Stuff You Should Know - How Face Blindness Works

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

It’s not that the person who can never remember meeting you is snobby or even absent-minded; they may have a fascinating – and often difficult – neurological condition called prosopagnosia, known more commonly as face blindness.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in in this bowl session that we like to call Stuff You Should Know. To shoot in the bowl, shoot in the breeze. That's right. Chewing the facts.

Slinging some facts. Slinging some facts about something that is just downright astounding, if you ask me, Chuck. Yeah. When have we talked about this? Oh, buddy. We talked about it in, I think, the doppelganger episode. I feel like also in the days of yore, we hit it at some point briefly.

Sure. Actually, can you transplant a head? No, jeez. I'm kidding. This is digging deep. I don't know if it was in that one or not, it could have been, but yeah, we've definitely talked about it. We should say prosopagnosia, which is face blindness, more commonly known, which is a

neurological condition to just kind of dryly define it right out of the gate. Yeah. And what we're not talking about, although as you'll see, it is a condition that does exist on a spectrum, but I think they're saying basically, though, it's not just like, oh, I'm not real good at remembering people's faces. While that can also mean you might have a very low on the spectrum version of prosopagnosia, it's not generally what most people, when they say like, I'm not good with faces, probably don't have it.

It's a very clunky way of saying that it's pretty rare and it doesn't necessarily just have to do with how good you are remembering people when you meet them. That just means you're an a-hole. Right. Which is sad because a lot of people with prosopagnosia get kind of thought of as that because people don't really understand what their condition is. Brad Pitt? Yeah.

It's not, yeah. Supposedly he's self-diagnosed, I guess. Yeah. He has not been fully diagnosed, but he does just from reading like recent interviews with him. It seems like it's probably the deal with him and not just like, hey, I'm busy. But he's, as you'll see, it's a real struggle. It's not just like, oh, I'm not very good with faces.

You may not recognize your family members. If it's severe enough, you may not recognize your own face. Yeah. And more kind of in a day-to-day thing, I saw it described by, I believe it was Sadie Dingfelder, who is a Washington Post writer and also has severe face blindness. She said, I believe it was her, said basically like, you can spend like all day in a meeting, like a boardroom with somebody, like working closely with them the whole time. And then at the end of the day, if you both happen to bump into each other in the lobby

after leaving one another side five minutes before, she would not recognize that person. Yeah. I mean, I will say that I have, it's not a superpower, but I've always been really, really, really good at remembering faces. There's something called super recognizers. I think I might be on that, if that exists on a spectrum, I think I'm on it because I've had some freakishly weird occurrences of remembering faces of people I didn't know at all from years before, like even as a kid, I remember like seeing a guy at Six Flags

one time and then seeing him like a couple of years later. And I think maybe I met him and then somehow got confirmation. It wasn't just me thinking, you know, like, it wasn't a mistake. Like I've always been really good at recognizing faces is what I'm saying. You were like, is it him and then all of a sudden he puts on a jean jacket with the I heart Six Flags patch on the back and you're like, it is. It may have been something like that because as you'll see, the clothes and things can be a way to help you remember people.

For sure. So like you said, the whole thing kind of exists in degrees and a lot of people think that, you know, if you have face blindness, blindness, which is weird that I have trouble saying face blindness too because the clinical name is really difficult to say. If you have face blindness, if somebody knows that it exists and they have kind of a general conception of it, they might think that like you don't see faces, like it's that really creepy twilight zone thing where the sister was missing her mouth, you know, or everyone looks like Robert the doll.

Yeah, kind of like that. But without even eyes or a nose, just a blur or something like that. And apparently there is such a degree of it that if you saw like a picture of a face maybe out of context, like you didn't see it attached to somebody's body or whatever, you would think maybe it was a rock or just some other roundish object that there is like that degree. Apparently that's pretty rare. What's more likely is that you're seeing all the different parts of the face. Your brain's just not putting it together in a cohesive whole like everybody else's

brain does. Right. That's one big part of it for sure. Yeah. And I think what we're going to do, the order we settled on is we're going to kind of talk a lot about it and then maybe toward the end we're going to talk about causes and whether or not it can be fixed and stuff like that. So if that's a cliffhanger, then there you go.

Right. Does that count? It is. It does. There's one other thing we need to point out. There's absolutely nothing wrong with people with prosopagnosis like sight. They can see perfectly fine. Right.

