Lucy Sullivan
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
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.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
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.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
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.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
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 in to the coffee shop, and if you see me, you probably will recognize me as that guy from the coffee shop the next day. But I don't recognize a lot of the people who come in.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
That's Caitlin with the beautiful chin. This is Daniel. He has bald head. That's how I remember him. Small bald head.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Oh, there she is. 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.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
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, well, that guy's friendly.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Like, our friendship almost ended over this, and 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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. One morning, back in 1984, a little kid named Frank Vaughn was about to have a very exciting day of school.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Frank was a scrawny nine-year-old boy with feathery blonde 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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 going to fast forward 13 years later, March of 1997. Clinton is just a few months into his second term as president.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
So Missy is looking for a place to work outside of her home office and she finds this coffee shop. On her third 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 J.J. Goode.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Frank Vaughn is no longer a little boy. He's a 6'1 college student attending Wachita 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Frank said that there were hundreds of people lining the streets of Arkadelphia doing the same.
Revisionist History
Face Value
President Clinton, ever the people person, starts making his way into the crowd, shaking hands and taking pictures with kids.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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 nine years old and several feet shorter.
Revisionist History
Face Value
I asked Frank how he thought Clinton could possibly have remembered him.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
While I was reporting the 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?
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Like, for instance, when I notice 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
In one of our early calls, I told Degutis about my theory. And being the good scientist he is, he wasn't sold right away.
Revisionist History
Face Value
He needed cold, hard data, not random BuzzFeed quizzes. So I hopped on Zoom with his research assistant, Kayla Kusel, and took a three-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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
He's a cookbook writer. She's also a writer. So for me, it was like on many levels 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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. Degutis and I hopped on a Zoom call to go over my results.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Okay, I have to admit, I was over the moon at being called the complete package. I said, please, go on.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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 this with Malcolm.
Revisionist History
Face Value
He did say I was a complete package. So I will also take LeBron James if you want to call me that. I'm not going to argue.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Yeah, exactly. This is what J.J. Goode, the guy from the coffee shop, told me that he tries to do, too.
Revisionist History
Face Value
So a couple of 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Nothing romantic. Strictly friends who are just like, wow, we have so much in common.
Revisionist History
Face Value
So he told me that he tries really hard to find these cues. You know, it's still hard for him. And he never wants a repeat of the Missy incident. So his solution is to just treat every person that walks in as if they are his friend.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
This has been great. Thanks, Malcolm. Provisionist History is produced by me, Lucy Sullivan, with Ben Natafafri and Nina Byrd-Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chikurji. Fact-checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Scoring, mixing, and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Special thanks to Daphne Chen, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohn, as well as the many people who shared their time and expertise with me for this episode. Brad Duchesne, Bruno Rossian, Sarah Bate, Erica Long, Heather Sellers, Lexi Malkin, Vivek Rao, and Chris Cochran.
Revisionist History
Face Value
If you suspect you might have a problem recognizing faces and you want to get involved with the research they're doing at Dr. Joe DeGutis' lab, go to faceblind.org. And if you're curious about your own facial recognition abilities, visit our show notes and take the tests we have linked there. I'm Lucy Sullivan.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
He ghosts her. 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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 going to go back. I'm going to 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Like you're not just going to remember someone that you've met once or twice in passing.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
See, it's interesting because this never happens to me. Like I'm often on the other side of it being like, all right, I'm just going to 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
It's just like, oh, I met you once at my friend's party four years ago and now you are standing next to me in line at Target.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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. 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. Or just, frankly, caring enough to remember them.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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. I really wanted to understand what's actually going on in our brains when all this happens.
Revisionist History
Face Value
J.J. Good, 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
Malcolm, I can tell you the name of the coffee shop off mic, but my fellow cafe goers did not want me to name it on this podcast because it's that good.
Revisionist History
Face Value
It's worth noting that JJ himself is easy to spot. He was born with one arm.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
This is Dr. Joe DeGutis. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, and he studies facial recognition. DeGutis teaches at Harvard Medical School and runs a lab out of the Boston VA Hospital.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
The clinical term for face blindness is prosopagnosia. Anagnosia 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
This special thing that Degutis 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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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.
Revisionist History
Face Value
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. DeGutis told me that the ability to recognize faces is a spectrum.