonly known, which is a neurological condition, to
1:08
Speaker 1: just kind of dryly define it right out of the gate,
1:12
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, and what we're not talking about, although as
1:15
Speaker 1: you'll see, it is a condition that does exist on
1:18
Speaker 1: a spectrum. But I think they're but they're saying basically though,
1:22
Speaker 1: it's not just like I'm not real, real good at
1:25
Speaker 1: remembering people's faces. While that can also mean you might
1:30
Speaker 1: have a very low on the spectrum version of prosopagnosia,
1:35
Speaker 1: it's it's not generally what most people when they say like,
1:38
Speaker 1: I'm not good with faces, probably don't have it. It's
1:41
Speaker 1: a very clunky way of saying that. It's pretty rare
1:45
Speaker 1: and like it doesn't necessarily just have to do with
1:47
Speaker 1: how good you are remembering people when you meet them.
1:50
Speaker 1: That just means you're an a hole, right, which is
1:53
Speaker 1: said because a lot of people with prosopagnosia get kind
1:58
Speaker 1: of thought of as that because people don't really understand
2:00
Speaker 1: what their condition is. Yeah, it's not yeah, supposedly he's
2:04
Speaker 1: self diagnosed. I guess yeah, he's has not been fully diagnosed,
2:09
Speaker 1: but he does. Just from reading like recent interviews with him,
2:12
Speaker 1: it seems like it's probably the deal with him and
2:15
Speaker 1: not just like, hey, I'm busy, but he's you know,
2:18
Speaker 1: as you'll see, it's a real struggle. It's not just like, oh,
2:21
Speaker 1: I'm not very good with faces. It's you know, you
2:24
Speaker 1: may not recognize your family members. If it's severe enough,
2:27
Speaker 1: you may not recognize your own face. Yeah, and more more,
2:31
Speaker 1: you know, like kind of in a day to day thing.
2:32
Speaker 1: I saw it described by I believe it was m.
2:36
Speaker 1: Sadie Dingfelder, who is a Washington Post writer and also
2:42
Speaker 1: has severe face blindness. She said, I believe it's her.
2:46
Speaker 1: Said basically, like you can spend like all day in
2:50
Speaker 1: a meeting like a boardroom with somebody, like working closely
2:55
Speaker 1: with them the whole time, and then at the end
2:58
Speaker 1: of the day, if you both happened to ump into
3:00
Speaker 1: each other in the lobby after you know, leaving one
3:04
Speaker 1: another side five minutes before, she would not she would
3:08
Speaker 1: not recognize that person. Yeah, I mean I will say
3:12
Speaker 1: that I have. It's not a superpower, but I've always
3:16
Speaker 1: been really, really, really good at remembering faces. There's something
3:19
Speaker 1: called super recognizers. I think I might be on that
3:22
Speaker 1: if that exists on a spectrum, I think I'm on
3:24
Speaker 1: it because I've had some freakishly weird occurrences of remembering
3:30
Speaker 1: faces of people I didn't know at all from years before.
3:33
Speaker 1: Like even as a kid, I remember like seeing a
3:36
Speaker 1: guy at six Flags one time and then seeing him
3:40
Speaker 1: like a couple of years later, and I think maybe
3:43
Speaker 1: I met him, and then somehow got confirmation it wasn't
3:47
Speaker 1: just me thinking, you know, like it wasn't a mistake,
3:50
Speaker 1: Like I've always been really good at recognizing faces, is
3:52
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. You were like, is it him? And
3:55
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden he puts on a jean
3:56
Speaker 1: jacket with the iHeart six flags patch on the back.
4:00
Speaker 1: It is Let's say it may have been something like
4:02
Speaker 1: that because the clothes, you'll see the clothes and things
4:05
Speaker 1: can be a way to help you remember people for sure. So,
4:10
Speaker 1: like you said, the whole thing kind of exists in degrees,
4:13
Speaker 1: and a lot of people think that, you know, if
4:17
Speaker 1: you have face blindness blindness, which is weird that I
4:21
Speaker 1: have trouble saying face blindness too, because the clinical name
4:24
Speaker 1: is really difficult to say. If you have face blindness,
4:29
Speaker 1: that if somebody knows that it exists and they have
4:32
Speaker 1: kind of a general conception of it, they might think that,
4:34
Speaker 1: like you don't see faces, like it's that really creepy
4:39
Speaker 1: Twilight zone thing where this sister was missing her mouth,
4:42
Speaker 1: you know, or everyone looks like Robert the Doll. Yeah,
4:45
Speaker 1: kind of like that, like but without even eyes or
4:48
Speaker 1: a nose, like just a blur or something like that.
4:50
Speaker 1: And apparently there is such a degree of it that
4:54
Speaker 1: if you saw like a picture of a face maybe
4:57
Speaker 1: out of context, like you didn't see it attach to
5:00
Speaker 1: somebody's body or whatever, you would think maybe it was
5:03
Speaker 1: a rock or just some other roundish object. That there
5:09
Speaker 1: is like that degree. Apparently that's pretty rare. What's more
5:13
Speaker 1: likely is that you're seeing all the different parts of
5:16
Speaker 1: the face. Your brain's just not putting it together in
5:20
Speaker 1: a cohesive hole like everybody else's brain does. That's that's
5:24
Speaker 1: one big part of it for sure. Yeah, And I
5:26
Speaker 1: think what we're going to do the order we settled
5:28
Speaker 1: on is we're going to kind of talk a lot
5:29
Speaker 1: about it and then maybe toward the end we're going
5:32
Speaker 1: to talk about causes and whether or not it can
5:36
Speaker 1: be fixed and stuff like that. So if that's a cliffhanger,
5:39
Speaker 1: then there you go, Right, does that count? It? Is?
5:42
Speaker 1: It does? There's one other thing we need to point out.
5:45
Speaker 1: There's absolutely nothing wrong with people with prosopagnosias like site.
5:50
Speaker 1: They can see perfectly fine, right, It's that the sensory
5:54
Speaker 1: information that's coming in is not being processed correctly. Right.
5:58
Speaker 1: That's just called far sightedness. Yeah, myopia. Yeah, mister McGoo.
6:03
Speaker 1: Should we talk about, now, you know what else? The
6:05
Speaker 1: deal with Magoo? He couldn't see very well. They always
6:08
Speaker 1: joked about this on the podcast Freedom of whether or
6:11
Speaker 1: not Magoo had glasses? Uh man, No, they think about it.
