Speaking of Psychology - Encore - What is it like to be face blind? With Joe DeGutis, PhD, and Sadie Dingfelder

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

After a lifetime of thinking that she was just a little bit bad at remembering people, Sadie Dingfelder learned that she had prosopagnosia, a disorder more colloquially known as face blindness. Harvard psychologist Joe DeGutis, PhD, who runs the research study that Dingfelder participated in, joins her to discuss how people with face blindness see the world, why it’s such an interesting disorder to study, and promising treatments that his lab is exploring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Speaking of psychology is taking a summer break, so we're rerunning some of our favorite episodes from the past. Back in 2021, I talked to psychologist Joe Degutus and journalist Sadie Dingfelder, author of a new book about what it's like to be faceblind, about what scientists are learning about prosopagnosia or face blindness. We hope you enjoy this episode from the archives. Speaking of psychology, we'll be back with new episodes in late August. Thank you for listening.

Imagine living in a world where everyone looks vaguely familiar, but you never know for certain exactly who anyone is. Your old classmates, your coworkers, your friends, and even your family members, all can appear at first glance to be friendly strangers who seem to know you. That's what life is like for people with prosopagnosia or face blindness. Historically, the disorder was thought to be rare, but more recent research suggests it may affect as many as one in 50 people. Last year, Sadie Dingfelder found out she was one of them. Sadie is a former colleague of mine. She used to be an editor at APA's magazine, and I later hired her

to be editor of our website. After a lifetime of thinking that there was something just a little bit different about her brain, Sadie took part in a study at Harvard Medical School that finally gave her some clarity about her condition. She wrote about the experience for the Washington Post magazine. So what does it like to have prosopagnosia? And what have psychologists and other scientists learned about the causes of face blindness? Can it be treated? If so, how? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. If you enjoy speaking of psychology, the conversation doesn't have to stop when the podcast is over. Get unlimited access to

hundreds of videos about the latest in psychology for just one low price by registering for access to APA's 2020 virtual convention. Start with some of our selected videos featuring psychology's biggest names discussing such topics as COVID-19, racism and stigma. Or let your curiosity take over and use our on-demand library to explore any topic. Go to convention.compa.org. slash podcast. That's convention.a.a.org slash podcast. We actually have two guests today. Joining Sadie and me is Dr. Joseph Dugutis, a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the Boston VA. He studies the neuroscience of face blindness and has developed treatment programs to help those with face blindness improve their ability to recognize faces.

He runs the study that Sadie participated in and was the person who confirmed herself diagnosis. Welcome to speaking of psychology. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Sadie, let's start with the question that I posed in the intro. What is it like to have prosopagnosia? When you look at people, what do you see?

Yeah, well, a lot of people think that faceblind people maybe just see a blur where faces. That's definitely not true. I have good visual acuity. My problem is I just don't remember faces. Like the second I'm looking away from them, they're gone from my memory. And I was kind of astounded to find out that everyone else has like an almost photographic visual memory for faces specifically.

Dr. Degutus, what does the research tell us about why prosopagnosix can't do this thing that other people do so effortlessly, recognizing and remembering faces? Is the problem memory, perception, or perhaps both? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that the research shows right now and our kind of recent results have found kind of two different maybe subtypes. So one, more of a perceptual subtype where you can't tell faces apart that are right in front of you. And then there's also this more of this memory component where, you know, kind of like you were saying in the intro, prosopagnosics can have this vague kind of feeling, but they don't have this kind of rich, robust kind of once they see somebody where they were all this other information about the person comes back to them automatically. And, you know, people are remarkably

good at faces. And I think that this is one of the things that it could be, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, it looks like, you know, the face may be exploded in the genetic kind of variation. And in some ways, I think a lot of, you know, we capitalize on this and we are able to kind of recognize individuals by their faces. And in other species, like for instance, penguins, they don't have quite a, you know, maybe people are like, well, if I were a penguin, I could recognize penguin faces. But their faces don't, they don't vary as much. So the human face is exploded in variability. And, you know, our brains have kind of maybe evolved to capitalize on that. And I think with prosopagnosics, yeah, there's these very subtle deficits that may be accumulations,

and they're not able to capitalize on all this variability. And one of the remarkable things, too, I want to just say is it it's a pretty specific disorder. I think we keep as scientists, we see that these people are, you know, have normal and sometimes above average, like intellectual abilities and other abilities. So it's like one of these developmental disorders that seems pretty, like very specific, you know, in comparison to other developmental disorders. So it seems like this vision and visual memory specific disorder. What's actually happening in brains like Sadie's when they see people's faces?

