Radiolab - Strangers in the Mirror

Episode Date: June 16, 2010

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can't recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of ... that's right, faces.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W-N-Y-C.

C. Yes. And N-P-R. You have a good sense of what you want to tell me? Yeah. All right. Hey, I'm Jed. I am Robert.

This is Radio Lab, the podcast. The podcast. Can I just start us off with a moment of appreciation? I'm very excited for what you're going to. and play for us today. Because sometimes, you know, you talk to people on stage, smart people, and you did one recently for the World Science Festival. Yes. And we put it on every so often on the podcast, but we don't do it enough. Well, we're going to do it now. Let's do it. So in just a moment, I'm going to introduce you to two gentlemen who are nothing short of remarkable.

And so we go now to the Dany and Sylvia K. Auditorium at the campus of Hunter College in Manhattan. Wait a second. Just set it up for us a little bit? Like, what are we about to do? Well, so the idea of this World Science Festival evening, there are people who wander around the world who have a problem which is called face blindness. Weirdly, both these men are faceblind. So when they look at a face for 10, 20, 60 minutes, the other guy's face just doesn't get in or stick into their heads.

I chose two people. One of them is Oliver Sacks, our regular. Oliver. He's a neuroscientist. Oliver is faceblind? Oh, boy, is he face blind? He can't recognize faces? Well, you'll see.

The other guy, who we're going to call Chuck. The other guy is one of the greatest portrait artists in the world. He has, as many of you know, for decades now created art, big paintings, a little but usually huge paintings, mostly of faces. Here he is Chuck Close. I thought it would be interesting to bring these two people together, faceblind Oliver, face blind Chuck, and discuss what many people think of as a very rare situation.

Who are you guys again? We don't know who you are either. All right, so the both of you, how long ago did you discover, if indeed that's the right word, that you were unusual in this regard? I think probably when I was high to everyone. Oh, you can't hear? Okay, so tell you what, I'll just stick this thing in front of you and say something.

Say something. That's better. All right. So you missed the first part of the program, but Oliver was saying. So you were in a class with other kids. If you had a friend who was like, you know, a pal, would you take a bit, a beat to know who it was? Yeah. So say Jonathan Miller became a good friend.

He's tall and gangly. He has red hair. And his movements are fluid and evocative and wonderful. But if Jonathan Miller was brought in paramed? and totally straight, would you know it was Jonathan Miller? Do you have to see the hair and the movements? No. When I have got to know someone well, then I will recognize the face.

But it takes a long while. And even then it has to be reinforced, right? You have to keep seeing them. So if you've spent four minutes with the person, and then you walk away and come back, two minutes later, do you know who the person is? Does 20 minutes with the person, time make a difference? I tend to lose it with a minute.

Wait a minute. You? Same problem? Same problem. I can spend an evening talking to someone looking at them across the table and I've seen them the next day I'd have no idea I'd ever seen them. Nor do I remember their name. But when they open their mouth, would you say, oh, that's the one or not even?

No. And a lot of it's context. If they walk into my studio, I figured they've walked into my studio because they're supposed to be there. Then I interview them for a while to find out who they are. are you just trying to subtly find, like, so who is this? Who the hell is this person? Why are they in my studio? Now, in your case, if that person were to suddenly flatten out and work and be still on a page.

Well, everything in my work is determined by my learning disabilities. So face blind, I'm sure I was driven to paint portraits by being face blind. That is, I know now that if I can flatten an image out and scan it the way I work, I can commit it to memory, and I have almost photographic memory for things that are flat. And still? Still, yeah. So being in space and moving around makes the face invisible, fixing it makes the face memorable. You move your head a half an inch to me.

It's a whole new face I've never seen before. Wow. Have you ever not recognized yourself? Yeah, I'm always, well, several times I have started apologizing to large, clumsy, bearded people and realize that it's a mirror. That it's a mirror? It's a mirror. But it's even going to stage further than that.

Fairly recently, I was in a cafe in Chelsea Market with tables outside, and while I was waiting for my food I do what people with beards often do I started to to preen myself and then I realized that my reflection was not doing the same thing and that inside

and that inside there was a man with a beard possibly you who wanted to I wondered why I was sort of, you know, making faces at him. So I may take other people to be myself as well as failing to recognize myself. I was wondering how you result, once you realized that you were preening your beard in front of a bearded man, did you, like, look down?