6:18
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if he had glasses. Whatever the answer is,
6:20
Speaker 1: I can't remember. The opposite is kind of what people
6:22
Speaker 1: commonly think. I think he doesn't have classes. Yeah, so
6:26
Speaker 1: people when they see people with really thick glasses would
6:29
Speaker 1: say like, oh, real Magoo, when in fact people with
6:33
Speaker 1: no glasses hurt the magoose. Does that make sense? Yeah,
6:36
Speaker 1: it does. It's kind of like misusing loman on the
6:38
Speaker 1: totem pole or drink the coolie exactly. You know. All right,
6:42
Speaker 1: So should we talk about agnosias in general? Yeah, because
6:46
Speaker 1: prosopagnosia is a specific kind of a mental disorder that
6:51
Speaker 1: belongs to like a general class of disorders, neurological disorders
6:55
Speaker 1: called agnosias, And they are about as fascinating as it
6:59
Speaker 1: can get. They also reveal a tremendous amount of how
7:02
Speaker 1: our brain works too. Yeah, and it's a Greek if
7:05
Speaker 1: you're wondering, basically means absence of knowledge, but medically speaking,
7:10
Speaker 1: it means you have some sort of recognition impairment, and
7:14
Speaker 1: it is you know, And we'll go through these. They're
7:17
Speaker 1: very specific. Ed helped us put this together. And the
7:21
Speaker 1: reason it's so specific, I think, is because it has
7:23
Speaker 1: to be, because there are some minute differences in some
7:26
Speaker 1: of these that make a difference, you know, yeah, for sure,
7:30
Speaker 1: make a big difference. All right, So I guess we'll
7:34
Speaker 1: start with the three main categories. Color blindness, which we've
7:38
Speaker 1: talked about before, is a version of an agnosia, word blindness,
7:43
Speaker 1: which I guess you have with reading the words face blindness,
7:47
Speaker 1: and what we're talking about today prosopagnosia. But those aren't
7:51
Speaker 1: the three categories. Those are three types of visual. The
7:55
Speaker 1: three main categories are visual, auditory, in touch right right right,
8:00
Speaker 1: visual seems to have the most associated with it. In
8:03
Speaker 1: addition to all those other ones you just mentioned, there's
8:05
Speaker 1: one called apperceptive, which is where you can't differentiate objects,
8:09
Speaker 1: just like a person can't differentiate a face with prosopagnosia.
8:13
Speaker 1: Like a person with apperceptive visual agnosia, like you can
8:19
Speaker 1: say say, hey, look at that car, and look at
8:22
Speaker 1: that toaster over there aren't they really nice to look at,
8:24
Speaker 1: And they'd be like, I don't really see any difference
8:26
Speaker 1: between those two things that you're pointing out now, And
8:29
Speaker 1: I have questions about this. You may not know the
8:31
Speaker 1: answer too, about why a toaster is out on a
8:34
Speaker 1: street with a car. That's it. No, it's And to
8:38
Speaker 1: be fair, toaster and car were probably not great examples
8:41
Speaker 1: to use because you take into consideration, as you'll see,
8:45
Speaker 1: if you have any of these disorders, you know the
8:47
Speaker 1: fact that it's on the street, in a driveway, or
8:49
Speaker 1: on a counter in a kitchen. Sure, But what I
8:52
Speaker 1: want to know is is do they do they even
8:56
Speaker 1: note like the size of something? I don't know. Some
9:00
Speaker 1: of these are so exotic that there's like just a
9:03
Speaker 1: handful of cases in the entire history of medicine. I
9:08
Speaker 1: think a perceptive is a little more common, but I
9:11
Speaker 1: don't know exactly how they see it, because like a
9:14
Speaker 1: pair of glasses on a coffee table or a remote
9:16
Speaker 1: control like that kind of thing makes a little more sense.
9:20
Speaker 1: Car and toaster blows my mind. Okay, So I'm just
9:24
Speaker 1: gonna go ahead and confess car and toaster was my example.
9:28
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to get the point across. Okay, I
9:31
Speaker 1: just wonder if if it is that severe. I'm sure
9:35
Speaker 1: it can be, especially if allow this exists on a spectrum.
9:37
Speaker 1: If there's people out there who can look at a
9:39
Speaker 1: picture of a face and think it's a rock, I'm
9:41
Speaker 1: sure there's somebody out there who has a perceptive visual
9:44
Speaker 1: agnosia that says that toaster in that car, same thing, buddy.
9:48
Speaker 1: All right, all right, fair enough, I'm putting money on
9:51
Speaker 1: it now. And you know what we're hoping to do
9:54
Speaker 1: is hear from some people, because this is really fascinating.
9:57
Speaker 1: Like you said, there's not a ton of as we'll see,
10:00
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't come forward because they learn
10:03
Speaker 1: to deal with it. You're right, totally. So. Associative is
10:06
Speaker 1: another visual one that's an inability to identify objects whereas
10:14
Speaker 1: you can, like you can see the coffee cup, you
10:16
Speaker 1: can reach out and grab it, but you can't identify
10:18
Speaker 1: its use, like I'm holding the thing, but I don't
10:21
Speaker 1: know what the heck you do with it, right exactly.
10:23
Speaker 1: And then there's another one that sounds man, I think
10:26
Speaker 1: this deserves its own short stuff akin autopsia, and it's
10:30
Speaker 1: where you can't perceive motion. Yeah, so I saw it
10:32
Speaker 1: described as like if a car's coming at you. It
10:35
Speaker 1: just is like a series of like it suddenly jumps
10:39
Speaker 1: closer and closer and closer. You don't see it moving.
10:42
Speaker 1: It's like a series of still images. All of life
10:45
Speaker 1: is like that. Like how if you see somebody like
10:47
Speaker 1: moving towards you under a strobe light. That's what it's like,
10:50
Speaker 1: but no need for the strobe light. So it's like
10:53
Speaker 1: a murder scene in a club in a movie exactly.
10:57
Speaker 1: That's exactly what life is like for people with can't
11:00
Speaker 1: atop to you, Wow, you have your auditory ones. Auditory
11:03
Speaker 1: verbal is when you can't recognize a word that you hear.
11:08
Speaker 1: They also call it word deafness for obvious reasons. And
11:11
Speaker 1: then also under auditory is oh I had all these earlier.
11:18
Speaker 1: How do you do you pronounce that G? There? I
11:20
Speaker 1: think it's phone agnosia, phone agnosia. Okay, that makes sense.
11:23
Speaker 1: I think that is not being able to recognize familiar
11:27
Speaker 1: voice and identify that voice right, understand everything they're saying.
11:31
Speaker 1: But I would be on this recording right now, as
11:34
Speaker 1: and often the case, wondering who is this guy? Right?
11:38
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the auditory version of prosopagnosia, right
11:42
Speaker 1: with voices instead of faces. There's another one that's called
11:45
Speaker 1: tactile agnosia, and it's where you can't recognize an object
11:50
Speaker 1: by touch. And I've really thought about this, and the
11:53
Speaker 1: best I could come up with is that this would
11:55
Speaker 1: be problematic at one of those Halloween parties where they
11:58
Speaker 1: pass around a bowl of spaghetti and tell you it's guts.
12:00
Speaker 1: It just be lost on you. But that's about the
12:02
Speaker 1: worst that could come of it from what I can tell. Okay,
12:06
Speaker 1: because you can still use the thing and recognize what
12:08
Speaker 1: it's used for. In't that right? I think? So it's
12:12
Speaker 1: just when you touch it you don't know what it is.
12:15
Speaker 1: So I'm sure like going to turn off the oven
12:17
Speaker 1: would be really problematic or something like that. But um, yeah,
12:21
Speaker 1: it's it's that's It just seems like such a limited thing.