It's that the sensory information that's coming in is not being processed correctly. Right. That's just called farsightedness. Yeah. Myopia. Yeah. Mr. Magoo. Should we talk about, you know, what's the deal with Magoo?

He couldn't see very well. They always joked about this on the podcast 3DM of whether or not Magoo had glasses. Man, now that you think about it, I'm not sure if he had glasses or not. Whatever the answer is, I can't remember. The opposite is kind of what people commonly think. I think he doesn't have glasses. Yeah. So people, when they see people with really thick glasses would say like, oh, a real

Magoo when in fact people with no glasses hurt the Magoo, does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It's kind of like misusing lowman on the totem pole or drink the Kooli. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Do you think about agnosias in general? Yeah.

Because prozopagnosia is a specific kind of a mental disorder that belongs to like a general class of disorders, neurological disorders called agnosias. And they are about as fascinating as it can get. They also reveal a tremendous amount of how our brain works too. Yeah. And it's Greek if you were wondering, basically means absence of knowledge, but medically speaking it means you have some sort of recognition impairment. And it is, you know, and we'll go through these, they're very specific.

Ed helped us put this together. And the reason it's so specific I think is because it has to be, because there are some minute differences in some of these that make a difference, you know? Yeah. For sure. Make a big difference. All right. So I guess we'll start with the three main categories.

Another blindness, which we've talked about before, is a version of an agnosia. Word blindness, which I guess you have with reading the words face blindness. And what we're talking about today, prozopagnosia. But those aren't the three categories. Those are three types of visual. The three main categories are visual, auditory and touch, right? Right. Right.

And visual seems to have the most associated with it. In addition to all those other ones you just mentioned, there's one called aperceptive, which is where you can't differentiate objects. Just like a person can't differentiate a face with prozopagnosia. Like a person with aperceptive visual agnosia. Like you can say, hey, look at that car. And look at that toaster over there. Aren't they really nice to look at?

And they'd be like, I don't really see any difference between those two things that you're pointing out. Now, and I have questions about this. You may not know the answer to. About why a toaster is out on a street with a car. That's it. No. And to be fair, a toaster and car are probably not great examples to use because you take

into consideration, as you'll see if you have any of these disorders, the fact that it's on the street in a driveway or on a counter in a kitchen. But what I want to know is, do they even note the size of something? I don't know. Some of these are so exotic that there's just a handful of cases in the entire history of medicine. I think aproceptive is a little more common, but I don't know exactly how they see it. Because like a pair of glasses on a coffee table or a remote control, like that kind

of thing makes a little more sense. Car and toaster blows my mind. Okay. So I'm just going to go ahead and confess, car and toaster was my example. I'm just trying to get the point across. Okay. I just wonder if it is that severe. I'm sure it can be, especially if all of this exists on a spectrum.

If there's people out there who can look at a picture of a face and think it's a rock, I'm sure there's somebody out there who has aproceptive visual agnosia that says that toaster in that car, same thing to me, buddy. All right. All right. Fair enough. I'm putting money on it. No.

And what we're hoping to do is hear from some people because this is really fascinating. Like you said, there's not a ton of, as we'll see, a lot of people don't come forward because they learn to deal with it. Right. Totally. So associative is another visual one. That's an inability to identify objects, whereas you can see the coffee cup. You can reach out and grab it, but you can't identify its use.

Like I'm holding the thing, but I don't know what the heck you do with it. Right. Exactly. And then there's another one that sounds, I think this deserves its own short stuff, akinotopsia. And it's where you can't perceive motion. So I saw it described as like, if a car's coming at you, it just is like a series of like, it suddenly jumps closer and closer and closer.

You don't see it moving. It's like a series of still images. All of life is like that. Like how if you see somebody like moving towards you under a strobe light, that's what it's like, but no need for the strobe light. So it's like a murder scene in a club, in a movie. Exactly. That's exactly what life is like for people with akinotopsia.

Wow. So when you have your auditory ones, auditory verbal is when you can't recognize a word that you hear. They also call it word deafness for obvious reasons. And then also under auditory is, oh, I had all these earlier. How do you, do you pronounce that G there? I think it's phonagnosia. Phonagnosia.

Okay. That makes sense. I think. That is not being able to recognize a familiar voice and identify that voice. Right. And everything they're saying, but I would be on this recording right now as an often the case wondering who is this guy? Right.