What have you learned from brain imaging studies about where this disorder originates in the brain? Yeah, so I think one of the things that we're finding is that there's kind of these two perceptual processes. And I know Sadie's results, so I'm not going to totally go into her results. But basically a lot of prosopagnosics have trouble with. putting all the parts of the face together into a complete hole. So this is something we do automatically. You can call it holistic processing or gestalt processing. And it's something that is very fast and automatic. The other thing that we're finding is that a lot of the prosopagnosics have particular trouble with kind of being sensitive to the eye region. So the eyes hold a lot of

information with regard to identity. So that's something that, you know, one of the main mechanisms of like these kind of perceptual deficits are both maybe a combination of these feature, lack of feature sensitivity and then a difficulty with putting the face together into a whole. So that's on the perceptual side of things. And then on the more on the memory side, I kind of, it's kind of this type of memory that we call recollection memory. So recollection memory, again, it's like kind of taking a face and making all these associations with all this other information. And usually when you see a face, all this

extra semantic information, like their name, their job when you last saw them, comes flooding back without any effort. Now, when a prosopagnosic, and I think Sadie can say more about this, sees a face, they don't get this flood of. of information, a lot of times they're met with this kind of vague sense of knowing. And we call that familiarity memory. And sometimes that was kind of coined back in the 80s as the butcher on the bus phenomenon. When you see somebody out of context, let's say you're a butcher or a barista that you frequent, and you can't place who it is.

Now, prosopagnosis, I'd love to hear more of what Sadie says. So this might happen with very, very familiar people. Whereas with people who don't have prosopagnosia, this may just happen with a new acquaintance. Does this happen to you, Sadie? Do you have a butcher on the bus? Oh, yeah. I have a lot of trouble identifying people out of context. But I have a lot of trouble identifying people who are right in their normal context, too.

I was just on the elevator in my apartment building, and this woman was like, oh, hey, Sadie, and I had no idea who she was. We were both wearing masks. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I have no idea who you are. And she's like, oh, I cat sat for you last week. And I was like, oh, cool. So, yeah, she was in my building, and I did not recognize her.

But the masks make it really hard. That has to be tough, not only for people like Sadie, but what happens to, you know, children at various levels of development. I mean, if we're going around wearing masks for the next year or more, Dr. Degoutis, is that going to have any effect on their development, do you think? You know, I don't think we know, but I mean, I think that the face recognition system needs to have a lot of input and a lot of different faces. And actually, they found that some people that grow up in kind of smaller towns, even, you know, may not be as good at face recognition than people who grew up in larger cities that have more exposure.

And there's a little bit, there's some evidence that there may be these kind of critical periods for face recognition where you, you know, maybe you can differentiate all faces. And this is something like related to the other race effect where you may be able to differentiate all faces of all different ethnicities. And then after a while, you kind of, whatever ethnicity you're most exposed to, you get better at that. So there may be these critical periods. I hope, I think it's an interesting question if this is affecting development or if we can kind of rely on, you know, neuroplasticity or the ability for the brain to kind of reorganize and recover. But I do think just seeing, you know, part of the face may disrupt this holistic processing and kind of putting all the face together.

So it could. I wonder if all the kids are on TikTok, right? I wonder if exposure to faces that are flattened on a screen can make up for it. I guess we need research. It's really not fair to ask you, Dr. Deguda, since you're not a developmental psychologist. Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, I think people are still seeing a lot of faces on TV and on the screen. I mean, it could be slightly different than interacting with people in a more kind of face-to-face. or um but um but actually a lot of some of the prosopagnosics kind of have have mentioned that faces seem

flat to them and i guess i just wanted to ask you sadie is that is that something that you i i you know i mean it's hard to kind of have insight into this but you know um do you see faces as being flat do you see them or do you see them as being kind of three-dimensional i have nothing really to compare it to because i see everything is flat because my eyes are not aligned correct So I only use one at a time and do not have binocular vision, which is another thing I kind of discovered as an adult and didn't realize. It was very exciting to figure out why I could never catch a fly ball. It wasn't entirely my fault.