12:24
Speaker 1: But I'm sure there's much more problems with it than
12:26
Speaker 1: I can come up with. If you want to get
12:28
Speaker 1: even rarer, here are some more versions of agnosia's auto autotopagnosia,
12:34
Speaker 1: which is when you can't recognize and identify specific body
12:39
Speaker 1: parts of your of your own body. Oh, there's also
12:43
Speaker 1: my favorite Simultan tang Agnosia, Simultan Agnosia. Yeah, I think
12:48
Speaker 1: that's it. You got it. Okay. So that one is
12:50
Speaker 1: where you can see all sorts of different stuff, all
12:53
Speaker 1: the objects, you can identify all the objects in your
12:55
Speaker 1: field of viewer in a picture or something. But what
12:58
Speaker 1: they're doing together, that worms of cohesive whole a scene
13:03
Speaker 1: is just totally lost on you. You would see a
13:05
Speaker 1: kid in their pajamas opening a present. There would be
13:07
Speaker 1: a tree that's decorated. There would be like a couple
13:12
Speaker 1: of parents like watching the kid or standing off to
13:16
Speaker 1: the side. You would not put together that this is
13:18
Speaker 1: a scene of like a Christmas morning, Like you just
13:21
Speaker 1: you just can't put scenes together. And I saw it
13:23
Speaker 1: compared to not being able to see the forest from
13:25
Speaker 1: the trees. Okay, that makes sense, Yeah it does. That's
13:29
Speaker 1: my favorite one right there. Yeah, all these are so tough,
13:32
Speaker 1: and it's not I think it's something that's easy for
13:36
Speaker 1: people to laugh at, Like if someone said, like, why
13:38
Speaker 1: is there a tree in that living room? Right, It's
13:41
Speaker 1: it's not funny, you know, and especially when it comes
13:43
Speaker 1: to the main topic of face blindness, it can be
13:47
Speaker 1: a very debilitating thing. It can be for sure, but
13:50
Speaker 1: astoundingly humans who have these conditions are really good at
13:55
Speaker 1: figuring out ways to kind of make it through life,
13:59
Speaker 1: just kind of worker out and essentially um and we'll
14:03
Speaker 1: talk more about that. I say, after a break, how
14:05
Speaker 1: about that, let's do it. I want to learn about
14:07
Speaker 1: a terroristort and college dactyl, how to take a perfect moment,
14:09
Speaker 1: all about fractolki is gone, that's another hun, the Lizzie
14:12
Speaker 1: Border murders that I have, all runs on the plane,
14:14
Speaker 1: everything Stubby should know. Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck, Now,
14:32
Speaker 1: I don't feel at all comfortable making any jokes about
14:35
Speaker 1: this stuff. You really threw the gauntlet down. Is there
14:38
Speaker 1: a tree in your living room, Josh? That's not funny
14:41
Speaker 1: covered with lights? It's Halloween. It's not funny. Uh, it
14:46
Speaker 1: is not funny. It's a little funny, isn't it. I
14:52
Speaker 1: think that one specifically to not recognize a scene. All right.
14:56
Speaker 1: I think you can get a yuck or two out
14:58
Speaker 1: of that. Okay, Okay, let's move on. Okay. So I
15:03
Speaker 1: was saying before the break that people with agnosias, and
15:07
Speaker 1: in particular prosopagnosia, learn to just kind of navigate through
15:11
Speaker 1: life without the advantages that the rest of us just
15:14
Speaker 1: totally take for granted and say, I say, the best
15:17
Speaker 1: way to understand prosopagnosia, I just sounded like foghorn leghorn
15:21
Speaker 1: for a second. I'll say the best way is to
15:26
Speaker 1: understand how just people normally perceive faces. Right. Yeah, So
15:32
Speaker 1: this is something that you know when you're grown up
15:35
Speaker 1: or whatever. You you just sort of again, you take
15:38
Speaker 1: it for granted that this is something that you've always
15:40
Speaker 1: been able to do, but it's actually a learned process.
15:44
Speaker 1: You develop this over the course of your life. I
15:46
Speaker 1: think they say, you know, and it kind of makes sense,
15:48
Speaker 1: like sort of in your prepubescent years around twelve, you're
15:52
Speaker 1: really spongy at that age at soaking up faces and
15:55
Speaker 1: getting better, and it just gets better in time. I
15:58
Speaker 1: think we peek in our third ease. And this also
16:02
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense. If you grow up in
16:03
Speaker 1: a city, you're better if you're exposed to, you know,
16:06
Speaker 1: a lot of faces than someone who might grow up
16:08
Speaker 1: in a small town seeing the same people over and over. Yeah,
16:11
Speaker 1: And so the whole thing of recognizing a face, we've
16:14
Speaker 1: figured out, and by we I mean you and me, Chuck,
16:16
Speaker 1: is that it's a two step process, and one is
16:19
Speaker 1: that that visual information comes in and it gets processed
16:24
Speaker 1: into a hole. So like we see faces as holes
16:27
Speaker 1: generally most most people do. And a person's face when
16:32
Speaker 1: we're taking it in, it's not necessarily whole. We're putting
16:34
Speaker 1: all of these pieces together automatically instantly. It's called holistic processing.
16:39
Speaker 1: So you've got a face now in your head, and
16:41
Speaker 1: then you run it against a database essentially to find
16:45
Speaker 1: out if it's familiar or not, and all this is
16:47
Speaker 1: taking like microseconds to do. Yeah, and then if it
16:52
Speaker 1: comes up like, yes, this is familiar, then you have
16:55
Speaker 1: what's called recollection memory. I believe if I recall correctly,
17:01
Speaker 1: and that is this biographical information that we attached to
17:06
Speaker 1: each person. They've figured out that it seems like that
17:09
Speaker 1: is attached to the face, and that that's when you
17:13
Speaker 1: recognize somebody. If you stop and think about it, you're like, oh, yeah,
17:16
Speaker 1: I'm just inundated with this flood of information about that
17:19
Speaker 1: person that I know. It's they are figuring out it's
17:22
Speaker 1: triggered by the face. So they they're finding out that
17:25
Speaker 1: prosopagnosia patients not only can't recognize faces, they can't retain
17:30
Speaker 1: the biographical information that other people can because it seems
17:35
Speaker 1: to be filed away by a person's face. Yeah, and
17:39
Speaker 1: like you said, you pull up that file and in
17:41
Speaker 1: your mind, what's happening so so fast is you know,
17:45
Speaker 1: crooked nose, cheek scar. I went to high school with
17:48
Speaker 1: that guy. It's Ralph. I saw that guy it's six
17:51
Speaker 1: flags once. It'd be funny if actually went to my
17:55
Speaker 1: high school. That's where I knew him. But Ralph. So
17:58
Speaker 1: let's say, let's take the example of Ralph. You know
18:01
Speaker 1: that Ralph likes long walks on the beach, that Ralph
18:04
Speaker 1: doesn't like cockroaches, he's scared of them. You know that
18:07
Speaker 1: Ralph has a really cool car that you like to
18:09
Speaker 1: ride in sometimes, like you just know this stuff, like
18:13
Speaker 1: you just know it, and it's part of it's part
18:17
Speaker 1: of recognition. And again that's triggered by a face. So
18:21
Speaker 1: people who have pazzo pagnosia have to kind of make
18:25
Speaker 1: it through the world without that. And so for you
18:29
Speaker 1: and me and people who can easily recognize faces, it's
18:33
Speaker 1: it's really hard to imagine not being able to do that.
18:36
Speaker 1: But it came up with a really good thought experiment.