Yeah, I did look abashed. I often look abashed. Well, now, let me just ask about, is this just a face problem? What about emotional? If you can't see a face, can you ever read sadness, happiness? I don't think I have any trouble reading how someone is feeling. I think I'm actually pretty good at that. You know, the way I work is to make this kind of Brab Dignalian world

in which I make the face into a landscape. And I journey across that landscape like Deliver's Lilliputians, crawling over the face of a giant. not knowing that they were on the face of a giant, but knowing everything about that face. And then what I do is I put all that information together, the kind of nose and nostril, the corners of the mouth, whatever, and I can commit it to memory.

So I know that it's no accident that I was driven to make portraits of people who matter to me. But if the person whose face you can't read, lips are trembling, or if they'll have a downcast look in the eye, or if they're being brave, can you assign emotion to a facet of a face? Yeah. And you two? Well, I...

Look, talk to the mic. Well, I can't paint or whatever, but I think I'm a sense of two emotions, you know, and little things, including little grimaces, which indicate that someone is lying. Now here's a difference, I sense, just to complete this sort of look of what you can and can't do. Oliver can remember, when I ask you about things you've written 22 years ago, a lot of times if you talk to an author

about something they wrote 22 years ago, they give you a sad look of, you know, well, that was a long time ago. But you seem to remember much of what you have learned. You seem to remember very little of what you have learned. Well, let me be gently about that. Let me get that. Like, when you were in high school,

it was time to take the test. You once described to me an all-night bathtub. No, I used a kind of sensory deprivation tank in order to memorize things. And it's very hard for me. I don't know how to add or subtract without using the spots on dominoes of visual system. I still don't know the multiplication tables.

I didn't take algebra, geometry, physics, or chemistry. If the junior college in my hometown had not taken every taxpayer's son or daughter, I could never have gone to college. Wow. So you're a wreck, really. But the coping part of this for both of you has been kind of interesting, because both of you were very, very smart, so you just put your intelligence where you have to.

One of the great quotes I've ever heard is from the great painter Robert Rauschenberg, who was about the most learning disabled dyslexic person I've ever known. And he said, when you're this way, you have to find other venues for your intelligence. You have to prove to your teachers that even though you're not going to be able to spit back the names or dates, that you care about the material. And we have to prove to the people who we see that we care about them, even though we're not going to recognize their faces and maybe remember their names.

So you have to be charming. You have to be a bullshk-er. You have to be fast on your feet and figure out how you're going to explain your way out of the fact that you don't know who they are or remember them. Do you find people calling you like a snob or, I mean, like, what do you mean you don't know me? I'm the host of this dinner party kind of thing.

Yes, usually my assistant cakes will. say to people beforehand, before they come in, don't ask if he remembers you, which he'll say no. To me, she says, don't just say no. Say, I'm awful with faces. I wouldn't recognize my own mother.

But I'm not good at bullshin. I tend to withdraw. You withdraw. So you solve it by going into a corner and not talking to anybody. doesn't solve it, it often makes it worse. But my approach is to be more outgoing, more friendly, whatever, and to try and charm my way through things.

And I also lecture and talk all the time about face blindness and my other problems so that people are aware that I have them and they'll cut me some slack. But you go out like every chance you can, right? And you stay in every chance you can, right? Well, more or less. I don't stay in, but there are other things besides human beings. And when, for example, I first visited Australia, I came back with hundreds of photos and people look through them and said,

yes, but didn't you meet any human beings? Because all my photos were of scenery and plants, where I'm very at home. And I noticed that when you get in the elevator in your apartment, you don't have any idea who the neighbors are, but you do look down, right? Oh, I know they're dogs. So if they were to switch dogs, you'd just be... Well, I wouldn't notice.

But if you see them without the dog, you don't know who they are, right? No idea. No, no. So this charm offensive that you go on, what does that, like, How, if you have no idea who you're talking to, what are the, what are the charm moves? Well, not always as it charming. I didn't recognize a woman I'd lived with for a year. Two years later, and there's no amount of charm that is going to get you through a mistake like that.