And is that unusual that this non-stereo vision would be associated with face blindness? Yeah. People have found that difficult, you know, like with eye movement kind of issues like stripismus or amblyopia, that prosopagnosics have a higher incidence. Now, people haven't exactly figured out why, but that is something that we've noticed and other labs have noticed. So maybe kind of using your eyes together to create a 3D faces is an important aspect of, you know, face perception and recognition. Some of us, Sadie probably included, learned about face blindness by reading a fascinating essay in 2010 in the New Yorker magazine by the British

neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. He described a life in which he avoided other people and not even recognizing his own face in the mirror. Dr. Degutus, how common is that type of coping? Well, and I think that there's, we kind of see a couple different variants of coping strategies. And some, you know, so one of the things we're looking into is whether prosopagnosics are more like introverted or extroverted, and we didn't find anything there. But I think what some prosopagnosics do is they just go out there in the world and they're nice to everybody. And they're just overwhelmingly smiling and, and, and, you know, in a couple of the prosopagnosics that I studied while I was at the University of California, Berkeley, I just remember seeing them

from like 100 yards away. And they're just beaming a smile and looking around at everybody. And I think that that's something that, I mean, it's probably a lot of work to do that. But I think that's one of the strategies is like you just kind of have pretend like you know everybody until proven otherwise. But I think maybe some other prosopagnosics, you know, feel more anxious about, you know, social settings, interactions. And that might not be for everybody. But I kind of, you know, I defer to Sadie because I know that sometimes. you know, you've mentioned that you might use a little bit of that strategy. Yeah, I definitely, and deeply, like, very friendly to everyone all the time.

And that's totally a coping mechanism because, like, anyone could end up being, like, a good friend. So you don't want to miff or, you know, you don't want to hurt someone's feelings. So you're just like, anyway, this strategy at one time caused me to talk to a woman. who quickly turned out to be a total stranger on the street, and I tricked her into thinking that she knew me. That's great. And I mean, we talked for like five minutes, and then I'm like, okay, got to run. And, like, she looked so confused, and I kind of felt happy to, like, have inflicted my confusion on someone else. But it wasn't very nice.

But it wasn't intentional until I realized. No, Sadie, I remember a few years ago I was walking in front of the building for lunch, and you came up the street. And I said, hey, Sadie, and you stopped and you said, hello, but then you said, oh, I was afraid I might run into some people from work if I walked past here. And I didn't know, and maybe you didn't even know at that time that you had face blindness, but you covered very well. Yeah, well, that's the thing about developmental disabilities is that you just grow up coming up with lots of clever strategies and you have no idea that there's strategies and you just assume everyone else is doing the exact same thing. So I really thought I was like maybe a little bad with faces, but like completely on the normal curve. And then it turns out I am really quite exceptionally bad. And proud of it.

I think there is actually, you know, in our testing of people, there's quite a range. Like some people will say they're really suffering, like that it hurts their employment. opportunities, that it really affects their social lives, that it really creates a lot of social anxiety and difficulties. But then there's other people that maybe have figured out ways to compensate. I think making a very kind of specific context, I know we gave a talk at the Google headquarters, and we had a couple of prosopagnosics there. And they said that they had very specific people they interacted with and they knew where everybody sat and they and they only and so they kind of set up their lives in a way that that would help them recognize people and they

didn't have these situations where they were thrown into a situation where they had to recognize everybody out of context or on the fly or so but I think you know some people you know this is just like an annoyance and other people really can make a big difference in in their life and in socializing. I actually kind of think that it gave me a little bit of a superpower in terms of like since I've been practicing talking to strangers my entire life. As a reporter, it is very easy to like connect with people. And I think a lot of even like professional reporters get anxiety about talking to strangers, just walking up to a stranger and talking to them. And I have no problem doing that because I have been doing that my entire life.