18:38
Speaker 1: I think is the sea apples? Are we there? I
18:41
Speaker 1: think so? Sure. Yeah. I mean this is kind of
18:44
Speaker 1: like a Memento, you know, the dude and Memento came
18:49
Speaker 1: up with a system, and it's all about developing a
18:52
Speaker 1: system that works. So when you see Ralph, you think
18:57
Speaker 1: you've learned crooked nose, cheek, scar on the left face.
19:00
Speaker 1: I know that's my friend, but there's still not that recognition,
19:03
Speaker 1: which I can't imagine how frustrating that must be. But
19:07
Speaker 1: in this case, if you're talking about like apples, you
19:09
Speaker 1: show someone an apple and then you put that apple
19:12
Speaker 1: on a coffee table with like forty apple buddies, and
19:15
Speaker 1: then you say, pick up that apple, and it's you know,
19:19
Speaker 1: you'd be lost, to be very frustrating, But if you
19:21
Speaker 1: were told to do this several times or you know,
19:24
Speaker 1: given years or whatever, you would eventually develop a system
19:28
Speaker 1: to memorizing how to recognize that apple, which could be
19:33
Speaker 1: the most minute little features of the apple, from the
19:36
Speaker 1: length of the stem to the dent in the top
19:39
Speaker 1: corner that you don't want to eat. Yeah, and if
19:42
Speaker 1: your entire social life, and in some cases your own
19:46
Speaker 1: survival was predicated I'm being able to recognize individual apples,
19:50
Speaker 1: you would figure out a way to do that. And
19:52
Speaker 1: so if you just replace identifying individual apples with identifying faces,
19:58
Speaker 1: that's what people with pazo pagnosia have to learn how
20:00
Speaker 1: to do, and they do it, like you said. And
20:02
Speaker 1: it turns out that if you, um kind of study
20:05
Speaker 1: how prosopagnosiacs real world from I've seen it a ton
20:10
Speaker 1: of places, including people who know what they're talking about. Yeah, um,
20:14
Speaker 1: that you'll find that there are a bunch of little
20:16
Speaker 1: cues and mannerisms and things that that we have that
20:19
Speaker 1: we're not aware of that really make us individuals beyond
20:23
Speaker 1: just what our faces look like. Yeah, because we're literally
20:27
Speaker 1: just talking the face. So if your friend has a
20:30
Speaker 1: purple mohawk, then use that like like that's a you
20:34
Speaker 1: want all your friends to have weird hair. You know,
20:36
Speaker 1: you grab onto that with all your might. That's right.
20:38
Speaker 1: Don't let go with the of that mohawk. Uh you
20:42
Speaker 1: you know, you can still see the eyes and recognize
20:44
Speaker 1: like eye color or like I said, you know, if
20:47
Speaker 1: your friend has like you know, broke their nose or
20:49
Speaker 1: they have a scar on their face or things like that,
20:52
Speaker 1: or how big their ears are or how they walk,
20:55
Speaker 1: or what they their mannerisms. Mannerisms are huge or yeah,
20:58
Speaker 1: obviously things like tattoos or if they have stinky armpits,
21:03
Speaker 1: or like there's sure, there's a lot of ways you
21:07
Speaker 1: gotta get that one right or that could be very embarrassing.
21:09
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of things that we don't
21:13
Speaker 1: need to use but are still in our own memory banks.
21:16
Speaker 1: If you don't have prosopagnosia, but just filter out the
21:20
Speaker 1: face and those are what everyone else with prosopagnosia is using. Right.
21:24
Speaker 1: There's also a lot of reliance on friends and family
21:27
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, here comes Ralph. Remember you like
21:29
Speaker 1: his car, right, and you'd be like, Ralph, good to
21:33
Speaker 1: see you. Friend. Can I ride in your car? And
21:36
Speaker 1: Ralph and say, sure, I appreciate you recognizing me. Of
21:38
Speaker 1: course you can ride in my car. The problem is
21:41
Speaker 1: you're not always around your friends and family. Some people
21:44
Speaker 1: are single and don't live in the same town as
21:47
Speaker 1: their family. Some people's family don't like them. There's all
21:50
Speaker 1: sorts of reasons that you might not be able to
21:52
Speaker 1: rely on prompts all the time, And there's also problems
21:55
Speaker 1: with the strategy of using all sorts of little details
21:58
Speaker 1: to identify people too, because people change their hair color
22:04
Speaker 1: exactly once you enter that business world. That purple mohawks
22:07
Speaker 1: probably gone, right, Yeah, people change their hair color, people
22:11
Speaker 1: change their clothes. It can be really difficult to keep
22:14
Speaker 1: up with that stuff. And so there's other potentially better
22:18
Speaker 1: ways of identifying people. And it seems to have to
22:21
Speaker 1: do with basically teaching yourself to memorize the people who
22:26
Speaker 1: are important in your life. Like you would choose a
22:29
Speaker 1: select group of people and be like, these are the
22:31
Speaker 1: people I really need to recognize, and you would get
22:33
Speaker 1: to studying them, like photographs of them at length, yeah,
22:37
Speaker 1: and which you know that's can also be a little
22:40
Speaker 1: tricky because let's say you have a friend with Prizo
22:43
Speaker 1: Pagnosia and you know that this is their strategy, and
22:45
Speaker 1: they still don't remember you, and you're like, oh, okay,
22:49
Speaker 1: I didn't make that list of extra study that's right.
22:51
Speaker 1: Yeah awkward, but no, that is that is one thing
22:55
Speaker 1: they say. And I think I get the picture that
22:57
Speaker 1: this is sort of a um sort of a beginning
23:01
Speaker 1: coping method, which is like get to know the people
23:04
Speaker 1: around you and get used to like doing that, and
23:07
Speaker 1: then I feel like the circle probably broadens from there
23:11
Speaker 1: once you're like kind of have your techniques down, Yeah,
23:14
Speaker 1: I would guess so for sure. Another one that I
23:17
Speaker 1: thought was pretty interesting, a coping skill for people with
23:20
Speaker 1: face blindness is using conversation skills. Using general small talk,
23:28
Speaker 1: you can kind of create like certain situations with conversation
23:32
Speaker 1: to see how a person reacts, like if you're like, yeah,
23:35
Speaker 1: you know, would you vote for right? Exactly? So like
23:40
Speaker 1: you can use conversation to figure out who you're talking to.
