IT'S NOT FACE BLINDNESS!
It's prosopagnosia!!! Oh my God! If you say face blindness one more time, I'll kill you.
Ok, I'm done.
The Hour had a little bit on PROSOPAGNOSIA just a minute ago, as if it was just some quirk or interesting new development.
But seriously, this isn't an average disease. And they didn't even pick a very extreme example. This man did seem to at least think he could recognize faces, but really it did seem as though he fixated on distinctive features on a face. (He said that he could have recognized Penelope Cruz from the side because he thought her nose was big.) It was apparently shocking to the woman interviewing him that he was unlikely to recognize his wife's face, but that's what the disease is all about. You can't do faces.
Prosopagnosia is an inability to process a face holistically. Normal peoples (like you and I, I assume) are actually "face experts". Right from the minute we're born, we're hooked on recognizing and processing faces. And it takes us until about age 10 to become complete experts. From there on out, we're seeing faces as a whole, not the sum of its parts. Prosopagnosics will either see the face only as the seperate parts and not be able to combine the parts into a coherent whole, or, in some extreme cases, will not be able to even recognize parts. Some prosopagnosics describe their condition by saying that they see faces the same way any person would see rocks on the beach. You know it's a rock, but you have no way of differentiating one rock from the rest of the rocks without close inspection, which they seem to have an inability to do, or else they have an inability to commit the details to memory.
Alright, now you're a little more enlightened, and I am sufficiently calmed for sleep.
Thank you psychology 2520.
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3 comments:
John Cleese made a documentary a few years ago called "The Human Face," and one of the segments focussed on a guy in America somewhere with a really extreme version of this.
It was way better than The Hour's treatment of it.
And not just because it was John Cleese.
One of these days, I have to sit down and dissect the hour. I do watch it (it's more entertainment than news), but it's like you watching a news shows for people who have ADD. I almost want to reach through the screen and give George some ritalin.
I don't think you guys get it in SJ but it's a paper called the "Dose". Comes out daily in Edmonton (or used to) and it does the same thing as the Hour. It's bite-sized chunks of news, some interesting tit-bits, makes you feel all knowledgeable and cool. After all, it's hip to know the news right? Then when you get right to it I discovered that this free paper is published by the Calgary Herald and the like. The slant is conservative, just like the Hour's is liberal. It's interesting the way one attempts to influence the minds of a target audience.
Just a few random thoughts late in the night. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Cheers
Dups
I have to say, George should have stuck to MuchMusic. His style is much more appropriate for those brief sound-bites.
Anyways, got a blog. Partytime in the city.
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