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. Can we talk about treatments? I know, Sadie, you've had some treatments.

And Dr. DeGutis, maybe you can explain some of what you have done and how well these treatments work. Well, I guess the first thing I want to say before, the treatment side of it is that, and this is something that, you know, Sadie, you can talk about because you've written about. But I think that just raising awareness, I think if people know about this, I mean, this is one of these things where you grew up in, You know, when you grow up, you know about how good you are at math and you know how good you are at sports and you know how good you are. But in some ways, like a lot of people, you know, they may kind of think they have a problem with face recognition, but it's not something that is easy. You can say, well, maybe I just don't pay attention or I'm kind of lazy or I don't know. I don't know what it is.

So I guess just raising awareness, having people know if they have this thing. And I think that has allowed people to either, you know, have a better understanding of, of, of. of, you know, oh, I can tell somebody, oh, I have prosopagnosia and this is, and this is what happens. So like, you know, destigmatizing when you miss somebody from and misrecognize somebody or you walk right past them, you're like, hey, sometimes I'm going to just walk right past you. And it's not because I'm aloof and I don't care. I just have prosopagnosia. So that is like a big thing to raise awareness and get the kind of word out.

And I think it really can, has given people a lot of relief and insight into their lives. And yeah, maybe say if you want to talk about that before, and I can, we have training programs. I'll talk, I can talk about that. But I just also want to say to you to chime in about how powerful that has been. Oh, yeah. Like, I mean, it felt like a central mystery in my life was suddenly sort of cleared up. Like I used to be worried that I was very self-centered because I could never remember people's names or. there was something, you know, something like wrong with me at like the spiritual level or something.

And it was really fun just to learn that like my fusiform face area is not working very well. And, you know, it doesn't like reflect poorly on me as a human being. Which is a part of the brain that we haven't really talked about the fusiform face area. Yes. Apparently that's where you recognize faces in your brain. What are the treatments and how do they work? So right now, there's a couple different avenues that people have explored. But one is to do this kind of computer-based training, and that's focused on either kind of like, you know,

matching faces or getting better at kind of being sensitive to the configuration of features. So that's something that there's been maybe four or five studies that have looked at that and showed some benefit. we're also looking into some memory training that targets kind of improving recollection memory, which is trying to take a more effortful approach to, you know, taking a face and just adding all this information and trying to, you know, kind of actually create a narrative around the face and process the face more deeply and make more connections to things like, Oh, how does the face make you feel? How extroverted or introverted is the face?

And these are kind of judgments that Postapagnosics can do. They can kind of say, oh, yeah, this face is attractive, or I think this face is trustworthy. And we're trying to actually have the face information and also these other things like their name and their profession be processed more deeply, making like a story about the face in order to try to get that. That feeling of recollection, that automatic kind of like, oh, okay, that's, that's Sadie. And I recognize her. And I know that she's, you know, here, all this kind of other contextual and semantic information comes back. So another kind of avenue that people have explored is actually oxytocin, which is this kind of neuropeptide that they showed that actually you can, if you squirt a little bit of oxytocin,

nasyl oxytocin that prosopagnosics got better at face recognition temporarily. And it looks like maybe the mechanism is by focusing more on the eye region. But I guess the training is still a little bit at its infancy. It's still one of these things that were, I think what we've proven is that for years and years people thought face recognition was kind of set in stone. And if you damage the face recognition system or it never developed properly, that it was that was that. But I think what we've shown is that it can be, you know, rehabilitated or enhanced. Now, we're still talking about, you know, modest improvements.

So I don't think, I think the things I want to caution against is this is not like a cure. It's definitely an experimental treatment that it works for some people and it doesn't work as well for others. Sadie, have you tried the oxytocin? No, no one's given me oxytocin, but I have totally tried if someone wants to send them over. You got to go back to Harvard. How sticky is the training? Do you have to, is it sort of like going to the gym? Do you have to keep doing it all the time?