23:44
Speaker 1: And I also saw that a lot of people with
23:46
Speaker 1: prosopagnosia walk around half pretending like they know everybody, so
23:52
Speaker 1: that if they come upon somebody who actually knows them,
23:55
Speaker 1: they can already be primed to be like, yeah, how's
23:57
Speaker 1: it going, kind of things like overly friendly, almost yes
24:01
Speaker 1: exactly that they're all smiles all the time, and they're
24:05
Speaker 1: doing that. It's like a coping mechanism to basically trick
24:08
Speaker 1: people into thinking that they recognize them. And then also
24:12
Speaker 1: they found at least Sadie Dingfelder has found that if
24:15
Speaker 1: you get people to talk about themselves, if you ask questions,
24:19
Speaker 1: first of all, they're going to love talking to you,
24:21
Speaker 1: because people love talking about themselves. But then secondly, they're
24:26
Speaker 1: going to give up enough biographical information pretty quickly that
24:29
Speaker 1: you're going to know who you're talking to. This is
24:31
Speaker 1: fascinating stuff, isn't it. Yeah, it's almost like being a
24:34
Speaker 1: really skilled detective slash detective interviewer. Well Sadie Dingfelder attributes
24:40
Speaker 1: her success as a reporter for The Washington Post as
24:44
Speaker 1: being able being comfortable talking to strangers because she said,
24:47
Speaker 1: everyone's a stranger in my life, and then also like
24:51
Speaker 1: it really helped her honor conversation and interviewing skills too. Yeah,
24:54
Speaker 1: that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's I feel
24:57
Speaker 1: like sometimes there are these disorders that end up having
25:00
Speaker 1: you certain superpowers at the same time. For sure, that's
25:03
Speaker 1: a great way to put it. If you are someone
25:06
Speaker 1: with Prosa pagnosia and you were watching a TV show
25:09
Speaker 1: or a movie, that can be problematic from episode to
25:13
Speaker 1: episode because you may literally not know who this person
25:17
Speaker 1: is on the screen, and that could make it very hard.
25:20
Speaker 1: And I know it's you know, it's like, oh, you're
25:22
Speaker 1: only watching a movie, but like that'd be really frustrating
25:25
Speaker 1: a consuming entertainment was there was an ade layer of
25:29
Speaker 1: difficulty to that. You know, it's an impossibility. From what
25:33
Speaker 1: I can tell, there's this guy named Tim Rymel who
25:35
Speaker 1: wrote a little article about what it's like to live
25:38
Speaker 1: with it, and he was saying, like, you just you
25:40
Speaker 1: just can't You just stop watching after like ten minutes,
25:43
Speaker 1: because you just lose patience. It'd be kind of like
25:47
Speaker 1: watching a double feature of Happiness in Life during Wartime? Wait,
25:52
Speaker 1: which one was Life during Wartime? That was the sequel
25:54
Speaker 1: to Happiness where he kept the same characters but replaced
25:57
Speaker 1: them with all new actors. I don't think I saw
25:59
Speaker 1: that one. It's really weird to watch. It's really discomforting.
26:06
Speaker 1: I mean, it's already just horrible, like inhumane material to
26:11
Speaker 1: begin with, Todd Sollins and stuff. Yeah, but just it's
26:15
Speaker 1: just really unsettling to see new people playing the same
26:19
Speaker 1: characters and trying to keep up with who they are.
26:21
Speaker 1: So actually, that'd be a really good exercise in what
26:23
Speaker 1: it's like to be a prozo pagnosiac. I don't know
26:29
Speaker 1: if I would recommend everybody watching Happiness in Life during Wartime.
26:32
Speaker 1: Maybe read a little bit about it first before you
26:34
Speaker 1: watch it, and then if you go ahead and watch it,
26:36
Speaker 1: don't play me. But if you're good with those movies.
26:39
Speaker 1: That would be a pretty good way to be Like,
26:41
Speaker 1: this is what it's like to have prazo pagnosia. Yeah,
26:43
Speaker 1: I would imagine for entertainment consumption, music and reading become
26:47
Speaker 1: even more important, you know. Yeah, And you know you
26:51
Speaker 1: can imagine isolating that can be too, and not just
26:54
Speaker 1: like oh I can't sit in and talk about TV
26:57
Speaker 1: shows with other people, but it's an isolated in condition,
27:00
Speaker 1: to be sure. Like the people that have overcome it
27:02
Speaker 1: to the point where they're extroverted and overly friendly, like
27:07
Speaker 1: hats off to them, you know, yeah, because a lot
27:10
Speaker 1: of people go the opposite route. They become very introverted, yeah,
27:13
Speaker 1: and don't like to go out because they're so they
27:16
Speaker 1: become so socially anxious about the shame and embarrassment of
27:19
Speaker 1: not recognizing somebody and how awkward it can be, especially
27:22
Speaker 1: if that person has no idea what their condition is,
27:25
Speaker 1: that they just stop going out. It's just easier to
27:28
Speaker 1: stay home, and so it can be a really isolating condition.
27:31
Speaker 1: And then also all the stuff we've been talking about,
27:33
Speaker 1: all those coping skills that is really mentally exhausting. Yeah,
27:37
Speaker 1: Like it's so just natural to us to just recognize
27:42
Speaker 1: somebody by the face. That to have to study somebody
27:45
Speaker 1: and remember it and memorize pictures of your friends and
27:48
Speaker 1: loved ones. That is a lot of work. So it
27:50
Speaker 1: can be isolating, it can be exhausting, and then, I guess, sadly,
27:56
Speaker 1: at least for now, those coping skills are also basically
27:59
Speaker 1: the extent of treatment for prosopagnosia as as it currently stands.
28:04
Speaker 1: That's kind of it. It's it's learned all these strategies
28:08
Speaker 1: to deal with it to whatever extent you're comfortable, and
28:12
Speaker 1: and that's about all you can do. It's it's basically, uh, well,
28:15
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit about the permanency of the condition,
28:18
Speaker 1: but it's it's almost always permanent. Um yeah, let's hold
28:22
Speaker 1: off on that though, because there there are a couple
28:24
Speaker 1: of different ways you can get it that we'll get to. Okay,
28:27
Speaker 1: But there have been it feels like the last few
28:31
Speaker 1: decades there's been a lot more research than there ever
28:33
Speaker 1: was before. There are, of course, you know, previous to
28:38
Speaker 1: you know, the last couple of decades. You may not
28:41
Speaker 1: even like your doctor probably and this might still be
28:44
Speaker 1: the case in some cases, your doctor may not even
28:46
Speaker 1: know like what the heck is going on? It's that rare.
28:50
Speaker 1: So nowadays there are support groups and there a therapist
28:53
Speaker 1: and people might generally and that's you know, another reason
28:57
Speaker 1: we're doing this is it's sort of always like to
28:59
Speaker 1: help get the word out on these rare things. But
29:03
Speaker 1: previous to a couple of decades ago, I can't imagine
29:06
Speaker 1: what it would have been like living in the world.
29:08
Speaker 1: It's probably just a secret that you keep. Yeah, And
29:11
Speaker 1: it was chalked up. Oliver Sacks actually had it. The
29:14
Speaker 1: fame neurologist to Awakenings was based on his work, and
29:17
Speaker 1: he wrote awesome books like The Man Who Mystic his
29:20
Speaker 1: wife for a hat, There you go, and an Anthropologist
29:23
Speaker 1: on Mars I think was one of his two. He
29:26
Speaker 1: had like severely, and he just chalked it up to
29:29
Speaker 1: being kind of flighty, kind of absent minded, to being
29:33
Speaker 1: aloof and a lot of people just kind of chalk
29:36
Speaker 1: it up to that and just go through life because
29:39
Speaker 1: they don't. They weren't aware of it. And he was
29:41
Speaker 1: a neurologist and he wasn't making aware of it, and
29:44
Speaker 1: he had it. Apparently Jane goodall the primatologists had it.
29:49
Speaker 1: And Chuck Close the awesome portraitist. You look up his work.
