Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you're like me, you know this feeling. Maybe you're at a party or you're walking down the street and suddenly, out of a sea of passing faces, one of them lights up looking right at you. This person starts waving, says hello. This person is glad to see you. And you? You have no idea who you're looking at. Recognizing faces is a crucial But although your mind is amazing at identifying your boyfriend or your child in a crowd, there are important limits to this ability. Some of us, like me, are extremely bad at it. Some of us are terrific. Today, we bring you a classic Hidden Brain episode about people on opposite ends of the facial recognition spectrum. We'll also explore how our ability to recognize faces has broad implications in our lives. And then in the second part of today's show, we're going to bring you another look at facial recognition from the Revisionist History podcast. If you're unfamiliar with the show, Revisionist History is bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell's podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. The show has covered everything from what Americans get wrong about guns to how English muffins get their signature nooks and crannies. It turns out that Malcolm, like me, struggles with recognizing faces. His producer, Lucy Sullivan, on the other hand, is exceptionally good at it. And Lucy wanted to find out what's going on, or isn't going on, in our brains when we see someone we know. She also brings us stories about suspected super recognizer, former President Bill Clinton, and how face blindness almost ended a friendship. Stay tuned after today's Hidden Brain to hear this special episode of Revisionist History.

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My name's Alison Young, and I'm a police officer in the Metropolitan Police in London.

She started out several years ago working on response teams in East London. These are the cops who mostly just respond to 911 calls. Then about 3 and a half years into that job, she and a bunch of her fellow officers were invited to take a series of tests at a university.

You get given like 3 or 4 different faces. And you have to memorize those faces.

Then a new screen appears with other faces. These ones are obscured in some way or heavily pixelated. One of the faces you saw earlier might now show up wearing a beard.

So you have to try and work out which one of the faces is the face that you've seen before, and it's that kind of thing.

The test, of course, was measuring how good officers were at recognizing faces. A while later, Alison received her results. She came in second out of all the officers.

And they asked me to come down to Scotland Yard.

Scotland Yard, of course, is the headquarters for London Police. When she got there, she was told she was being added to a new unit they were forming. It was called the Super Recognizer Unit.

Yes, that's what— that's the name that they've given.

Do you feel like a super recognizer?

I don't know. I don't— well, I guess so, but I don't think I'd necessarily say that a lot because it's just the word super, isn't it? It just sounds a bit super. It's just— I don't know. It's just the notion of the word super kind of brings out as if we're some sort of superhero or something like that, whereas that isn't the case.

In other words, don't picture Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Picture instead a bunch of cops sitting in front of computers. Members of the Super Recognizers Unit would be given the faces of criminal suspects and then try, in essence, to play a matching game.

Well, there's a catalog of criminals essentially that are wanted by police. And what they decided to develop was a thing called snapping, which meant that we may not know who that person is, but If I look at this face, number 1 photo on this chart, and then I continue to go through further and further and further through different photos, can I find him in any other photos that he's wanted for? Which then means that we've got him for one offence of, I don't know, theft. We find him for another offence to do with theft, and you end up accruing this one person for around 25 to 30 different crimes.

Alison was also called on to use her facial recognition skills when she was out in the field. In 2015, for example, the Transit Police came to Scotland Yard for help. A 21-year-old woman and 2 girls aged 15 and 16 complained that a man had inappropriately touched them while riding the bus. Transit Police pulled security footage taken from the various buses. From the pictures and the witness accounts, it appeared his modus operandi was to get on the bus with a newspaper. He would sit next to the young woman and then attempt to fondle her under cover of the newspaper.

And they were overtly young in the respect that some of them were in school uniform.

The security footage was grainy. The transit police didn't have an ID on the man. And because he struck at different times on different buses, They didn't know how to track him down.

And they basically had said to us, we need to find this man. It's young girls, it's predatory, et cetera. So myself and my colleague, Detective Sergeant Elliot Porritt, just like did some investigation.

They studied the security videos and eventually they figured out which station the man tended to frequent.

After a lot of investigation, we discovered that he had quite a specific route of generally being around. Camden Town, which is an area in northwest London.

Camden Town is a busy neighborhood. It's heavily populated with lots of shops and tourists and people always milling about. It's perfect, in other words, for someone to blend into the background. Alison and Elliot Porritt knew what they had to do.

So we made our way to Camden Town from Scotland Yard on a Wednesday. I can't remember the exact day, but I know it was a Wednesday.

This was supposed to be just a scouting mission to get a sense of the Camden Town bus station. Alison and her partner decided to look through old security footage in the CCTV room.

So we went to the CCTV bit, which was just behind a clear Perspex glass where people buy their tickets. So it's right by the entrance foyer to the station.

Detective Porritt began talking with the transit security. Alison was looking through the glass at the commuters milling about the station.

I just glanced up and through the crowd, I just saw him. I saw him walk in, pick up a newspaper, and leave, or go to leave. And at which point I, I mean, I screamed because I, I don't know why I did it. I just screamed. I don't know, I can't quite work out why, but I just made quite a loud noise. And just said to Sergeant Porritt, he's outside.

They both stopped what they were doing and rushed to catch up with the man.