It's kind of like the auditory version of prosopagnosia with voices instead of faces. There's another one that's called tactile agnosia and it's where you can't recognize an object by touch. And I really thought about this and the best I could come up with is that this would be problematic at one of those Halloween parties where they pass around a bowl of spaghetti and tell you it's guts. It'd just be lost on you, but that's about the worst that could come of it from what I can tell.

Okay. Because you can still use the thing and recognize what it's used for in that right? I think so. It's just when you touch it, you don't know what it is. So I'm sure like going to turn off the oven would be really problematic or something like that. But yeah, it's, it's, it just seems like such a limited thing, but I'm sure there's much more problems with it than I can come up with.

If you want to get even rarer, here are some more versions of agnosias, auto, auto-pagnosia, which is when you can't recognize and identify specific body parts of your, of your own body. There's also my favorite, simultaneous agnosia, simultaneous agnosia. Yeah. I think that's it. You got it. Okay. So that one is where you can see all sorts of different stuff.

All the objects, you can identify all the objects in your field of view or in a picture or something, but what they're doing together that forms a cohesive whole, a scene is just totally lost on you. You would see a kid in their pajamas opening a present, there would be a tree that's decorated. There would be like a couple of parents like watching the kid or standing off to the side. You would not put together that this is a scene of like a Christmas morning. Like you just, you just can't put scenes together and I saw it compared to not being able to see the forest from the trees.

Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. That's my favorite one right there. Yeah. All these are so tough and it's not, I think it's something that's easy for people to laugh at. Like if someone said, like, why is there a tree in that living room?

Right. But it's, it's not funny, you know, and especially when it comes to, to the main topic of face blindness, it gets, can be a very debilitating thing. It can be for sure. But astoundingly, humans who have these conditions are really good at figuring out ways to kind of make it through life. Right. They just kind of work around essentially.

And we'll, we'll talk more about that. I say after a break. How about that? Let's do it. I'm Mange Shatikler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find a Skyline drive in the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, now I don't feel at all comfortable making any jokes about this stuff. You really threw the gauntlet down. Why is there a tree in your living room, Josh? That's not funny.

Covered with lights. It's Halloween. It's not funny. It is not funny. It's a little funny, isn't it? I think that one specifically, to not recognize a scene, I think you can get a yuck or two out of that. Okay.

Let's move on. Okay. So I was saying before the break that people with agnosias and in particular prosopagnosia learn to just kind of navigate through life without the advantages that the rest of us just totally take for granted. I say the best way to understand prosopagnosia, I just sounded like Foghorn Leghorn for a second. I'll say the best way is to understand how just people normally perceive faces, right?

Yeah. So this is something that when you're a grownup or whatever, you just sort of, again, you take it for granted that this is something that you've always been able to do, but it's actually a learned process, you develop this over the course of your life. I think they say, you know, and it kind of makes sense, like sort of in your pre-pubescent years around 12, you're really spongy at that age at soaking up faces and getting better, and it just gets better in time. I think we peak in our 30s, and this also makes a lot of sense.

If you grow up in a city, you're better if you're exposed to, you know, a lot of faces than someone who might grow up in a small town seeing the same people over and over. Yeah. And so the whole thing of recognizing a face we figured out, and by we, I mean you and me, Chuck, is that it's a two-step process, and one is that that visual information comes in and it gets processed into a whole. So like we see faces as holes generally, most people do. And a person's face when we're taking it in, it's not necessarily a hole, we're putting

all of these pieces together automatically, instantly, and it's called holistic processing. So you got a face now in your head, and then you run it against the database essentially to find out if it's familiar or not. And all this is taking, like, microseconds to do. And then if it comes up like, yes, this is familiar, then you have what's called a recollection memory, I believe, if I recall correctly. And that is this biographical information that we attach to each person. They figured out that it seems like that is attached to the face, and that that's when

you recognize somebody, if you stop and think about it, you're like, oh yeah, I'm just inundated with this flood of information about that person that I know, they are figuring out it's triggered by the face. So they're finding out that prozopagnosia patients not only can't recognize faces, they can't retain the biographical information that other people can because it seems to be filed away by a person's face. Yeah. And like you said, you pull up that file, and in your mind, what's happening so, so fast

is, you know, crooked nose, cheek scar. I went to high school with that guy, it's Ralph. I saw that guy at Six Flags once. It'd be funny if you actually went to my high school, and that's where I knew him. And Ralph, so let's say, let's take the example of Ralph. You know that Ralph likes long walks on the beach, that Ralph doesn't like cockroaches, he's scared of them. You know that Ralph has a really cool car that you like to ride in sometimes.

