The Human Brain Is Hardwired To Recognize Faces. But What If You Can't?

This episode explores face blindness, a condition where individuals struggle to recognize familiar faces, and dives into the neuroscience behind facial recognition.

1. Face blindness can lead to significant social challenges and personal confusion.
2. The fusiform face area of the brain is crucial for recognizing faces, and its malfunction can lead to prosopagnosia.
3. Sadie Dinkfelder, affected by the condition, experiences faces as fragmented, unlike typical face perception which integrates facial features into a coherent whole.
4. Understanding face blindness can lead to better personal relationships through adapted social interactions and communication methods.
5. The condition is more common than often perceived, affecting millions who may not realize their difficulty with face recognition.

1: Introduction

Sadie Dinkfelder discusses her personal experiences with face blindness and its impact on her life. She recounts a specific incident involving her husband at a grocery store. Sadie Dinkfelder: "And all at once I realized that he was not my husband."

2: The Science of Face Recognition

Exploration of the biological and evolutionary basis for face recognition, including the role of the fusiform face area. Sadie Dinkfelder: "It is astonishing that we have this whole chunk of brain devoted just to face recognition."

3: Personal Impact and Research

Discussion on the broader implications of face blindness and related research findings. Sadie Dinkfelder: "Learning that you're face blind... feels like a missing piece of a puzzle."

1. Educate others about face blindness to foster understanding.
2. Use name tags in social settings to help those with prosopagnosia.
3. Encourage the use of verbal introductions and reminders of relationships.
4. Create environments that consider sensory and recognition needs.
5. Employ technology like facial recognition apps to assist in identifying individuals.

Humans are hardwired to see faces — even in inanimate objects. We have a lima bean-shaped part of our brains dedicated to facial recognition. But this process isn't always straightforward. Science journalist Sadie Dingfelder is one of 10 million Americans who are face blind, or struggle to recognize the faces of people they know. In her new book, Do I Know You? she dives into this, as well as the science of memory and imagination.

People

Sadie Dinkfelder, Emily Kwong, Joseph Dagoudis

Companies

Harvard Medical School, VA Boston Healthcare System

Books

"Do I Know You?" by Sadie Dinkfelder

Guest Name(s):

Sadie Dinkfelder

Content Warnings:

None

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Emily Kwong
You're listening to short wave from NPR.

Sadie Dinkfelder
I see faces everywhere.

In fact, the human brain is hardwired to see them in things that don't have faces at all.

Driving this is the fusiform face area, which is a part of our brain at the back shaped like an almond or a lima bean that sits right behind our ears. And for many people, the process of seeing a face and recognizing who it belongs to is pretty seamless.

Emily Kwong
Sadie DInkFelder, though, always had trouble with this.

Sadie Dinkfelder
And then one day in her late.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Thirties, I was in the grocery store with my husband, and I was following him around, and I noticed he was just suddenly filling our cart with all this junk food, which is very out of character. He's just a food snob.

And so I grabbed some peanut butter out of the cart, and I said, since when do you buy generic? And I just, like, looked at him and he looked back at me, and his face was just this mask of horror.

And all at once I realized that he was not my husband. He was a random husband shaped stranger.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Sadie is a freelance science journalist, and she couldn't shake how strange this grocery store encounter was. She joined a clinical study on something called face blindness, led by Joseph Dagoudis, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston healthcare system.

Sadie Dinkfelder
I expected that when I joined the study, I was going to come out as, like, sort of below average. And then I came out like the worst of the worst. Like, I was really bad.

Emily Kwong
He told you that you had the fusiform face area of a twelve year.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Old and the facial recognition ability of.

Emily Kwong
A, quote, mediocre to below average macaque.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Yeah, yeah, I'm on the monkey level.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Joseph told her she had two types of face blindness, or prosopagnosia, which makes it difficult for people to recognize the faces of those they know.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Now the thing is, though, the word face blindness does confuse people, because when people are trying to illustrate this, they'll make, like, fuzzy faces. And, you know, I see faces just as sharply as anyone else, but they don't hang together in the same way.

Sadie Dinkfelder
In Sadie's case, it was hard for her to tell faces apart and hard for her to recall a rich memory of who someone is.

After she learned this, Sadie kind of laughed off her results.

But pretty quickly after, I started to.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Feel like a burning in my nose about then, and I was like, oh, my God, I'm gonna cry.

I was just mortified, and I just, like, had tears running down my face. But I had glasses, and I just threw on glasses, and I went straight home. I just didn't tell anyone.

Sadie Dinkfelder
But it was information she couldn't run from. She thought about her whole life, the isolation of not recognizing people she knew or forgetting their names, feeling like people didn't want to hang out with her. It all began to click.

Sadie Dinkfelder
All of these long running mysteries suddenly became clearer or had, like, sort of a new bit of evidence to apply to them.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Sadie is one of an estimated 10 million Americans who are face blind, and she has received even more diagnoses since then, among them aphantasia, which makes it hard to form mental images, and severely deficient autobiographical memory, which makes it hard to remember things about her own life.

Sadie Dinkfelder
My memory is very different from neurotypical memories, and I have no ability to do that sort of mental time travel. I have no sensory memories.

Sadie Dinkfelder
So Sadie decided to write down her story, combining memoir with science in a new book called do I know you?

Sadie Dinkfelder
Everything in my life is just a story I may have read. I could have just read it about myself, basically.

And so in some ways, that makes being a writer the perfect job for me.