But it was quite difficult to get out because we had to go all the way back round, back round to the foyer. So by the time we'd got into the main foyer where he was, we couldn't see him anymore.

They ran out of the station to see if he'd left. They looked left, couldn't see him. They looked right, Alison caught a quick glimpse of a man disappearing around a corner. This fraction of a second was all she needed to recognize her target. The cops started running toward the corner.

And as we turned, we looked just behind the wall. He was there.

The officers approached the man.

As soon as we got up to him, as in face-to-face with him, the pair of us, like myself and Detective Sergeant Porritt, we were 100 million percent certain that this was the exact same gentleman in all the photos. So he was placed in handcuffs immediately, and explained to him what he was being arrested for, et cetera. And it was extremely noticeable that he was very nervous. His mouth just went completely dry, and he just wasn't able to speak.

When we spoke with Alison Young, she was no longer working on the Super Recognizer unit. She had gone on to other detective work. But she said the time she spent on this unusual unit was the first she ever realized she had an above-average ability. The thing is, she's still not sure where the skill comes from.

Yeah. I think my mom was just like, oh, you've got that from me. Modest as ever, my mother. But my mommy is very, very, very good with faces. Very good. We'll be walking just doing some shopping and she'll see someone and go and speak to them and she'll have known them from primary school and she'll remember them. And my mum's, what's she now, 61? And she went to primary school at like 7 or 8 with them and she'll remember them.

So do you think this is genetic or do you think this is learned?

I have no idea. I don't think it's learned. I don't. I don't think you could teach someone I don't think you could teach someone to be able to just do it at all.

Coming up, how common is Alison's skill? Are you a super recognizer? Can you learn to be one? That and more from a scientist who studies how we identify faces. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud— new customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. So the other week I was at the airport, and just like everyone else, I showed my driver's license to get past security. And it occurred to me that I was operating on an assumption that I think is widely shared. I assumed the TSA officer was pretty good at matching my face with the photo on my driver's license. So I asked Mike Burton, he's a professor of psychology at the University of York in the United Kingdom, if that assumption was true.

It's not, although it is a very common assumption. Most of us think we're pretty good at recognizing faces, but when you actually test people out, particularly in the situation where somebody who doesn't know you is checking a photo against you, it turns out people are really bad at this. Interestingly, even professionals are really bad at it. So we did some work with passport officers where we showed that even passport officers find this a very difficult task. And are often inaccurate.

When I showed my ID at the airport last week, Mike, I handed over the ID and I noticed that the officer looked at the ID first and then looked at my face second. And I assumed there must be some trick to this, that it actually is— you're able to make a better connection if you don't actually look at the person's face, that you start with the ID and then look at the face. Is there any truth to that?

No. There's all kinds of techniques that the people who do this professionally use. And what's interesting is they all believe themselves to be performing quite well. But when you test them, just like anybody else, they're actually not very accurate at this.

It's a little terrifying what you're telling me, because you're saying that this thing that we are relying on to keep ourselves safe, to run security systems at airports and other places, that this is a fundamentally bad system?

That is exactly what I'm telling you. I think that what's sort of interesting is that we have come to rely on this, but I think we've come to rely on it for an interesting reason. We are fantastic at recognizing faces, those faces of people we know. We can recognize our family and friends across a huge range of conditions, you know, distances, in bad light, all kinds. But we falsely assume that this means we're quite good at faces in general, and in fact we're not.

Mike can say all this with some degree of confidence because he ran a study to test for it.

So we set up this little experiment where we asked people to match pairs of faces. They just have to say, are these 2 faces the same person or not?

Mike and his colleagues ran this experiment in both the United Kingdom and in Australia. In both countries, they selected some faces that were likely to be well-known locally But unlikely to be known globally.

Yes, we use what we call B-list celebrities. So we check it out beforehand, but we use people who are known very well by the local population. These are people like, you know, newsreaders, local sports people, and they tend to be very well known by the local community, but not by people internationally. What we find then is that when the UK people are matching UK celebrities, they're really good at it. And they're really poor at matching the Australian celebrities, the people that they don't know. When you look at the Australian students looking at these photos, you find exactly the opposite pattern. They're great at matching Australian celebrities and poor at matching UK celebrities. So at this point, we know that there's nothing in the faces themselves that make them easy or hard to match. It's just in the perceptions of the viewers. So far, so good. We know that people are better at matching familiar faces. But what we then ask is, how well do you think other people will do on these faces when we give them the same task? And what you find is that the UK viewers think other people will find the UK faces easier. The Australian viewers think other people will find the Australian photos easier. That can't both be true. It must be that they are falsely generalizing their own knowledge to other people.

You make a very interesting point in the paper, and I was struck by it, which is that in some ways this might be part of a general phenomenon in cognition where we do not fully understand how difficult a task is for someone else to do. And especially when we're good at something, it's very, very difficult for us to anticipate how much harder it could be for somebody else to do the very same task.

That's right. It's— it comes up in a number of areas of psychology. Even something simple like general knowledge. If you happen to have read some books about Napoleon and be knowledgeable about Napoleon, you falsely generalize that and assume that other people know more about Napoleon than they actually do. Of course, we all have our own different areas of specialist knowledge, and people turn out to be rather poor at understanding that and being able to generalize it.