Like, you just know this stuff, like you just know it, and it's part of recognition. And again, that's triggered by a face. So people who have prosopagnosia have to kind of make it through the world without that. And so for you and me and people who can easily recognize faces, it's really hard to imagine not being able to do that, but it came up with a really good thought experiment, I think. Is this the apples? Are we there? I think so, sure.

Yeah. And this is kind of like in Memento, you know, the dude in Memento came up with a system. And it's all about developing a system that works. So when you see Ralph, you think you've learned crooked nose, cheek scar on the left face. I know that's my friend. But there's still not that recognition, which I can't imagine how frustrating that must be. But in this case, if you're talking about like apples, you show someone an apple, and

then you put that apple on a coffee table with like 40 apple buddies, and then you say, pick up that apple. And it's, you know, you'd be lost to be very frustrating. But if you were told to do this several times or, you know, given years or whatever, you would eventually develop a system to memorizing how to recognize that apple, which could be right. The most minute little features of the apple from the, the length of the stem to the, to the dent in the top corner that you don't want to eat.

Yeah. And if your entire social life, and in some cases, your own survival was predicated on being able to recognize individual apples, you would figure out a way to do that. And so if you just replace identifying individual apples with identifying faces, that's what people with prozopagnosia have to learn how to do. And they do it, like you said, and it turns out that if you kind of study how prozopagnosiax is a real word from, I've seen it, a ton of places, including people who know what they're talking about, that you'll find that there are a bunch of little cues and mannerisms

and things that, that we have that we're not aware of that really make us individuals beyond just what our faces look like. Yeah. Cause we're literally just talking the face. So if your friend has a purple mohawk, then use that. But like that's a, you want all your friends to have weird hair, you know? You grab onto that with all of your might. That's right.

Don't let go of that mohawk. You can still see the eyes and recognize like eye color or like I said, you know, if your friend has like, you know, broke their nose or they have a scar on their face or things like that, or how big their ears are or how they walk or what they, their mannerisms, mannerisms are huge or obviously things like tattoos or if they, if they have stinky armpits or like there's sure there's a lot of ways you got to get that one right or that could be very embarrassing. But there are a lot of things that we don't need to use, but they're still in our own

memory banks. If you don't have prosopagnosia, but just filter out the face and those are what everyone else with prosopagnosia is using. Right. There's also a lot of reliance on friends and family to be like, oh, here comes Ralph. There you like his car and you'd be like, Ralph, good to see you friend. Can I ride in your car? And Ralph would say, sure, I appreciate you recognizing me.

Of course you can ride in my car. The problem is you're not always around your friends and family. Some people are single and don't live in the same town as their family. Some people's family don't like them. There's all sorts of reasons that you might not be able to rely on prompts all the time. And there's also problems with the strategy of using all sorts of little details to identify people too because people change their hair color. Yeah, Ralph gets a new look and you're in big trouble.

Exactly. Once you enter that business world, that purple mohawk's probably gone. People change their hair color. People change their clothes. It can be really difficult to keep up with that stuff. And so there's other potentially better ways of identifying people and it seems to have to do with basically teaching yourself to memorize the people who are important in your life.

You would choose a select group of people and be like, these are the people I really need to recognize and you would get to studying them, like photographs of them at length. Yeah. Which, you know, that can also be a little tricky because let's say you have a friend with prosopagnosia and you know that this is their strategy and they still don't remember you and you're like, oh, okay, I didn't make that list of extra study. That's fine. Yeah.

Awkward. But no, that is one thing they say. And I think I get the picture that this is sort of a beginning coping method, which is like get to know the people around you and get used to doing that. And then I feel like the circle probably broadens from there once you kind of have your techniques down. Yeah, I would guess so for sure. Another one that I thought was pretty interesting, like a coping skill for people with face blindness

is using conversation skills. Using general small talk. You can kind of create like certain situations with conversation to see how a person reacts. Like if you're like, you know, yeah, right, exactly. So like you can use conversation to figure out who you're talking to. And I also saw that a lot of people with prosopagnosia walk around half pretending like they know everybody so that if they come upon somebody who actually knows them, they can already be primed to be like, yeah, how's it going?