Yeah, I mean, I think also, you know, Sadie, you can answer this question, but I think it's something where you do it for, you know, a couple of months and then it usually lasts for, you know, two or three months. And then it kind of, then you kind of go back to the way that you were processing faces before. Sadie, I don't know. What was, what was it like for you when you kind of went through the training and then? It was interesting. I think, yeah, after the, at first, like, it felt like sort of a developed. Like, I felt like, after the training, I was like a little bit better. And then, like, in the weeks following, I kind of got even better. And then it's been like sort of a long decline since then.

Though you've retested me, so you can tell me if that's accurate. But and in terms of like it being a modest improvement, I think that I like, for instance, I recognized a random dude in a coffee shop and for who lives in my building. And I like, I had to ignore him because I didn't feel like talking to him. And I think it might have been like the first time in my life I intentionally ignored someone. So it's not necessarily like something I want to do all the time, so I didn't do any boosters. Well, Dr. Degutus, let me ask you, you published a study where you looked at whether people's self-reports about their face recognition ability matched up with whether they actually had prosopagnosia. What did you find? Do most people with prosopagnosia realize they have it?

And should we be testing kids? Is this something that we should be adding to the standard battery of tests that we give to children? Yeah, so I think that this idea that a lot of people are walking around and they have no idea, they have prosopagnosia, I think there's always in, you know, this I think that we're finding that people may think that they're like, man, I think I'm below average. I think this idea that you have no idea that you have any face recognition deficits is false. So most of our prosopagnosics that come to the lab are. go through the screening. A lot of it, a lot of times they say like, well, I think I'm bad at faces, but then we're like, oh, you're really, really bad. And they're like, oh, I didn't realize I was like in the 0.001 percentile of people. But I think people do become aware of this.

And usually it's around like junior high or high school that people kind of first become aware that this is a thing. And so I think this is, and that's also when these social interactions are really important, and they may have had these kind of salient events in their lives that happened during that time. So I think people do,

they have some insight into their face recognition abilities. But yeah, I think testing children is a great kind of direction that the field needs to go into. It has been tough to kind of get at this because the memory system is developing. Who knows if this is just going to be like, you know, in a few years if this is something that is going to kind of, they're going to grow out of it. I mean, face recognition itself doesn't really peak until your early 30s. But I think there are some challenges with identifying children.

But if we could identify children, that would be great because I think some of the suffering and some of the difficulties that prosopagnosics report in like middle school and high school, it would be really wonderful to try to avoid. I mean, middle school and high school is rough for everybody, but I think it's particularly hard for prosopagnosix. Is there a genetic component to this? Sadie, you were apparently born with this. Are there others in your family who you think maybe have this? Yes, I mean, I think my uncle has faceblindness. He disagrees, but I remember once, I mean, one time we were at Thanksgiving and he said to my brother like, oh, are you Sadie's roommate or something? And Saul's like, no, I'm your one nephew who you've known since I was born.

And Aaron was like, oh, anyway, my uncle was like, oh, yeah, right. So I just think, yeah, I don't know why anyone would be in denial about it. It's a pretty cool disorder to have. We're in such good company. We've got Oliver Sacks. We have what's the chimpanzee researcher? Oh, Jane Goodall. Yeah, Jane Goodall.

Yeah. Yeah, I was really surprised to read about that. I mean, there she was working with all these chimps that you had to recognize. I mean, Sadie, do you recognize your dog? Oh, oh, actually, you're a cat person. Well, I'm also a birdwatcher, right? And so there's not a lot of, I guess I don't have to recognize individual birds, though, very often. They're all little brown birds.