I'm wondering how good you are at facial recognition.

I'm poor. On the tests, I'm just a little below average.

And has doing these tests and studying this, has it, has it sort of changed the way you yourself trust yourself or your ability to recognize faces?

Well, I do now know how poor I am. I certainly would try not to rely on my own ability to do it. But I think that nobody really knew until the last few years just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces, and it's just becoming clear now.

After the break, we talk with someone who, like me, is very bad at recognizing faces. She shares the strategies she's developed to cope in public settings. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Our chronic inability to recognize faces, coupled with our chronic overconfidence in our ability to recognize faces, has big consequences. One place that's especially true is in the criminal justice system, where eyewitness identifications are often central to police investigations. But this issue also shows up in lots of other settings with lower stakes— recognizing colleagues at an office party or a fellow parent at a school meeting. Julie Dorschlag from Washington, D.C. has had this problem for a long time.

I've had a lot of uncomfortable situations forgetting people and have been accused of being a snob. Or racist, or, I mean, everything.

If Alison Young, the cop we heard from earlier, was a super recognizer, you might call Julie face blind. Her whole life, she's been terrible with faces.

When I was in college, I, you know, you're on a campus, you meet a lot of people all the time. And there were people I met for a few minutes at a party or something, a meeting, I don't know. And I'd be on campus, small campus, walking, and I'd walk past them. Didn't think anything of it. Just smile and keep going. And they were offended. I've heard over time people were offended. I got this little reputation of being this snobby person because I didn't greet everybody that I met, or, how are you doing? Or so. And I normally would if I knew them, or I thought I knew them.

Julie's struggles followed her as she left college and entered the working world.

I worked for an architecture firm in Philadelphia, and we had to go to a meeting. And I swore after going into the meeting and then coming back, going back into the meeting room, I talked to this guy as if I knew him. He happened to be African American, and I was talking to him. He's like, I'm not that man. I said, oh, I'm sorry, I could have sworn. He's like, oh, okay. So it became that. And it's not people of just color or different ethnicity.

What do you do about it?

I apologize profusely, and usually the people just walk away from me. So I just stop. I just feel embarrassed. I'm just used to being embarrassed.

Research suggests, by the way, that people are worse at recognizing faces of people from unfamiliar groups. Many Americans are worse at recognizing the face of someone from a different race than a face of someone from their own race. Now what makes Julie's dilemma especially acute is her husband, Marty.

When I look at somebody, I never forget their face. If I spend about 30 seconds Looking at somebody, I will remember their face for years and years and years.

Marty Dorschlag, Julie's husband, is a super recognizer. For years, Julie's been keenly aware of her husband's superpower. One time they were in Las Vegas sitting down for dinner at a restaurant. Marty glanced up at the waiter.

He's like, oh, you waited on me in Columbus, Ohio in X year. The guy just froze. And then he's like, oh yeah. And I don't know how you put it together. You named the restaurant, the time, the place. And it was probably 15 years before. And he said, yeah, you're right. And so he does that a lot with servers. And, you know, I think people in restaurant industry travel and he remembers them because they're servers. You see their face.

Marty's had lots of encounters like this. Like at the Dallas airport, he spotted a man he sat behind at a University of Michigan football game 3 years earlier. Now, you might think that with this gift, Marty could at least be Julie's crutch. But it doesn't always work out like that.

If we're in a place, I'll always— sometimes, and I'll whisper in the back of her ear, that's Jim, you know, who works at so-and-so.

Well, sometimes he doesn't catch me in time. I think we were at one of your friend's apartments. A guy came in, and I went up and hugged him and said, oh, it's so good to see you again. And Marty's friend leaned over and said, why is Julie hugging the caterer? So, yeah.

I remember that too.

And I—

because they thought that was funny.

But I saw it coming too. I saw Julie approaching the guy, and I said to my friend, I said, watch, she's gonna think that's your roommate. Because they look sort of— they looked— I mean, they had the same color hair, I think, or something, and they were the same size. And I said to him, here it comes, watch. And sure enough, she did it. It was—

But I touched him, I hugged him. So that goes into another— you have to be careful.

Julie's cringeworthy ordeals hit close to home. Recently, I was watching a play. The lead actor looked familiar. I stared at his face for the better part of 90 minutes, but it took me until after the play was over to realize this was a colleague of mine from NPR. I'd be absolutely terrible as a TSA agent. And it got me wondering, are there any solutions here? Julie's picked a simple one.

I don't approach people with as much joie de vivre. I don't touch them until I'm sure they want to be touched and/or that I know them. And also, I sort of create this verbal cue for them to tell me why I know them. So if I shake their hand, I'll say, oh, right, um, do I know you from somewhere? And they're like— if they say, I don't think so, I said, okay, you just looked a little familiar. I'd rather err on that side. than not knowing them. And if they finish the sentence, I said, yes, that's right. Good to see you again. But I don't use again until I know that they've filled in the blank.