Kind of thing. Yeah. It's like overly friendly, almost. Yes, exactly. That they're all smiles all the time and they're doing that as like a coping mechanism to basically trick people into thinking that they recognize them. And then also they found, at least Sadie Dingfelder has found that if you get people to talk about themselves, if you ask questions, first of all, they're going to love talking to you

because people love talking about themselves. But then secondly, they're going to give out enough biographical information pretty quickly that you're going to know who you're talking to. This is fascinating stuff. Isn't it? Yeah, it's almost like being a really skilled detective slash detective interviewer. Well Sadie Dingfelder attributes her success as a reporter for the Washington Post as being comfortable talking to strangers because she said, everyone's a stranger in my life.

And then also like it really helped her hone her conversation and interviewing skills too. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like sometimes there are these disorders that end up giving you certain superpowers at the same time. For sure. That's a great way to put it, Chuck. If you are someone with prosopagnosia and you were watching a TV show or a movie, that can be problematic from episode to episode because you may literally not know who this

person is on the screen and that could make it very hard. And I know it's like, oh, you're only watching a movie, but that'd be really frustrating if consuming entertainment was there was an added layer of difficulty to that. It's an impossibility from what I can tell. There's this guy named Tim Rymel who wrote a little article about what it's like to live with it. And he was saying like, you just can't, you just stop watching after like 10 minutes because you just lose patience.

It'd be kind of like watching a double feature of happiness and life during wartime. Wait which one was life during wartime? That was the sequel to happiness where he kept the same characters but replaced them with all new actors. I don't think I saw that one. It's really weird to watch. It's really discomforting. I mean, it's already just horrible, like inhumane material to begin with, Todd Saulins and stuff.

But it's just really unsettling to see new people playing the same characters and trying to keep up with who they are. So actually that'd be a really good exercise in what it's like to be a prosopagnosic. I don't know if I would recommend everybody watching happiness and life during wartime. Maybe read a little bit about it first before you watch it. And then if you go ahead and watch it, don't play me. But if you're good with those movies, that would be a pretty good way to be like, this is what it's like to have prosopagnosia.

Yeah. I would imagine for entertainment, consumption, music and reading become even more important. Yeah. And you can imagine how isolating that can be too. And not just like, oh, I can't sit in and talk about TV shows with other people. But it's an isolating condition to be sure. Like the people that have overcome it to the point where they're extroverted and overly friendly like hats off to them, you know?

Yeah. Because a lot of people go the opposite route. They become very introverted and don't like to go out because they become so socially anxious about the shame and embarrassment of not recognizing somebody and how awkward it can be. Especially if that person has no idea what their condition is that they just stop going out. It's just easier to stay home.

And so it can be a really isolating condition. And then also all the stuff we've been talking about, all those coping skills, that is really mentally exhausting. Yeah. Like it's so just natural to us to just recognize somebody by the face that to have to study somebody and remember and memorize pictures of your friends and loved ones, that is a lot of work. So it can be isolating.

It can be exhausting. And then I guess sadly, at least for now, those coping skills are also basically the extent of treatment for prosopagnosia as it currently stands. That's kind of it. It's learn all these strategies to deal with it to whatever extent you're comfortable. And that's about all you can do. It's basically, well, we'll talk a little bit about the permanency of the condition, but it's almost always permanent.

Yeah, let's hold off on that though, because there are a couple of different ways you can get it that we'll get to. But there have been, it feels like the last few decades, there's been a lot more research than there ever was before. There are, of course, previous to the last couple of decades, you may not even, like your doctor probably, and this might still be the case in some cases, your doctor may not even know what the heck is going on. It's that rare.

So nowadays, there are support groups and they're a therapist and people might generally, and that's another reason we're doing this, is it's sort of always like to help get the word out on these rare things. But previous to a couple of decades ago, I can't imagine what it would have been like living in the world. It's probably just a secret that you keep. Yeah, and it was chalked up, Oliver Sacks actually had it, the famed neurologist who Awakenings was based on his work, and he wrote awesome books like The Man Who Mystic is Wife

for a Hat. There you go. And an anthropologist on Mars, I think, was one of his two. He had it like severely, and he just chalked it up to being kind of flighty, kind of absent-minded, to being aloof, and a lot of people just kind of chalk it up to that and just go through life because they weren't aware of it, and he was a neurologist and he wasn't even aware of it. Yeah, good point.