29:55
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've seen it before. He frequently makes giant
29:59
Speaker 1: canvases of faces, close up of faces, but they're made
30:02
Speaker 1: of little squares and he's really good, but it just
30:06
Speaker 1: kind of alters what the person looks like. And then
30:09
Speaker 1: once you figure out that he has pazo pagnosia, and
30:11
Speaker 1: you're like, Okay, that's really interesting that he dedicated his
30:15
Speaker 1: career to faces. You know. Yeah, and I'm telling you
30:18
Speaker 1: that Brad Pitt People magazine article I read, he says that,
30:23
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of been a thorn in his
30:26
Speaker 1: side where people think he's a jerk or whatever. And
30:29
Speaker 1: he said, for a while he was trying to use
30:31
Speaker 1: a strategy of like, you know, because of course you
30:33
Speaker 1: meet way more people when you're Brad Pitt than the
30:36
Speaker 1: average person. Sure, just constantly meeting new people because of
30:39
Speaker 1: your job. But he said he used his strategy for
30:42
Speaker 1: a while like you know, hey remind me, like in
30:44
Speaker 1: a really friendly way, like hey remind me where we met.
30:47
Speaker 1: And he said sometimes that was even worse, like people
30:49
Speaker 1: get more offended if you've asked out loud, which is
30:53
Speaker 1: like that's the really the right way to handle that
30:55
Speaker 1: when you don't recognize someone in life, you know, it
30:58
Speaker 1: can be very awkward. But the right way to handle
31:00
Speaker 1: this say I'm so sorry, like I know we've met,
31:03
Speaker 1: but who were you again? And you know it's a
31:07
Speaker 1: tough thing to say. Imagine saying that over and over
31:09
Speaker 1: and over in your life. Right, and one of those
31:12
Speaker 1: people who got deeply offended with Shania Twain, I'm guessing
31:16
Speaker 1: I never thought i'd say this, but poor Brad Pitt, Right.
31:20
Speaker 1: I think another part of it too, that actually makes
31:22
Speaker 1: it a little more difficult on him than the average
31:24
Speaker 1: person is because he's such a celebrity. He's put up
31:27
Speaker 1: on a pedestal and so people him not recognizing people
31:33
Speaker 1: makes him he's already primed to be viewed as arrogant
31:37
Speaker 1: or can you think he's above everybody else? And then
31:40
Speaker 1: if you combine his condition with that, I would guess
31:42
Speaker 1: it's harder on him than most people. Yeah, and I
31:45
Speaker 1: will tell you this is that when someone is famous
31:47
Speaker 1: and they do recognize you know, the the craft service
31:52
Speaker 1: person or the guy who parks their car, like, people
31:55
Speaker 1: make a really big deal out of that, like he's
31:57
Speaker 1: such a good dude, he parked this guy's car like
32:01
Speaker 1: three times a year and he remember me every time.
32:03
Speaker 1: That ends up to be like a legend passed around
32:05
Speaker 1: on Reddit, right kind of thing exactly. So you want
32:09
Speaker 1: to take our second break and come back and talk
32:11
Speaker 1: about diagnosing prosopagnosia and then what's going on in the brain. Yes, please,
32:16
Speaker 1: I want to learn about a terris ort and college verydactyl,
32:18
Speaker 1: how to take a purgect moment, all about fractol thinks gone,
32:21
Speaker 1: that's another hun the Lizzie Border murders all runs on
32:24
Speaker 1: the plane. Everything should know. Word up, Jerry. So if
32:42
Speaker 1: you go back in the way back machine and look
32:44
Speaker 1: at the earliest cases of this, you'll see that some
32:47
Speaker 1: of the first cases that they found were diagnosed because
32:50
Speaker 1: of a like a brain injury. And that is one
32:53
Speaker 1: of the two ways that you can get this is
32:55
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about the parts of the brain is
32:57
Speaker 1: sec but is either by some sort of injury or
33:00
Speaker 1: maybe a tumor pressing on this part of the brain.
33:03
Speaker 1: But what they found is that is far and away
33:05
Speaker 1: the more rare kind, and that it's usually something that
33:09
Speaker 1: you're born with, yeah, the congenital kind, but the acquired
33:15
Speaker 1: kind is so dramatic when you suddenly lose the ability
33:19
Speaker 1: to recognize faces. Those were the first cases that were described.
33:23
Speaker 1: And the guy who coined the term prosopagnosia is Joaquim Bottomer,
33:29
Speaker 1: and he studied a World War Two veterans who'd been
33:32
Speaker 1: shot in the head and couldn't recognize people any longer.
33:35
Speaker 1: And I had a certain idea and conception of what
33:38
Speaker 1: the World War Two veterans Bottomer was studying were like
33:42
Speaker 1: until I found out that he was a German neurologist
33:45
Speaker 1: and that he was studying them in like nineteen forty four.
33:47
Speaker 1: So apparently the earliest ones were Nazis, who were the
33:51
Speaker 1: ones who kind of turned the world onto the idea
33:53
Speaker 1: of prazo pagnosia. Oh interest, and that jarring. It's kind
33:58
Speaker 1: of like there was this episode of the Office where
34:00
Speaker 1: Dwight's talking about how his grandfather fought in World War
34:04
Speaker 1: Two and was captured in Hell as a pow, and
34:06
Speaker 1: then he says something at the end that reveals that
34:09
Speaker 1: his grandfather was German. It was a Nazi, And it's
34:12
Speaker 1: just such like a jarring turn because you're just thinking
34:15
Speaker 1: about this greatest generation, you know, person over there, Yeah, yeah,
34:19
Speaker 1: you know, just kicking Germany around in Europe, and all
34:23
Speaker 1: of a sudden, it's not, Well, that's a pretty funny
34:26
Speaker 1: character thing because only Dwight Trute would brag about right,
34:29
Speaker 1: you know, or hold up their Nazi grandfather as a
34:32
Speaker 1: as a wounded veteran. That's funny. It was. It was
34:34
Speaker 1: good character development for sure. So as far as how
34:37
Speaker 1: rare it is, we've talked a little bit about it
34:39
Speaker 1: and said, you know, it's really rare. I've seen some
34:41
Speaker 1: stuff that that it's not as rare as you might think.
34:46
Speaker 1: I think psychology today said two percent of the population
34:49
Speaker 1: or somewhere on that spectrum. Yeah, about one and fifty.
34:52
Speaker 1: And that's not just them. That's pretty widespread that. Yeah,
34:57
Speaker 1: I mean, that's not that rare. But I get the
35:00
Speaker 1: feeling that it's the spectrum side of things where it
35:03
Speaker 1: gets more and more rare to the people that see
35:05
Speaker 1: faces rock. But if you put fifty people in a room,
35:08
Speaker 1: one of those people is going to be thinking who
35:10
Speaker 1: are all these people? Yeah? So um yeah, And I
35:14
Speaker 1: think it does have to do with the spectrum thing,
35:16
Speaker 1: like you're saying too, you know, like there's a lot
35:18
Speaker 1: of people out there who are just not very good
35:20
Speaker 1: at it, but there's just some sort of breakdown, but
35:23
Speaker 1: it's not a full breakdown in one of the processes.