There are going to be outliers among us, people with extraordinary skill at recognizing faces. Some of them end up as security officers or gregarious socialites or politicians. The rest of us are going to keep smiling awkwardly at office parties at people we're supposed to know. It's what happens when you stumble around in the 21st century with a mind that was designed in the Stone Age. After the break, Revisionist History brings us another take on facial recognition and how it colors so many of our perceptions about ourselves and each other. You don't want to miss it. Stay with us. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. Hiring Pro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com/hp. Terms and conditions apply.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. For the rest of today's show, we're bringing you a story from our friends at the Revisionist History Podcast. I'll pass things now to Revisionist History host Malcolm Gladwell.

Hello, hello.

Malcolm Gladwell here. Today I'm in the studio with my producer Lucy Sullivan. Lucy?

Hi, Malcolm.

I understand you have a story for me about a particular misunderstanding.

That is true. We're here because I want to tell you about something I'm calling the Missy Incident.

Oh my goodness!

It totally changed the way that I think about something foundational, and it also reminded me of you.

Of me?

Of you.

Oh my God.

Where are we—

Um, okay. —going?

So it all happened at this coffee shop that I go to all the time.

Can you tell me what the name of the coffee shop is?

Malcolm, I can tell you the name of the coffee shop off mic, but My fellow café-goers did not want me to name it on this podcast because it's that good.

Oh, it's that good?

Yeah, it's so good. And it's the kind of place that's always packed. So you have to be comfortable sitting with a stranger if you want to get a seat. And that's where this all starts. So the person at the center of this, her name is Missy Kurzweil. She was fresh off of maternity leave with her second kid when the incident happened.

I think one of the things that happens when you have a baby and are on maternity leave is, like, you lose a bit of your identity and yourself. You're spending all your time with a newborn who can't talk back to you. And so I was sort of just navigating that transition and wanting human interaction.

So Missy is looking for a place to work outside of her home office, and she finds this coffee shop. On her 3rd morning kind of feeling out this place, is this where she wants to set up camp for her HQ? She sits down at this table, and in walks this guy, and he's like, hey, you mind if I sit here? She says, sure. This is JJ Goode.

So JJ and Missy are sitting down together, and what happens?

Missy's on the phone with her kid's pediatrician, and JJ is sitting there eavesdropping. And, you know, the doctor asks for what's the patient's name, and Missy says, oh, his name's Remy.

And JJ freaked out because he was like, you have a Remy? Because I have a Remy. And then, of course, like, then we were off to the races.

Turns out they both have cats named Sunny. They both are freelancers. He's a cookbook writer. She's also a writer.

So, for me, it was like on many levels, it was just really kind of a special bond instantly.

And I don't know if this is normal for you, but I'm not usually chatting it up with people at the coffee shop.

But these two— and there's nothing romantic going on here?

Nothing romantic. Strictly friends who are just like, wow, we have so much in common.

I think no matter where you're at in your life, meeting someone like JJ feels unusual because he's just so open and so so seemingly genuinely interested in what you have to say and what are all these details about your life.

So Missy is excited. She goes home and she tells her husband, oh my gosh, I've met this great friend and I found this great coffee shop to work. Like, things couldn't be better. And so for the next few days, Missy and JJ sit together, work together, crucially always at this same spot in the front. But one day she comes in and their usual table is taken. So she just heads to a different one in the back.

And maybe an hour after I sat down, I see JJ kind of walk to the back, and he's looking around seemingly for a table. And we make direct eye contact. And I start to say, hey, JJ! But he looks at me and sort of kind of registers it and turns around and walks the other way.

He ghosts her.

He ghosts her. Like, completely. Like, she was like, we made eye contact. I was like, maybe he didn't see me. But no. He saw me. Our eyes locked. I went to wave, he turned around. So now Missy's like, what is going on here? Like, she had just met his wife a couple days before, and she's like, maybe the wife wasn't comfortable with, like— or maybe she's thinking something's going on. Maybe I said something weird to him. Like, she's really, like, spinning her wheels.

She's reeling. She's reeling.

And I went back the next day, sat in the back, and the same thing happened where he walks by, sort of sees me, seemingly, like, we make eye contact. And this time I think I probably was a little bit more reserved because of what had happened the day before. And he turns around and walks the other way again. And now I'm like, okay, I think I might have said something that offended him.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. And since we're talking about misunderstandings, whatever you think is going on in this story right now, I promise you, you've got it wrong.

Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with Long-Winded, and I'm not gonna lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible, so listen to my podcast, won't ya? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. And some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally. Fall asleep. A listen is a listen, even when you're sleeping, and a view is a view, even with your eyes closed. If you dare, and it doesn't take much gumption, Enjoy! Listen to Long-Winded wherever you get your podcasts.

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So Missy is obviously super bummed about this.

You know, I mean, listen, I've been with my husband for a long time, so I haven't been like on the dating scene, but it definitely had an equivalent. Like you put yourself out there and you like are, you know, think that you're connecting with someone, but they're not experiencing that same thing.

She considered trying to find a new place to work, but like I said, the coffee shop is just too good. And so after a few days, she decides, you know what, I'm just gonna go back. I'm gonna ignore the weirdness. And this time, their usual spot in the front is open. So she sits down, and then right on cue, JJ walks in.

And he sees me, and his face lights up, and he's like, Missy, you haven't been here in, like, a week or two!