Do you just, do you make fun of yourself? Oh, yeah. Self-deprecating humor will cover a great deal. If you laugh at yourself, you're giving permission for other people to see it as less than the most tragic condition. It is funny, you know. It's funny. I wish I didn't have it, but it's funny. Lots of neurological conditions are comic. They can be both awful and comic. And it's important to... Well, there's a gallows humor in rehabilitation hospitals for that very,

reason. What about that's narrowed down the techniques here. Can you sometimes not see the face but see the hair, the ears, the something? Absolutely. If someone has large outsticking ears or hooked nose or a little triangular beard

or the glasses of a particular sort, I'm better at recognizing caricatures than portraits. In a caricature, salient features are exaggerated. And for me, it's, to some extent, I have to make an inventory of salient features. You talk about Gulliver and that process. Do you think of what you do as an expression of the situation you find yourself in? Sure. In every way. I mean, I have trouble in a global sense

with the whole. But if you break it down into small enough bite-sized units, incremental units, then I made this big overwhelming problem into thousands of little more solvable problems. I've just found a way to, you know, take my deficits and use them rather than banging my head against the wall. Let me show you Lyle. This is Chuck 15 and then we'll do Chuck 16. So in Chuck 15, it's going to be a person you know named who is Lyle. Wait, now what's happening? What is this right here?

So, Jan, what you should do is you should imagine. a, it's a detailed slide, and what you see is lots of boxes with almost like mirror-like shiny nuggets in each box. Is this when you're looking at a Chuck Close painting really close? Is that what you're describing? Yes, it's a detail, so it's the lower lip and chin of somebody, somebody who he calls Lyle.

When people stand right in front of Lyle's mouth, there's a little bit of confusion. You can't quite read it right away. Well, the closer you get to something, normally the more information you get. But the closer you get to one of mine, the less information you have. But when you step back, these very abstract, flat little cells suddenly turn into a very interesting face.

Well, here's what I don't understand, though. If he's blind to the face, how do you even build it up? Like, don't you have to be able to see the thing that you're building to? If he can fix it, which the photograph does. Oh, he takes a picture first. He takes a picture first. And then what? Then he graphs it, so he makes it into lots of little boxes.

It looks like a giant checkerboard. And then he goes into each checkerboard and he then repaints it. Oh. Magically, when you step away, there is the thing that you can't see. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. So he's able to see the details within those boxes well enough to be able to construct them and then trust that what will emerge as a face.

Yep. And the magical part is not only do you suddenly get the reveal of the face, but with the reveal comes a sense of the person. Okay, so let's go back to the situation. So now, Oliver, you have been losing your depth perception. So he's now go, he takes the world in 3D and puts it into 2D in all these fleshy and interesting ways. You have always been all your life a 3D man. Passionately.

Passionately. What's happening to you now? Well, now I've lost the sight of one eye. everything for me is on a plane and on a flat surface. Does that mean that when you look at art that things that used to bore you now the flat things get better

and spatial things get worse? Well, there has been a paradox and that for me previously until a few months ago the world consisted of solid objects residing in space and with space between them. Now the objects are, as it were, painted on a flat plane,

and I think that the sense of visual composition, which is not a word I ever use, a concept I ever had strongly, I think that is stronger. Unfortunately, I can't paint, but I do, in fact, find myself enjoying paintings more, especially sort of rather flat medieval ones. I partly feel I'm in a sort of 13th century world.

And I'm sitting here with one eye closed, which is what I've done my whole life. Why? Well, because I have double vision if I have both eyes open. And, you know, so I close one eye and I flatten the world out. And I have a much better chance of getting around in it. So you see the wrinkles on this eye. Yeah, yeah, you have. Because it's been closed virtually my entire life.

Oh. By the way, is there any cure for this that, you know, that if you have this, if this facial blindness, Does anyone get cured of it? Not so far as I know. Okay. But, you know, I think it's important to say, and, you know, I portrayed myself as sort of as withdrawn or helpless.

But I think I also have a vivid love of humanity, as Chuck has. But for me, the portraits take the form of narratives, of stories. Yeah. Well, your words paint the most specific portraits of people's lives and I always have identified your characters as vivid a portrait as anything anybody could do in any other art form. And I, you know, you celebrate your connectedness with humanity in a really important way. I mean, it's a way that we can identify with even if it's a problem we don't have. Empathy is the basis of, I think, the mortar.

that holds society together and telling stories in a riveting way that allows us to empathize and care about these people. My grandfather had Tourette syndrome and reading about a character with Tourette Syndrome in one of your books.