And he had it. Apparently, Jane Goodall, the primatologist, had it, and Chuck Close, the awesome portraitist. Look up his work, I'm sure you've seen it before. He frequently makes giant canvases of faces, close-up of faces, but they're made of little squares of color. And he's really good, but it just kind of alters what the person looks like, and then once you figure out that he has prosopagnosis, you're like, okay, that's really interesting that he dedicated his career to faces, you know?

Yeah, and I'm telling you the Brad Pitt People Magazine article I read, he says that, you know, it's kind of been a thorn in his side where people think he's a jerk or whatever, and he said for a while he was trying to use a strategy of like, you know, because of course you meet way more people when you're Brad Pitt than the average person, just constantly meeting new people because of your job. But he said he used a strategy for a while, like, you know, hey, remind me, like in a really friendly way, like, hey, remind me where we met. And he said sometimes that was even worse, like people will get more offended if you

asked out loud, which is like, that's really the right way to handle that when you don't recognize someone in life, you know, it could be very awkward, but the right way to handle is say, I'm so sorry, like, I know we've met, but who were you again? And you know, it's a tough thing to say, imagine saying that over and over and over in your life. Right. And one of those people who got deeply offended was Shania Twain, I'm guessing. I never thought I'd say this, but poor Brad Pitt.

Right. I think another part of it too, that actually makes it a little more difficult on him than the average person is because he's such a celebrity, he's put up on a pedestal. And so people, him not recognizing people makes him, he's already primed to be viewed as arrogant or, you know, thinks he's above everybody else. Yeah. And then if you combine his condition with that, I would guess it's harder on him than most people.

Yeah. One of the ways to do this is that when someone is famous and they do recognize, you know, the craft service person or the guy who parks their car, like people make a really big deal out of that. Like, he's such a good dude. He, I parked this guy's car like three times a year and he remembered me every time. That ends up to be like a legend passed around on Reddit. Right.

Kind of thing. Exactly. So you want to take our second break and come back and talk about diagnosing prozopagnosia and then what's going on in the brain? Yes, please. Want to learn about a terrasaur and a colostaridactyl? How to take a perfect boob with all about fractals? Genghis Khan.

A till of the hunt. The Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explosives. Chugs. And jobs. Stuff you should know. No.

No. Word up, Jerry. I'm Mangesha Tickler and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So if you go back in the wayback machine and look at the earliest cases of this, you'll see that some of the first cases that they found were diagnosed because of a brain injury. And that is one of the two ways that you can get this is, and we'll talk about the parts of the brain a sec, but is either by some sort of injury or maybe a tumor pressing on this part of the brain.

But what they found is that is far and away the more rare kind and that it's usually something that you're born with. Yeah, the congenital kind, but the acquired kind is so dramatic when you suddenly lose the ability to recognize faces. Those were the first cases that were described. And the guy who coined the term prosopagnosia is Joaquin Bodimer, and he studied a World War II veterans who'd been shot in the head and couldn't recognize people any longer. And I had a certain idea and conception of what the World War II veterans Bodimer was

studying were like until I found out that he was a German neurologist and that he was studying them in like 1944. So apparently the earliest ones were Nazis who were the ones who kind of turned the world onto the idea of prosopagnosia. Oh, that's very interesting. And that jarring, it's kind of like there was this episode of the office where Dwight's talking about how his grandfather fought in World War II and was captured in hell as a POW.

And then he says something at the end that reveals that his grandfather was German. He was a Nazi. And it's just such like a jarring turn because you're just thinking about this greatest generation, you know, person over there, you know, just kicking Germany around in Europe. And all of a sudden it's not as a Nazi. Well, that's a pretty funny character thing because only Dwight Schroet would brag about or hold up their Nazi grandfather as a wounded veteran. That's funny.

It was good character development for sure. So as far as how rare it is, we've talked a little bit about it and said, you know, it's really rare. I've seen some stuff that it's not as rare as you might think. I think psychology today said 2% of the population are somewhere on that spectrum. Yeah, about one in 50. And that's not just them. That's pretty widespread that estimate.