I've missed you! Where have you been?

And then he sits down, and he's chit-chatting, and he's catching up, and he's asking questions just like Nothing. No time passed.

Like nothing happened?

Like absolutely nothing happened.

Yeah.

And I was so confused. I did not know what to make of that, but I was kind of just relieved that the freeze-out was over.

And so I just went with it and was like, oh, you know, good to see you again.

And I just sort of picked up where we left off, and I didn't say anything.

And it wasn't too long after that that she discovered what was really going on and why it seemed like This new friend was just totally ignoring her.

I'm sitting at a table with JJ, and a woman walks in, super friendly, comes over to JJ and says, hey, JJ! And I think goes to give him a hug and asks him questions about how his kids are. Their conversation lasts just a few minutes, and then she walks away to get a coffee. And he looks at me and he goes, I don't know who that is. And I was like, what? You Seemed like you were friends with her. And he was like, I have this face blindness thing. It gives me a lot of anxiety because I'm probably supposed to know her. And then I think I paused and I said something like, is that why you broke up with me 6 months ago?

And this is the part that made me think of you, Malcolm. Face blindness. Because I've heard that you also might be a little face blind yourself.

Yes. Yes, that's true. This happens to me All the time. I won't remember if— I need to be exposed to a face, a person on multiple occasions before their face becomes meaningful. Or even there, I don't know whether their face is becoming meaningful or that I'm developing so many other ways of recognizing them that I feel on safer ground.

Like, you're not just going to remember someone that you've met once or twice.

No.

In passing?

No. There's no chance that I will. I had— it's actually funny because I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop, and I see— there's a guy who runs the wine shop across the street. His name is Michael. I'd known Michael for years. And I see Michael, or I think it's Michael, and I see a slender man in his 50s, about 5'9 with glasses and a baseball cap across the street from the wine shop, And I think, oh, that's gotta be Michael. And I go, Michael! And the guy looks at me, like, really weird and comes over. And it was like my nightmare. It's like, oh my God, no, it's not. It's just another dude who's in town who looks a lot like Michael. But that was— my system failed.

Uh-huh.

It's very rare for me to risk it like that. But I risked it because I thought if Michael thinks— I had the reverse JJ. If Michael thinks I'm ignoring him, then that's really bad because I go to the wine shop all the time, and I like Michael.

See, it's interesting because this— like, this never happens to me. Like, I'm often on the other side of it being like, all right, I'm just gonna pretend like I don't know this person.

You always remember.

I always remember. And I always remember people who are completely insignificant to me. Like, not in any sort of, like, value judgment way. It's just like, oh, I met you once at my friend's friend's party 4 years ago, and now you are standing next to me in line at Target.

That's so— completely foreign. Yeah.

And this is why, actually, Malcolm, to be honest, like, when I had first heard— because I think I heard from someone in passing before we started working together, like, oh, Malcolm, he's face blind. He has trouble recognizing people. And I was like, okay. Like, yeah, he's face blind. Like, because I was thinking, like, I've never forgotten— I just don't forget people's faces. So I was like, if I were you and I was meeting a million people all the time, and people recognized me from book covers, that would be kind of a disorienting experience. And it would be kind of nice to have an excuse, like, oh, I don't remember you because I'm, like, face blind or whatever. But I just couldn't believe that that was true until I heard this story.

Yeah. No, no, I do. And it makes me feel bad because I— we're in a— I mean, I feel for JJ because it's— you're in this constant state of worry about— that you're gonna be perceived as cold or aloof. And you're not.

Yeah. And so, like, this perception problem is exactly what fascinates me about face blindness. which I've now spent way too many hours learning about after hearing this story of Missy and JJ.

Mm-hmm.

Because I've always thought that being able to recognize someone was about, you know, having a good or a bad memory, whatever that means.

Yeah.

Or just frankly caring enough to remember them. Like, you worry that you might be perceived as cold or aloof if you don't say hi to Michael. Or Missy thought her new friend was ignoring her. I seem to remember way more faces than I want to.

Mm-hmm.

I really wanted to understand what's actually going on in our brains when all of this happens.

After the break, Lucy Sullivan takes us behind the face and into the brain.

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JJ Goode, Missy's friend from the coffee shop, doesn't know exactly when he realized he had a problem with faces. He just kept having these strange experiences. Like this one time when he ran into a woman on the train, and he knew he was supposed to know who she was, but he had no idea.

And we had this conversation where I was like, how is everything? Things are good with me. Like, I didn't mention any— there was no specifics because I wanted to make sure— like, I didn't want it— if you walked in and someone had no idea who you were, you would feel bad about yourself.

JJ said he also realized something was off when he'd watch movies and TV shows. He'd sometimes completely miss a big plot point.

When my wife and I were watching a show, I'll be like, who's that guy? And she's like, it's the main character. He just has a hat on. Like, it's literally Robert De Niro from the other scene. And I was like, ooh, this is kind of strange.

All of this has led to many awkward situations, and it's made JJ very aware of other people's feelings. What happened with Missy still haunts him.

I am afraid that I might have an interaction with someone and I might not recognize them, and I might not give them the attention That makes them feel good.

