A few years ago I wrote a post about my struggles with face recognition. The upshot, if you don't want to click through, is that I score at about the 15th percentile on the quizzes that ask you to recognize famous faces in isolation. I'm not face-blind but I'm definitely face-impaired. Face-wears-thick-glasses-and-is-still-squinting, or something like that.
The NYT has been publishing short documentary videos about people with disabilities. The second one, about stuttering, made a big splash at my workplace, as you might expect, so I was excited to see this next one. And now I am so curious, super-curious, about your reactions.
The only reason I recognized the picture of Oprah they led with is that I've gotten it wrong in multiple face-blindness quizzes. I still don't look at it and say, "Ah, yes, that is Oprah Winfrey." I look at it and say, "Ah, yes, that is the picture I am supposed to recognize as Oprah Winfrey." In the middle of the video there is this little demonstration with faces on a clothesline. I guess all the people with normal face-recognition skills say, "Oh, of course I recognize the right-side-up faces"? I only recognized one of the famous faces, and I guessed but wasn't certain that one of the others was the subject of the documentary.
They talked about this guy as if he were way out at the weak end of the face-recognition continuum, but I have to say: I do most of those same things in an effort to counterbalance my face-recognition struggles. Gait recognition is big for me. I also make a habit of using environmental cues to help me figure out who's who, just like Paul does at choir practice.
When we talked about this before the pandemic, some of you said, "I KNOW ME TOO!!" Tell me what you think about this video -- as I said, I'm so curious about whether this guy is closer to the bottom of the normal range than the filmmaker realized, or whether I'm closer to the "definitely atypical" part of the range than I realized. And if you've never read the Oliver Sacks article about living with serious face-blindness, it's fascinating.
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