I cried through the whole thing. Can I ask about the cause of this condition? You can get face blindness from a stroke, can you get it from a tumor? Yes, yes. or head injury or whatever affects a particular part of the brain, a small area in the visual cortex.

People call it the fusiform jaurus, the fusiform face area. Actually, there are a number of different face areas, and normally these connect up with memories of faces and things. But something which was not recognized until very recently and is still very insufficiently recognized is what Chuck and I have, which has lifelong face blindness and which is often strongly familiar. And there, if you do...

Strongly familial, meaning genetic perhaps? Yes. How widespread is this condition? The two of you have it... The best estimate is that it's fairly severe. I mean, there may well be a symmetrical curve. Chuck and I are in the worst two or three percent,

but probably not the worst one percent. There are people who are far... far worse. So you're going to give me a guess? You think it's like 10% of the world? 1%. The fairly severely affected people are 2% to 3% which is what 6 to 8 million people in this country.

Let's do a test to see whether this audience, let's just see how good or bad you guys are. We're going to do a little fun test of your face and the way it works is that 10 celebrity faces... So here's what's happening. We decided to give the whole audience. audience, a face test. Ten celebrity faces will be flashed on the screen for 15 seconds each.

We took ten very famous celebrities. They included the president of the United States of America, fabulous movie stars from the past and the present. You just put their face up and say, do you recognize them? We put their faces up, but we erased their hair. Huh. Oh, just the face. Only the face.

That's interesting. So imagine like Johnny Depp, but no hair. Take away his hair. The question is, would they recognize? Would you recognize this person? I would think people would recognize. Well, so would I. But when I read out the names, here I am reading out the name.

Number six is Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp. That's what he's like without hair? That's what he's like without hair. People sound surprised. I'm going to ask for a show of hands, all right now. And so then I said, well, I... Please raise your hand if you got any person right, anyone at all.

Almost everybody. Oh, me, me, me, me. Lower your hand if you only got one. or two right. Okay, so now some hands go down. Lower your hand if you only got three right. So now, yeah, we're beginning. Phrasing this in an odd way, only got three right.

Lower your hand if you only got four right. Only is such a funny word. Yeah, it's just a... Yeah, thank you, Chuck. We keep going. Please now, lower your hand if you only got nine right. The remaining hands... Wait, how many hands are up at this?

point. That's six out of like a thousand? Yep. How many, the remaining hands are, I got ten. Could you stand if you got ten, I just like to see who you are? Could the number of people, what? They're all women. Wow. Oh, they're all women, that's interesting.

All right, sit down, sit down, super people. How many people got none right? Could you please rise? Absolutely none. Let's see how they're more. Oh, we're all men? I wanted to know if anyone was just totally blind. And?

About 10 people were totally blind, got none right at all. My wife got none, right? Oh my God. Yeah, my wife. She was amazed. So this is the thing. So the question then becomes, so wow, a lot of people really do have this problem. So there are a lot of people who may be leading lives of embarrassment and partial disability and secrecy.

and shame. I evolved all sorts of coping mechanisms with dyslexia, many of which are now taught to people who have other problems. But there are, unfortunately, no real answers to coping with... Well, you have some. Charmed it out, hide. Yeah, well, I mean, you're not... You're not going to...

lessen the deficit by having a good attitude or trying harder or whatever. It is what it is. I want to thank the World Science Festival to Brian Green and Tracy Day, who run the thing. It comes every spring in New York City, lots of scientists. Boy, does it come. It comes like a comet. Yes. And we over at Radio Lab are the, Chad was there this year. He did, he did, he did animals. Animals. Yes. And like we haven't done that enough. Well, like we don't know faces. But it's the World Science Festival. So we say hello to the world. We say thank you to science. Thank you to festivals. We know how to party with the best of them. And thank you to you for listening. Thank you.

I'm Chad. I'm Robert. See you. Hi, this is Alicia Sunsmo, Radio Lab listener from Grinnell, Iowa. The Radio Lab podcast is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. Thank you. End of message.