It's worth noting that JJ himself is easy to spot. He was born with one arm.

Walking around with one arm, you are highly recognizable. It's like, how many one-armed people do you meet? Probably not a lot. So everybody comes into the coffee shop, and if you see me, you probably will recognize me from— as that guy from the coffee shop the next day. But I don't recognize a lot of the people who come in.

A while back, JJ told some friends about these weird moments he'd always had not recognizing people. And they asked if he'd ever heard of face blindness. They said Oliver Sacks, the science writer, had it too. And that's when it clicked for JJ.

So it is a little bit of this stealth disorder. I mean, people only kind of learn they have it often when they are subjected to a whole bunch of new people they have to meet.

This is Dr. Joe Degutis. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, and he studies facial recognition. Dugudis teaches at Harvard Medical School and runs a lab out of the Boston VA Hospital.

We've studied how people become aware that they have this, and often it's a little rocky. It's a little bit like, you know, in school they're like, I just don't pay attention, or I don't care as much about people, or maybe I'm a little bit on the spectrum.

They have all these attributions they can give The thing about people who are quote-unquote face blind is that they're not actually blind. They're not seeing blurs where people's faces are. They can see eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and they can read emotions and tell whether or not someone's attractive the same way we all do. The best estimates I could find suggest that around 3% of the population has some form of face blindness. Sometimes it's the result of a traumatic brain injury, but some people are just born with it. Scientists think it could be genetic, or that the network in the brain that recognizes faces just doesn't develop normally. But for most of us, a face is the trigger that calls up all the information we know about a person.

If you see somebody's face, it quickly triggers the retrieval of all this other information about them, like, you know, who they are, how you know them, all these other details about the person. So it has this kind of privileged role in terms of getting all this other information out.

The clinical term for face blindness is prosopagnosia. An agnosia is an inability to recognize something. Prosopagnosia uses the Greek word for face, prosopo, which also happens to be the Greek word for person. So much of who we are is wrapped up in this one part of our bodies. I want you to stop for a second. Think about your mom or your best friend or your kid. You're not picturing their elbows, are you? I mean, maybe you are. Crazier things have happened. My point is, for most of us, it's almost impossible to decouple who someone is from their face.

It's something that is also very special about humans.

This special thing that Degoutis is talking about here has to do with our brains. We have a specific network that's just for recognizing faces. And it functions unlike any other kind of cognition.

So when I recognize a chair, I'm like, oh, okay, it has something to sit on, has some legs, and boom, it's a chair. You're recognizing things at this functional level, which is like, okay, how do I interact with this thing? You know, usually you can do it part by part. One of the things that we do with faces more than any other like, visual object is you process it as a gestalt, as a whole. Because we have to kind of recognize them and not just like, okay, that's a face, that's a face. We have to be like, okay, that's my friend. Oh, that's not— that's— oh, boy, that's the person at work who I need to avoid. And so it's like, I think that the individuation demands of faces maybe are why we kind of had this specialized system to process faces.

Frogs use sound. Birds use smell, and we humans love this one cluster of features sitting on top of our necks. We are social animals, and researchers think that's part of why humans developed this special recognition network in our brains— because it served us. Faces have evolved to look really different from person to person, more so than any other body part. Scientists at UC Berkeley think that this had an evolutionary purpose. It helped us socialize. Not only was it beneficial to be recognizable, but also then to be able to recognize others. Humans had to get really good at differentiating friend from foe. And we did get really good at it. Well, most of us anyways. Degoutis told me that the ability to recognize faces is a spectrum.

These are all these kind of internal things that we don't talk about. And we just assume that everybody's kind of like us, right?

And after the break, we're going to the other end of that spectrum to see what it's like for the people who never forget a face: the super recognizers.

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I was 9 years old, and my 4th grade class was invited on a school field trip to the governor's office in Little Rock.

That's Governor Bill Clinton's office, to be exact.

They arranged us all in a semicircle in cross-legged style, and we waited for the man to show up. And typical of politicians, he was around 15 minutes late. He walks out, he sits down, and he immediately turns and he snaps his fingers and points at one of his female staffers and said, you go get my Pepsi. And she took off on a dead run for his inner office to go grab that Pepsi.

Frank was a scrawny 9-year-old boy with feathery blond hair that grew out in all directions. Nerdy kid, always cracking jokes for attention. Frank said that he and his classmates were so excited about meeting the governor.

There was this almost throne-like velvet chair sitting in the middle of the room. And he sits down in it and he crosses his legs and he, you know, just sort of gets himself arranged.

Frank remembers feeling in awe of this man sitting on a throne, barking out Pepsi orders. He said the governor greeted them all and started asking them questions. And then Clinton zeroed in on Frank.

I don't know if I just have one of those faces or what, but for some reason he settled on me and he pointed at me and he said, you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And after witnessing everything I had just seen, the only answer I could come up with was, I want to be you.

Frank said that his teacher looked horrified at this response. He thought he was about to get in trouble like he usually did for cracking jokes.

And then the governor started laughing. And of course, when he starts laughing, his staff joins in. And we all joined in. And it sort of released all the tension in the room.