You know, also, the craziest one is Chuck Close, who draws those huge, beautiful portraits. And of course he's obsessed with faces because there's such a puzzle. I think it's really cool that he channeled that through his art. So overall, Sadie, do you think knowing this is what you have has changed your life? You know, yeah, definitely. I wish I'd known as a kid, honestly, because I had so much trouble making friends, and I just assumed it was because I was weird, which isn't incorrect. But if knowing the specifics would have been very helpful because I could have, you know,

maybe I could have, like, used pictures. Later in college, before I knew I was faceblind, I did make flashcards for myself of everyone who lived in my dorm. It didn't actually help that much, though, so I don't know. know. But I do. I think knowing about yourself is always powerful. And it helps you sort of work around your issues and no, not to, well, and then I can just tell people too. I tell people in faceblind all the time. I don't know if they believe me. So sometimes I say, Google it. It's real. Well, Dr. Tagutis, there may be some people listening to this thinking, I have trouble

recognizing faces. I wonder if I might have prosopagnosia. Where should they go to find out? Yeah. So there's a, I think, I mean, one of the, we just started another study to look at more of these memory problems and also to train memory and focus on memory. That's at faceblind.harvard. And there's also some great resources at faceblind.org. So those would be two kind of good websites to start with. And you can do some self-tests and we can send you some other tests to take and also give you some feedback. So I think like this is something we're trying to get the word out and trying to get, you know, with the pandemic, we're also making everything online So I think we can get a lot of really useful information and do some of these training studies online.

So that would be a recommendation. And are you looking for more subjects for your research? Yeah. Yep. So we're looking for more participants and then also to, you know, we're also happy just to kind of say, oh, here's, you know, here's how I performed. And here's what's kind of happening in my daily life. and we can kind of give you some, I think one of the useful things that we can provide is we've tested a lot of people with face blindness or prosopagnosia. And we can say, oh, yeah, this is, you're right in the middle.

This is what everybody is kind of reports. Or we can also say, oh, you know, in our history of testing a couple of hundred people with face blindness, we've never heard of that. So I think that sometimes is useful to know, like, even if you're a prosopagnosic, am I like, a typical prosopagnosis? Or am I kind of like, you know, a little quirky or different? But I think that that's one of the things I think we've, we've also found that people have enjoyed knowing like a little bit more about like, oh, I report all these experiences or I have this really, you know, my perception is fine, but I just have this memory problem. So I don't, you know, and then we can say, oh, yeah, that's about, you know, 45% of prosopagnosics or, so I think it's been really

useful for people to know that they're not alone. There's a lot of people like them and also to see like, oh yeah, like there's this fits in with a lot of the other things people are experiencing. Yeah, it's so fun to get on the prosopagnosur Facebook group because I feel like it's like a lot of people who had the same childhood as mine and, you know, someone will write like, does anyone else like only make friends with very distinctive looking people? And I was like, oh my God, all my friends had blue hair or, you know, and it's, it's fun to find out you're not alone. It's kind of, it helps with the feeling of isolation living in a world where everyone kind of looks like a stranger. I'm just curious, how did you land on oxytocin as a treatment? So the oxytocin

treatment wasn't our lab that kind of spearhead that. That was Sarah Bate and her colleagues. but oxytocin has kind of been thought of this as this kind of trust neuropeptide that is about you know facilitating social bonds and and things like that and also has it may have a slight dark side to it too where maybe you facilitate in-group bonds but not out-group bonds so that's another conversation but I think that oxytocin has thought of they've looked on on some of these genes that are related to oxytocin. And that's kind of, there's some candidate genes that may be involved in both, you know, autism and prosopagnosia.

So there's a little bit of a higher incidence of prosopagnosa, prosopagnosia, and people with, who are on the autism spectrum. So this is, you know, so I think this idea of, that oxytocin is kind of this social neuropeptide, it may have to do with kind of forming social bonds or, you know, face processing. And that's kind of why they, yeah, so it's also kind of this idea of like trust and maybe engagement with faces. So it's kind of trying to improve attention and engagement with faces was the idea.

Given that it's situated in a physical part of the brain, has anyone looked at a possible surgical intervention? I think the surgical. So yeah, I guess I just to quickly kind of go. over the in the brain I think the brain with faces is so one of the things about why faces are so much so studied in neuroscience is you have you know and this is back in the 90s by Nancy Kenwisher and MIT and others you know across in many different labs they found this there's this little region about the size of the

tip of your pinky that just really responds to faces more than anything other any other kind of visual input and you know So they call it the fusiform face area. Now they've also found that there's this one back a little further in the visual processing stream called the occipital face area. And there may be even subcomponents of the fusiform face area. But it's these kind of modular, it's probably one of the only systems in the brain that is organized in a modular way, meaning like you kind of have these little nodes that do most