That's not that rare, but I get the feeling that it's the spectrum side of things where it gets more and more rare to the people that see faces rock. But if you put 50 people in a room, one of those people is going to be thinking, who are all these people? So yeah, and I think it does have to do with the spectrum thing, like you're saying too. You know, like there's a lot of people out there who are just not very good at it, but there's just some sort of breakdown, but it's not a full breakdown in one of the processes. The problem is because it is generally rare and because it is pretty recent that people

have just started to understand it. I keep seeing the Oliver Sacks wrote an article, which I read is in the New Yorker in 2010. I just read it like last night or whatever. But not to say like, oh, I read it way back. But I keep seeing that cited as like basically the beginning of spreading awareness of face blindness. It was that recent. So there's plenty of doctors who've had people come to them with prosopagnosia and other

agnosias and just had no idea what they were looking at and then probably misdiagnosed them. So they probably misdiagnosed the kid as having a learning disability because they were picking up on words that they were reading, but they could hear them just fine or that they had some sort of problem with their sight with prosopagnosia. And so the people were left to kind of like we talked about, figure out workarounds to kind of make it through life before people understood that there was such a thing as prosopagnosia.

Well, they didn't even come up with a really great test for it until 2006 when they started using, and I think it's still kind of the most widely used test, the Cambridge face memory test. And this is when they show you faces that it's just faces. There's no, there's no hair, there's no clothes or anything like that. No medallions. No medallions. Disco stew would be a dead giveaway.

So just a face against a black background, only faces. And then on the next screen, it will show you the same face along with two other faces. And you're supposed to select the face that you just saw on the slide before. Right. The computer shouts, who's it at you every time? It's really jarring. One of the troubling parts about this test is that they only had white male faces on the test for a long time.

Right. I think just this year, they finally started featuring women's faces, still only white faces, which I don't know if that was purposeful. I didn't see, I looked, I didn't see anything about any ethnic group being more apt to suffer from this. Did you? No, I don't get it. Especially with the new version debuted in 2022.

And the problem with it is, it's not just because it's not inclusive. It's a flaw in the test because there's something called the other race effect. It's very well documented. Yeah, we talked about that. If you were raised generally among, yeah, if you were raised generally among white people and you're a white person, you're going to have trouble differentiating people of other ethnic groups. It's just, and vice versa.

If you're Asian, same thing. If you're black, same thing. And if you were raised around a mixed group of ethnicities, you're actually going to be really good at differentiating among those ethnicities. But the thing is, is most people aren't raised among a bunch of ethnicities. And so if you show someone who is, say, black, a bunch of Caucasian faces, it might not be that they're face-blind. Right.

It might just be that the other race effect is coming into play and that they're being misdiagnosed actually. Yeah. That's interesting. We talked in the Doppelganger episode, which was very recently about the fusiform gyrus, which is the part of the brain that they have kind of finally figured out is really where face recognition happens, kind of full stop. That's where all the action takes place.

And I think they even have called it now the fusiform face area. And if you have any sort of damage to the fusiform gyrus. And again, the more rare kind is the acquired, or if you have a tumor pressing against it or something like that, then that's probably going to be the cause. It's damaged your fusiform gyrus. Right. And they found that for congenital patients, it seems that their fusiform gyrus is thicker than someone who doesn't have prozopagnosia.

And the theory that I read, there was a guy named Dr. Joe DeGuitis, who was a Harvard neuroscientist and he was on the American Psychology Associations or Psychological Associations Speaking of Psychology podcast. And he was basically saying that the theory is that as you get, as you're exposed to more and more faces, your fusiform gyrus just gets rid of like neural connections that doesn't need. It gets so like lean and mean and efficient that a thinner fusiform gyrus is going to be better at recognizing faces than a thicker one.

Was that Dr.'s name really? What was it? I think Joe DeGuitis. DeGuitis. DeGuitis. Okay. You said DeGuitis at first and I was like, that would be really interesting if a doctor had a last name with itis at the end of it.

Right. Okay. DeGuitis or Guitis. It's D-E-G-U-T-I-S. Let's just call him Joe from now on. Dr. Joe. Dr. Joe. Sounds like a chiropractor.