Clinton moved on from Frank, asked some other kids questions. He lectured them about the importance of eating their vegetables and doing their homework. And then he sent the class on their way. That was that. Okay, so now we're gonna fast forward 13 years later. March of 1997. Clinton is just a few months into his second term as president. And back in his home state of Arkansas, a series of tornadoes have just destroyed the town of Arkadelphia. 25 people were killed. Dozens were injured. 1,200 buildings were leveled. It was a huge disaster. Governor Mike Huckabee declares a state of emergency. FEMA is called in. And a few days after the storm settles and the rebuilding has started, President Clinton visits Arkadelphia.

It's obvious that you all have done a lot of work here in just a couple of days.

Yes, sir.

It's been amazing.

Everybody has really pitched in.

Frank Vaughn is no longer a little boy. He's a 6-foot-1 college student attending Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia. That feathery blonde hair is now closely cropped in the style typical of his fellow members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Frank and his friends heard that the president was in town, so they went to try and see him. Frank said that there were hundreds of people lining the streets of Arkadelphia doing the same.

And honestly, when I saw the entourage coming up the street with the Secret Service agents and the governor was with him, I thought, well, he's going to walk down the middle of the street because there's no way they're going to let him have you know, physical contact with people. He's the president. And I was wrong.

President Clinton, ever the people person, starts making his way into the crowd, shaking hands and taking pictures with kids.

There was a limited, about a 3-block area that we were allowed to stand on from street to street to street. But he literally went up one block shaking hands, turned, went back down the next block shaking hands, turned and went back up the third block. I mean, he spent a good 4 hours just walking these blocks and shaking hands with people.

And then Clinton gets to where Frank and his friends are standing.

He stopped, stuck his hand out, shook my hand, and he looked at me, and he leaned in and he said, do you still want to be me?

Frank said that he almost passed out. There he was, in the middle of a disaster zone in his college town, shaking hands with the President of the United States, who has just recalled a small anecdote from meeting him 13 years earlier, when he was 9 years old and several feet shorter.

The first thought in my mind was, I need to go to church and pray because this is, like, demonic. It was just so shocking. And listen, when I tell this story, I know it's hard to believe. I understand that it seems almost impossible. But if, as we say back home, if I'm lying, I'm dying.

I asked Frank how he thought Clinton could possibly have remembered him.

Some people are just like that, I guess. It's little wonder that he was, you know, born in Hope, Arkansas, to a very poor family and ended up being the most powerful man in the world. You don't get there without talent.

People always talk about this mythical charisma Clinton possessed. He dazzled voters on the campaign trail. And believe it or not, there are tons of stories just like Frank's. The comedian John Mulaney has a whole bit in his 2015 comedy special About Clinton's ability to remember people.

I want to tell you one more story before I get out of here about the night I met a guy named Bill Clinton.

Mulaney tells the story of this disagreement between his parents, who went to college with Clinton at Georgetown University, over whether or not Clinton would remember his mom, Ellen. Apparently, he would sometimes walk her home from the library in college. Mulaney talks about his mom dragging him to a campaign event in the '90s. to see if the presidential hopeful still remembered their walks. Here's what happens.

She was swinging me like a snowplow. I was just mowing down fat Chicago Democrats. I pushed past all the reporters.

I pushed past all the photographers.

We pushed past all the Secret Service.

We land at Bill Clinton's feet.

Bill Clinton turns, looks at my mom, and says, hey, Ellen. 'Cause he never forgets a bitch, ever.

Remember, facial recognition abilities are on a spectrum. Researchers are pretty sure it's a normal distribution, with prosopagnosics on the low end. Most of you listening are probably somewhere in the normal range. But there are also these people on the very high end, the super-recognizers, those who never forget a face. Ever. Something that the super recognizers are uniquely good at is being able to identify people even after a lot of time has passed or they've made changes to their appearance. This is something that Bill Clinton is very good at. Now, we can't know for sure, and Bill Clinton has never said anything about this super recognizing ability, but I'd venture to say that he is almost certainly a super recognizer. Dr. Joe Degutis, the neuroscientist, Told me that one of the ways they test facial recognition abilities is by showing people pictures of celebrities when they were kids. The before they were famous test.

Oh, it's a picture of, like, you know, Barack Obama when he was, like, 2 years old. And Super Recognizers can, like, see it. There's this kind of cool extrapolation thing that you can be like, I can see, you know, how that could be a younger version of Barack Obama.

While I was reporting this story, I came across a bunch of tests online. Like the Before They Were Famous one. You can take them to gauge how good or bad you are at recognizing faces. And I kept getting really good scores on them. Suddenly, everything started to make sense. Remember earlier when I was telling Malcolm that I never forget people? That I sometimes feel creepy after recognizing someone in line at Target? I started to suspect that maybe I was one of these super-recognizers. While JJ misses the plot of some movies and TV shows, I get distracted by extras. Like, for instance, when I noticed that a passing character in a 2001 episode of Sex and the City is the guy who— spoiler alert— gets murdered in the first season of the show White Lotus 20 years later. Face-blind people can't find their friends on the street, while I sometimes walk past someone that I recognize as my high school friend's cousin who I've only seen pictures of. In one of our early calls, I told Degoutis about my theory. And being the good scientist he is, he wasn't sold right away.