35:26
Speaker 1: The problem is because it is generally rare, and because
35:30
Speaker 1: it is pretty recent that people have just started to
35:32
Speaker 1: understand it. I keep seeing the Oliver Sacks wrote an
35:35
Speaker 1: article which I read is in The New Yorker in
35:38
Speaker 1: twenty ten. I just read it like last night or whatever,
35:41
Speaker 1: but not to say like, oh, I read it way back. Yeah,
35:44
Speaker 1: but I keep seeing that sited is like basically the
35:47
Speaker 1: beginning of spreading awareness of facebindness. It was that recent.
35:51
Speaker 1: So there's plenty of doctors who've had people come to
35:54
Speaker 1: them with prosopagnosia and other agnosias and just had no
35:58
Speaker 1: idea what they were looking at and then probably misdiagnosed them.
36:02
Speaker 1: So they probably misdiagnosed the kid is having a learning
36:04
Speaker 1: disability because they weren't picking up on words that they
36:09
Speaker 1: were reading but they could, you know, hear them just fine,
36:13
Speaker 1: or that they had some sort of problem with their
36:16
Speaker 1: site with prosopagnosia, and so the people were left to
36:19
Speaker 1: kind of, like we talked about, figure out workarounds to
36:23
Speaker 1: kind of make it through life before people understood that
36:26
Speaker 1: there was such a thing as prosopagnosia. Well, they didn't
36:29
Speaker 1: even come up with a really great test for it
36:32
Speaker 1: until two thousand and six when they started using and
36:35
Speaker 1: I think it's still kind of the most widely used test,
36:37
Speaker 1: the Cambridge Face memory test. And this is when they
36:41
Speaker 1: show you faces that it's just faces. There's there's no hair,
36:46
Speaker 1: there's no clothes or anything like that, so no medallions.
36:49
Speaker 1: No medallion's disgust too would be a dead giveaway. So
36:53
Speaker 1: just a face against a black background, only faces, and
36:58
Speaker 1: then on the next screen, it will show you this
37:00
Speaker 1: face along with two other faces, and you're supposed to
37:03
Speaker 1: select the face that you just saw on the slide before.
37:06
Speaker 1: Right the computer shouts who's it right at you every time.
37:09
Speaker 1: It's really jarring. But one of the troubling parts about
37:13
Speaker 1: this test is that they only had white male faces
37:16
Speaker 1: on the test for a long time. I think just
37:19
Speaker 1: this year they finally started featuring women's faces, still only
37:23
Speaker 1: white faces, which I don't know if that was purposeful.
37:27
Speaker 1: I didn't see I looked. I didn't see anything about
37:29
Speaker 1: any ethnic group being more apt to suffer from this,
37:32
Speaker 1: did you No? I don't get it, especially with the
37:36
Speaker 1: new version debuted into twenty twenty two. And the problem
37:39
Speaker 1: with it is is not just because it's not inclusive,
37:43
Speaker 1: it's a flaw on the test. Yeah, because there's something
37:45
Speaker 1: called the other race effect. It's very well documented. Yeah,
37:48
Speaker 1: if you were raised generally among Yeah, if you were
37:51
Speaker 1: raised generally among white people, and you're a white person,
37:53
Speaker 1: you're going to have trouble differentiating people of other ethnic groups.
37:58
Speaker 1: It's just and vice versa. If you're Asian, same thing,
38:01
Speaker 1: if you're a Black, same thing, And if you were
38:04
Speaker 1: raised around a mixed group of ethnicities, you're actually going
38:08
Speaker 1: to be really good at differentiating among those ethnicities. But
38:11
Speaker 1: the thing is most people aren't raised among a bunch
38:13
Speaker 1: of ethnicities, and so if you show someone who is,
38:17
Speaker 1: say black, a bunch of Caucasian faces, it might not
38:20
Speaker 1: be that they're face blind. It might just be the
38:22
Speaker 1: other race effect is coming into into play and that
38:25
Speaker 1: they're being misdiagnosed. Actually, yeah, super interesting. We talked in
38:31
Speaker 1: the Doppelganger episode, which was very recently, about the fusiform gyrus,
38:37
Speaker 1: which is the part of the brain that they have
38:39
Speaker 1: kind of finally figured out is really where face recognition
38:44
Speaker 1: happens kind of full stop. That's where all the action
38:47
Speaker 1: takes place. And I think they even have called it
38:51
Speaker 1: now the fusiform face area. And if you have any
38:55
Speaker 1: sort of damage to the fusiform gyrus, and again this
38:58
Speaker 1: is the more rare kind, and is he acquired or
39:01
Speaker 1: if you have a tumor pressing against it or something
39:03
Speaker 1: like that, then that's probably going to be the cause.
39:07
Speaker 1: It's damage your fusiform gyrus, right, And they found that
39:11
Speaker 1: for congenital patients, it seems that their fusiform gyrus is
39:15
Speaker 1: thicker than someone who doesn't have prosopagnosia. And the theory
39:20
Speaker 1: that I read there was a guy named doctor Joe
39:23
Speaker 1: de Guidas who was a Harvard neuroscientist, and he was
39:27
Speaker 1: on the American Psychology Associations or Psychological Associations Speaking of
39:33
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast, and he was basically saying that the theory
39:38
Speaker 1: is that as you get as you're exposed to more
39:42
Speaker 1: and more faces, your fusiform gyrus just gets rid of
39:47
Speaker 1: like neural connections it doesn't need. It gets so like
39:50
Speaker 1: lean and mean and efficient that a thinner fusiform gyrus
39:54
Speaker 1: is going to be better at recognizing faces than a
39:56
Speaker 1: thicker one. Was that doctor's name really what I think?
40:01
Speaker 1: Joe Degudis Deguttas. Okay, he said the guide us at first,
40:06
Speaker 1: and I was like, that would be really interesting if
40:08
Speaker 1: a doctor had a last name with ITAs at the
40:10
Speaker 1: end of it, right, Okay, de Guttis or goodis it's
40:13
Speaker 1: d e g u t I s let's just call
40:16
Speaker 1: him Joe from now on, doctor Joe. Doctor Joe sounds
40:18
Speaker 1: like a chiropractor. The interesting thing about these UM experiments
40:24
Speaker 1: they've done with the fuse from Gyrus, and that's what
40:25
Speaker 1: we talked about in the Doppelganger EPP was we now
40:29
Speaker 1: have an answer of whether or not we evolved like
40:32
Speaker 1: a very specific function to recognize a face because we
40:37
Speaker 1: have UM that. You know, the theories were out there
40:40
Speaker 1: about like did we recognize like a prey hunting a
40:44
Speaker 1: predator to like recognize different predators, And now we have
40:47
Speaker 1: an answer to that, and that is yes, yeah, so
40:51
Speaker 1: they think that UM. There was like a really large
40:53
Speaker 1: debate going on, Chuck, where it's like, Okay, do we
40:55
Speaker 1: actually have like a section of the brain that just
40:57
Speaker 1: does faces. That seems unlikely. Instead, the opposite explanation was
41:03
Speaker 1: that we have an object recognition system, the same thing
41:07
Speaker 1: as recognizing a rock or a car or a toaster,
41:10
Speaker 1: and that faces were just another object, but because they
41:13
Speaker 1: were so vital to our social life and survival, that
41:17
Speaker 1: we were experts at recognizing faces, but really to our
41:20
Speaker 1: brain they were just another object. And the fusiform that
41:24
Speaker 1: the confirmation that the fusiform gyrus just does faces kind
41:28
Speaker 1: of throws that out the window because in the in
41:30
Speaker 1: the experiment that we talked about in the Doppelganger episode,
41:34
Speaker 1: this guy had his his um, the fusiform gyrus electro stimulated,
41:39
Speaker 1: and the researcher's face just morphed. But his tie didn't change.