of the work. So the interesting thing is all of our prosopagnosis, have these regions. It's not like there are holes there in their brain where you'd think of face area. Their brain regions light up to faces. Now we're finding that their face areas are not as selective, meaning they don't prefer faces over other stimuli and other visual objects as much as someone without prosopagnosia. And we even find that their face areas may be a little thicker,

which means that early in development, your cortex is really thick and actually as you think thinner is is is worse but sometimes in the brain thinner and more dense is kind of how it means that you're making more connections and so we kind of find that some of the um the developmental prosopagnosics have thicker face areas and not as well connected to other brain regions like your hippocampus which is involved in like memory so in these and these anterior temporal lobes which are involved in like retrieving somebody's name and how you know them. So it is, it's this really interesting thing where the, you know, the developmental prosopagnosis we've studied have all of the structures

there. They're just not optimized. They're not as connected. They're not as working as efficiently. They're not as like selective. And so I think like, you know, you brought up a surgical intervention. I think sometimes people have tried to do brain stimulation, non-invasively. So they haven't kind of opened up somebody's skull to do something really invasive. Yeah, that's pretty radical. Yeah, that's pretty radical. But it's actually, and there hasn't been much positive results with the non-invasive brain simulation, but they found that these patients who have, you know, one of the things they wanted to do is figure out is the face area of really, you know, important and,

and necessary for face processing and face recognition. So in this person who had epilepsy, they put electrodes in their face area. And when they stimulated the face area, they reported that as they were looking at somebody's face, it like transmogrified and kind of melted and changed. And so this is really, I mean, it's fascinating. And it really made everybody believe like, oh, this isn't just, you know, like some kind of epiphenomenon. This little brain region is very much at the hub of. what we're doing with faces and face recognition.

And, you know, these epilepsy, this epilepsy patient would report that you just change to somebody else. As soon as they stimulated this brain area, they said, oh, you became somebody else. So I don't know if they're going to try that treatment for prosopagnosia anytime soon, but it's very fascinating. And it really shows how specialized these brain regions are. And also why this is a very kind of, in terms of a developmental disorder, this is a very specialized disorder. A lot of developmental disorders like ADHD or even autism spectrum disorders, like lots of the brain region, like many, many brain regions have been implicated.

With prosopagnosia, it's like we're dealing with these little small, specific, selective areas. And I think that's also from a neuroscience perspective, why it's been so fascinating to understand. And if we can actually improve face recognition, how do these little small nodes change? Are they making more connections? Are they getting thinner? Are they activating in a more selective manner? So this is one of the things that we can use this disorder to help us understand a lot more about what they call neuropasticity, which is kind of how the brain changes with experience.

And so as you can tell, we're pretty excited about this possibility. But again, we're still scratching the surface. This is still the beginning. You know, you don't need brain surgery. All you need is like facial recognition glasses, right? Like the technology already exists. It's being used in people's home security systems. But for privacy reasons and because everyone thinks it's creepy,

They won't put it in glasses. But it's my dream. I wish that, like, if you had a, if you, like, could prove that you were faceblind or something, you could get these, you'd have magic glasses that would tell you who everyone is. And you're, I think that'd be amazing. Okay. That leads me to the last question I want to throw to you, Sadie, which is if you could cure this, would you do so?

Or are you so accustomed to living with face blindness that you couldn't imagine living any other way? Oh, my God. I love to cure it. I mean, I would really like to see what faces look like to everyone who isn't faceblind. I get the feeling that there's actually a qualitative difference. And similarly, I would like to have binocular vision too. Like, I would like to be able to see things in three dimensions. So I think that, I mean, I do think it's been a huge part of my sort of personality growing up,

but I'm 40 or something. I'm 41, I guess. And anyway, and I feel like, you know, I've fully capitalized on my brain. old brain, my brain, and why not try something new now? Well, thank you for joining me today. It's been really interesting. I really enjoyed it. And Sadie, it was great to see you again. It's been a while. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much.

All right. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.spokenof psychology.org or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology all one word at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condihan. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.