The interesting thing about these experiments they've done with the fusiform gyrus, and that's what we talked about in the doppelganger app, was we now have an answer of whether or not we evolved like a very specific function to recognize a face because we have that, you know, the theories were out there about like, did we recognize like a prey hunting a predator to like recognize different predators and now we have an answer to that and that is yes. Yeah. So they think that there was like a really large debate going on, Chuck, where it's like,

okay, do we actually have like a section of the brain that just does faces that seems unlikely? Instead, the opposite explanation was that we have an object recognition system, the same thing as recognizing a rock or a car or a toaster, and that faces were just another object, but because they were so vital to our social life and survival that we were experts at recognizing faces, but really to our brain, they were just another object. And the fusiform, the confirmation that the fusiform gyrus just does faces kind of throws that out the window because in the experiment that we talked about in the doppelganger episode,

this guy had his fusiform gyrus electro stimulated and the researchers face just morphed, but his tie didn't change, none of the objects in the room, the chairs didn't change, so objects remain the same, just his face changed. So yeah, it basically said, yes, we have a fusiform gyrus, it functions for recognizing faces and that is all it does. That's how important facial recognition is. Well, and imagine in the earliest days of different took-tooks mulling around the savannah is friend or enemy.

It became very important very quickly to recognize people that have done you wrong or done you right. Right, exactly, for sure. And I think also that probably also supports the other race effect too, where it's like you don't need to differentiate between somebody like an outsider and outgroup, you just need to know like they're part of the outgroup. It's the people in your in-group that you need to have more specified social connections with.

Or just we've socially evolved enough that now we have a problem with this relic, this remnant from our evolutionary past that we still haven't physically evolved out of. We just socially evolved past it and it's just problematic now. I wonder if there's anything too short stuff on having a face that's naturally... That's the kindest way to say this. Average? No, naturally adverse looking. What do you mean?

Like scowly? Like, you know, like resting scowl face. Let's call it. Oh, BRF? I don't know what that is. I'll tell you later. Okay. No, but you know what I mean?

Some people have like their resting look is just not inviting, let's just say. And I don't mean any attractive or not at all. I mean, like literally like that person doesn't look like someone that would welcome me to come up and say hello. Right. They look angry and they're like, this is how I always look, I'm sorry. I think we should look into that for a short stuff because I'm sure there's research into it.

Yeah. Yeah, because most of the time when you do talk to them or whatever, they like light up their facial expression totally changes. So you hope that it's not just a charade that their normal resting faces just happens to look like that, that they're not mad all the time. Yeah. Who knows? Let's get to the bottom of it.

As far as animals go, if you're wondering, kind of to put a cherry on top of this thing, there has been research that has shown that recognizing faces in macaques has been detected, macaque monkeys. So it's been around longer than we have and that they've found that other non-primates like are good at this, sheep apparently are really good. I don't know if that transfers to goats. Our across the street neighbor didn't have goats any longer, which is very sad. But I feel like those goats, or maybe they just recognized us as the people coming across

from that house, but we would always bring them food scraps. And when we walk out the door, they would come run into the fence and bring and bring. So we never did an experiment where we came from around the corner or something. I'm curious if it was the same with goats with those creepy eyes. Yeah. I wonder too, or was it like your scent that they were picking up on? What was it, you know? Or was it faces?

It was probably just us coming out of the house with a bucket of food every other day. Yeah. That would be my guess. So prozopagnosia, huh? Good one. I think so too. If you have prozopagnosia, please write in and let us know what it's like. And if you didn't realize you had prozopagnosia until you listened to this episode, please

also write in and let us know that. And in the meantime, I think it's time for a listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this a gentle correction, or not a correction actually, just a question answered, which we always love. Hey guys, living in the high desert of California, I listened to the show, whenever I'm in the car on my hour long drive to the LA area. Today's show you mentioned, and this is the one on fake towns, you mentioned how the Boeing

plant in Seattle had camouflaged their factory with a fake town on the roof and you were wrapping it up and I think one of you said something about wondering if the West Coast was ever bombed. And I think Chuck said, no, I don't think so. I was wrong. California was indeed shelled from offshore by a Japanese submarine on February 23, 1942, just north of Galita, a town called Elwood. The submarine took aim at a rich field oil storage facility and landed between 12 and

five rounds, destroying a pump house and a derrick. And giving credit where credit is due, I first heard about this incident while watching an episode of Hewlett-Houser's California Gold, a show on public television, Casey E.T. out of LA. I pasted a link if you're interested, it could be a good subject of its own, the day California got bombed. And that is from Craig, Tim, and Rosamund, California. Very nice.

Thanks a lot, Craig. It would be the gentle question answered, or a question gently answered. Sure, I kind of got it wrong, too. If you want to be like Craig and gently answer one of our questions or make a correction or just say hi, it does not matter, we're always open to an email from you. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas

are about to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.