41:44
Speaker 1: None of the objects in the room, the chairs didn't change,
41:46
Speaker 1: so objects remain the same, just his face changed. So yeah,
41:50
Speaker 1: it basically said, yes, we have a fusiform gyrus. It
41:54
Speaker 1: functions for recognizing faces and that is all it does.
41:58
Speaker 1: That's how important facial recognition is. Well, and imagine in
42:02
Speaker 1: you know, the earliest days of different tuk tuks mulling
42:07
Speaker 1: around the savannah is friend or enemy? You know, it
42:11
Speaker 1: became very important, very quickly to recognize people that have
42:15
Speaker 1: done you wrong or done you right right, exactly for sure.
42:19
Speaker 1: And I think also that probably also supports the other
42:24
Speaker 1: race effect too, where it's like you don't need to
42:27
Speaker 1: differentiate between somebody like an outside or an outgroup. You
42:31
Speaker 1: just need to know like they're part of the outgroup.
42:34
Speaker 1: It's the people in your in group that you need
42:36
Speaker 1: to have more specified social connections with. And yeah, we're
42:42
Speaker 1: just we've socially evolved enough that now we have a
42:45
Speaker 1: problem with this relic, this remnant from our evolutionary past
42:50
Speaker 1: that we still haven't physically evolved out of. We just
42:53
Speaker 1: socially evolved past it. And it's just problematic now. I
42:57
Speaker 1: wonder if there's anything too. And a short stuff on
43:01
Speaker 1: on having a face that's naturally uh the kindest way
43:08
Speaker 1: to say this average, No, naturally adverse looking. What do
43:15
Speaker 1: you mean like scowli like, you know, like resting scowl face.
43:19
Speaker 1: Let's go BRF. I don't know what that is. I'll
43:24
Speaker 1: tell you later, Okay, No, but you know what I
43:26
Speaker 1: mean is is some people have like a their resting
43:30
Speaker 1: look is just not inviting. Let's just say, and I
43:33
Speaker 1: don't mean any not attractive or not at all. I
43:37
Speaker 1: mean like literally like that person isn't doesn't look like
43:40
Speaker 1: someone that would welcome me to come up and say hello. Right,
43:43
Speaker 1: they look angry, and they're like, this is how I
43:44
Speaker 1: always look. I'm sorry. I think we should look into
43:47
Speaker 1: that for a short stuff, because I'm sure that's research
43:49
Speaker 1: into it. Yeah. Yeah, because most of the time when
43:52
Speaker 1: you do talk to them or whatever, they like light up.
43:55
Speaker 1: Their facial expression totally changes. So you hope that it's
43:58
Speaker 1: not just a charade, that they're just their faces their
44:03
Speaker 1: normal resting faces just happens to look like that they're
44:06
Speaker 1: not mad all the time. Who knows, let's get to
44:08
Speaker 1: the bottom of it. As far as animals go. If
44:10
Speaker 1: you're wondering kind of to put a cherry on top
44:12
Speaker 1: of this thing, there has been research that have shown
44:17
Speaker 1: that recognizing faces in maccaques has been detected maccaque monkeys,
44:24
Speaker 1: so it's been around longer than we have, and that
44:26
Speaker 1: they've found that other non primates like are good at
44:29
Speaker 1: this sheep. Apparently you're really good. I don't know if
44:32
Speaker 1: that transfers to goats are across the street. Neighborhoodn't have
44:35
Speaker 1: goats any longer, which is very sad, but I feel
44:39
Speaker 1: like those goats or maybe they just recognized us as
44:43
Speaker 1: the people coming across from that house, but we would
44:46
Speaker 1: always bring them food scraps and when we walk out
44:50
Speaker 1: the door, they would come run into the fence and
44:52
Speaker 1: braying and braying. So we never did an experiment where
44:56
Speaker 1: we came from around the corner or something. I'm curious
44:58
Speaker 1: if it was the same with goats with us creepy eyes. Yeah,
45:02
Speaker 1: I wonder too, Or was it like your scent that
45:04
Speaker 1: they were picking up on? What was it you know?
45:06
Speaker 1: Or was it faces? It was probably just us coming
45:08
Speaker 1: out of the house with a bucket of food. Everything right,
45:11
Speaker 1: every other day it would be my guess. So prazo pagnoja. Huh,
45:16
Speaker 1: good one, I think so too. If you have prosopagnoja,
45:20
Speaker 1: please write in and let us know what it's like.
45:22
Speaker 1: And if you didn't realize you had prosopagnoja until you
45:26
Speaker 1: listen to this episode, please also write in and let
45:29
Speaker 1: us know that. And in the meantime, I think it's
45:32
Speaker 1: time for a listener mail. That's right. I'm going to
45:36
Speaker 1: call this a gentle correction or not a correction actually,
45:39
Speaker 1: just a question answered, which we always love. Hey guys
45:43
Speaker 1: live in the high desert of California. I listen to
45:45
Speaker 1: the show whenever I'm in the car on my hour
45:47
Speaker 1: long drive to the LA area. Today's show you mentioned,
45:51
Speaker 1: and this is the one on fake towns. You mentioned
45:54
Speaker 1: how the Boeing plant and Seattle had camouflaged their factory
45:57
Speaker 1: with a fake town on the roof, and you were
45:59
Speaker 1: wrapping it up, and I think one of you said
46:00
Speaker 1: something about wondering if the West Coast was ever bombed,
46:04
Speaker 1: and I think Chuck said no, I don't think so.
46:06
Speaker 1: I was wrong. California was indeed shelled from offshore by
46:10
Speaker 1: a Japanese submarine on February twenty third, nineteen forty two,
46:14
Speaker 1: just north of Galida, a town called Elwood. The submarine
46:19
Speaker 1: took aim at a rich Field oil storage facility and
46:23
Speaker 1: landed between twelve and twenty five rounds, destroying a pumphouse,
46:28
Speaker 1: defended Derek and giving credit or credits due. I first
46:32
Speaker 1: heard about this incident while watching an episode of Huel
46:35
Speaker 1: Houser's California Gold, a show on public television. Casey et
46:40
Speaker 1: out of LA. The pace of the link, if you're interested,
46:44
Speaker 1: could be a good subject of its own. The day
46:46
Speaker 1: California got bombed, and that is from Craig Tim in
46:50
Speaker 1: Rosamond to California. Very nice. Thanks a lot of Craig.
46:54
Speaker 1: That was indeed a gentle question, answered her question, gently
46:58
Speaker 1: answered short. I kind of got her on too. If
47:02
Speaker 1: you want to be like Craig and gently answer one
47:04
Speaker 1: of our questions, or make a correction or just say hi,
47:07
Speaker 1: it does not matter. We're always open to an email
47:10
Speaker 1: from you. You can wrap it up, spank it on
47:12
Speaker 1: the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at
47:14
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
47:20
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
47:24
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
47:27
Speaker 1: favorite shows.