Sadie Dinkfelder
So today on the show, one writer's journey into the science of sight, memory, and imagination, and how she hopes to awaken those who read her book to consider everyone's point of view. I'm Emily KwONg, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Emily Kwong
Okay, let's get into the science.

Sadie, I want to dive a little deeper into facial recognition, and I have to share with you that, like, I had always taken it for granted.

Why did humans develop this ability to recognize each other?

Sadie Dinkfelder
I mean, it is astonishing that we have this whole chunk of brain devoted just to face recognition.

And scientists have tracked it back to when human faces exploded in variability.

And this seems to be about the same time that proto humans started living in hunter gatherer societies that were called fission fusion, where you might leave your tribe and join another one for a while and then come back to your tribe. And in that sort of very complex society, you have to have the ability to remember faces for long, long periods of time and to recognize them very quickly.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Right. And this ability has to do with the fusiform face area, a part of the brain that recognizes faces, like we said earlier. What does that part of our brain do?

Sadie Dinkfelder
Man, the fusiform face area is fascinating.

So it seems like we're born with a face template that seems to reside in that little almond shape chunk.

Emily Kwong
Yeah.

Sadie Dinkfelder
This is according to scientists who study this, not me personally.

So if you have lights and you shine it on the bellies of, like, pregnant mothers, at about eight months, unborn fetuses will orient and track face shapes.

You're born with this template, and, you know, that's pretty basic. Right.

Emily Kwong
Which would be, like, the two eyes and the mouth, like generic face.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Right, okay, right.

Generic, possible face. And actually, at three months old, babies can distinguish between chimpanzee faces better than adults can.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Wow. Yeah. And you say that by nine months, babies lose that they're good at telling humans apart, but not chimps anymore.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Yes. And so this is all a process of neural pruning, and you actually don't peak in your face recognition skills until your thirties. So it's this very subtle, and it's.

Emily Kwong
Like, happening without anyone even trying.

But if a person has face blindness as you do, what is it like for you when you see a face?

Sadie Dinkfelder
I. You know, I believe it will be hard to ever know this is true or not, but I think I have a qualitatively different experience of looking at faces than people with normal face recognition. Because if you are looking at a face and you have all this information going into it, then I think that probably you are fitting that face onto, like, a internal face template, and you're doing just a better job than I am. And I think this actually goes hand in hand. There's a very famous portrait artist named Chuck Close, who is face blind. He was famous for gritting out faces, just patch by patch by patch, and making these huge scale pictures. And I think that faces seem more fragmented to people who are face blind, because people who are excellent face recognizers really take in the face as a whole. They can do it in one glance. It's amazing. And it turns out that faces are like the file folder for all the biographical information you have about someone. And if you don't have that representation in your memory, then that information will tend to get lost at the bottom of your filing cabinet. So at least for whatever type of face blind I am, I think that it does impair my ability to remember stuff people tell me about themselves. And so I've actually started to take notes, and I think it's really improved a lot of my relationships.

Sadie Dinkfelder
On the science note, what kind of.

Emily Kwong
Research has been done about face blindness?

Sadie Dinkfelder
I mean, it's amazing. There's a metric ton of research on face blindness, but most of it is really very dense neuroscience, because researchers have used what we've learned about face recognition and applied it to all object recognition, which is a huge, interesting, fascinating problem. You know, how do you recognize a chair is a chair, and how do you recognize the letter h is an h and all these things?

But I think that the research that really, I find compelling, it's more about the personal side of face blindness and how it affects people.

I mean, there's something like 10 million Americans who are face blind, and the vast majority of us do not have any idea that we're face blind. Because if you've always been like this, then it's just what you're used to, even if it causes problems. And it's hard to know how much better other people are at it. And so I just really enjoy the research that shows that learning that you're face blind people, this experience of having your life come into focus, it feels like a missing piece of a puzzle.

Emily Kwong
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in addition to having face blindness, you write about some other conditions that are yours. You are stereo blind, which I'm oversimplifying. This is an inability to see depth with both eyes.

Sadie Dinkfelder
And then you also write about having aphantasia, which is this condition that makes.

Emily Kwong
It difficult to imagine or visualize things in your mind.

And what did realizing all of these things in the past few years catapult for you?

Sadie Dinkfelder
I did not realize how many flavors of human consciousness there were.

I spend a lot of time wondering what it's like to be a cat, for instance.

It never occurred to me to also wonder what it's like to be a human, like a different any, like my husband or my best friend people, it just didn't occur to me. I just assumed that their inner lives and perceptions were very similar to my own. And this is a mistake that almost everyone makes. It's like advanced theory of mind, right? Theory of mind is understanding that other people have perspectives and might have different knowledge than you. But knowing that other people have a different way of processing information and awareness of their information processing is just wild. And it's really taught me to be more curious about other people and to be more understanding when people can't do things that I think are easy or vice versa.

Emily Kwong
Yeah. Sadie, it's been such an absolute pleasure talking to you. I'm so looking forward to just your book hitting those shelves and kind of truly opening people's minds up to brains that are different than their own. And your brain's pretty freaking awesome.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Thank you so much. Yours is, too.

Emily Kwong
Oh, thank you.

Sadie Dinkfelder
Sadie Dingfelder's new book, do I know you? Is out now.

This episode was produced and fact checked by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

Emily Kwong
I also have no inner monologue.

Sadie Dinkfelder
You don't?

Emily Kwong
I don't.

Sadie Dinkfelder
That's why we like talking out loud, so we know what we're thinking.

Emily Kwong
It's like a purely impressionistic painting of emotions.

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