I mean, maybe you just, like, convinced yourself that you're super and you're not really super.

He needed cold, hard data, not random BuzzFeed quizzes. So I hopped on Zoom with his research assistant, Kayla Kusel, and took a 3-hour battery of tests designed to definitively say whether or not I was a super recognizer. All right, so the next one is called Face Name.

You can go ahead and click on that link.

The test started off super easy. I was breezing through. So they're showing me that same face from, like, different angles, and I would say that is extremely easy. But things got weirder as the hours went on, and I started to get a little stressed. Now I'm getting nervous. I'm like, I need to want to get these right. Which is one of the 6 target faces?

One.

I had to do things like remember jobs and names of people whose faces would flash across the screen really quickly. And at one point, I was matching spiky blobs with other spiky blobs. That one was so hard. Yeah, the Georges is really crazy. Yeah, that, like, made me feel like I took drugs or something. I was like, whoa, what's happening here? Kayla and I wrapped up, and she said they'd get back to me in a few days with my results. I was eager to hear them and unsure of what they would be. By the end, I didn't think I did very well, and I was kind of embarrassed about the whole charade. What if I was just average? A few days later, the verdict was in. Dugudis and I hopped on a Zoom call to go over my results.

I mean, you're kind of the complete package for a super recognizer, so I'm—

Wow.

I feel like— I mean, maybe when I— when you started taking the test, I was a little skeptical, but I think— I think you're— you're right on. I think this is really good.

Okay, I have to admit, I was over the moon at being called the complete package. I said, please, go on.

Actually, looking at your results, you were, like, perfect on 2 of the— on 2 of the diagnostic tests. Like, you didn't get a single item wrong. You also did really well in this very impossible task where we had you, you know, try to learn 60 faces in a very short period of time, and you had to recognize them, like, out of 120 faces.

Oh, that one was so hard.

Yeah. No, you did— I mean, that's the thing. We wanted to kind of push you to see what your limits are, and you do have limits, but you were really— you were really quite good.

Getting my suspicions confirmed was so gratifying. It was cool to know that I have this superpower. Less than 2% of people can say the same. I had to share all of this with Malcolm.

You're like the LeBron James of facial recognition.

He did say I was the complete package, so I will also take LeBron James if you want to call me that. I'm not gonna argue.

My experience of you is dramatically different than your experience of me. I am forced to find alternate means of recognition. What those of us who have impairment in this area do is we're— we get obsessed with all the other possible cues that we can use to identify somebody. And because they're not as reliable as the face, we're always getting into trouble.

Yeah, exactly. This is what JJ Goode, the guy from the coffee shop, told me that he tries to do too.

That's Caitlin with the beautiful chin. This is Daniel. He has bald head. That's how I remember him. Small, bald.

So a couple months ago, I spent the morning with him at the coffee shop, and he was going around introducing me to all of his friends and telling me how he tries to identify them here.

Oh, there she is.

Oh, yeah.

It took me a while to recognize her, but she's got, like, very distinct glasses, which is useful. But she's been talking about changing her glasses, so I'm worried about that.

So he told me that he tries really hard to find these cues, but, you know, it's— it's still hard for him, and he never wants a repeat of the Missy incident.

Mm-hmm.

So his solution is to just treat every person that walks in as if they are his friend.

Everybody who comes in the door, I stare them down because I'm like, I hope— I have to see if I recognize you or know you or not. So I'm staring at them, and they look at me, and they're like, hi? And I'm like, hi! Just in case I know them. And they're like, oh, that guy's friendly.

And that morning I was there, JJ was surrounded by people. Like, you'd think he was the mayor or the owner of this place. I was like, did you tell all these people to show up because you knew I was coming? And he was like, nope. So he really has made all these friends even in spite of the face blindness thing. And I just think that's such a lovely way to live.

That is really beautiful.

JJ and Missy are great friends now, despite the incident. You can find them working and chatting at the coffee shop most days. They get dinner every once in a while, and their spouses and kids have become friends too. But their story could have ended very differently.

Like, our friendship almost ended over this, and it's— this is my nightmare. So this person felt so bad because I was not giving her the right attention that she, like, had a whole, like, crisis. Like, what did I do? I feel so bad. And that's why I'm so weird and extra friendly.

We've all had these experiences where we don't recognize someone right away, or someone doesn't recognize us. It can be embarrassing. and awkward. But the split-second assumptions that we make about why— that they're aloof, or that we said something that offended them, or that maybe we just aren't memorable— might be wrong. Faces matter. But it all comes back to what's in our heads.

Lucy? That is— you are Lucy, right?

Yes, that's me. Yeah, just checking. I changed my shirt, but it's still me.

This, uh, this has been a lot of fun.

This has been great. Thanks, Malcolm.

That was Revisionist History producer Lucy Sullivan and the show's host, Malcolm Gladwell. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Revisionist History. If you like what you heard, you can find more from Malcolm Gladwell and the Revisionist History team wherever you get your podcasts. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to check out our weekly newsletter where we bring you the latest research on human behavior. Each issue also features a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can read it and subscribe at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's news.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Hey, this is Jeff Lewis from Radio Andy Live and Uncensored.

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