When faces are a puzzle: the problem not to recognize others

There are people who remember and recognize the faces. They see a face in the crowd and can say, with complete security, that it is the saleswoman who attended a clothing store a few years ago, or a man who once for the metro, or who only worked in the factory for three days. Other people, on the other hand, are (we are) a disaster and we are considering those skills with an authentic past. Are Perfectly able to move next to a neighbor of a life and not to identify it, especially if the hairstyle has changed, wear sunglasses or is in an unusual place, And the faces with which we cross the street often come to us in overwhelming doubts: is it, it is not, maybe it was …? Naturally, The generalized use of masks has completely that daily confusion, In an ‘even more difficult’ that increases the greeting to the challenge category.

The ability to visually recognize our fellow people, which are naturally considered to be in society, is one of those characteristics that make us human. «There is a part of the brain, in the temporary lob, called a fusiform circum filling: There we have the fusiform facial area, a region that we only have people. We have evolutionary the mechanism developed to identify faces, while the muscle package that enables us to have some control over the expression of emotions. A dog can assume an aggressive position or submission: express emotions by the body. Humans too, but above all we use the face, ”Diego Redolar, a professor in neuropsychology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and co-founder of the cognitive Neuro-Lab Laboratory. These circuits are the basis, hardware”, but Through our experience with the environment, they model: that is why the faces of people from other ethnic groups may seem enormously comparable, although they are actually just as unique as ours. «The recognition of emotions is all good, unless we have a brain injury – redolar Añade – but in the ability to remember the faces, we show large individual differences. It also happens with spatial learning, for example, and that is why some people quickly find their car in the parking lot, following a mental map, and others can throw around for hours ».

That is calculated Between 2 and 3% of the population experiences problems to recognize faces, Because part of the process of remembering the factions and consolidating that long -term memory does not work efficiently. In principle, it is a skill that can be improved with training, because to a certain extent is related to our way of focusing attention when dealing with others. “These people can spend more time looking at parts of the face that are not so useful to distinguish some faces from others, such as her, instead of other regions that are more important, such as eyes,” “ In an article for ‘The Conversation’, she summarized the Australian professor Romina Palermo, specialized in this edition. “At the level of artificial intelligence, machines are taught to recognize the faces and even the emotions they express,” says Diego Redolar. This capacity can also be improved in people. We have proven that the more you do the homework, you get better ».

The extreme difficulty to recognize faces It is known as prosopagnosia or ‘facial blindness’, which can reach the level of non -identifying family and friends. On some occasions it is an acquired condition caused by any injury that has damaged specific brain areas, but in many other cases it is a characteristic that apparently can have a certain genetic basis. A patient explained a few years ago in the ‘British Medical Journal’ Some social implications that accompany this condition, by a pathetic assessment of his youth (“They punished me because I had not discovered a teacher”), her childhood (“I ignored girls who had met the previous night”) and their adult life (“I recognize the coins and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates and their plates”). This man, just like anyone who suffers from prosopagnosia, In the end he entrusted himself to details such as the way of dressing, the voice or, especially, the context: “A person of certain characteristics in a certain corridor is my partner, but in the supermarket she is certainly a stranger.”

Great and bearable

The British neurologist and distribution Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, is a well -known example of a person suffering from ‘facial blindness’, a characteristic that he shared with his brother and did not identify until he reached average age: while he broke out in an article for ‘the New Yorker’, On some occasion he could not recognize his personal assistant (although he was waiting for him in the place where they had gone) and even consider his own face. “Several times I apologized that I was about to collide with a large and bearded man, and then realize that this big and bearded man was in a mirror,” he said. The primatologist Jane Goodall, Princess Victoria van Zweden or actors Stephen Fry and Brad Pitt also maintain a complicated relationship with the faces of others. “Many people hate me because they believe they have no respect,” Pitt complained in an interview with ‘Esquire’. A singular is that of the American painter and photographer Chuck Close, precisely specialized in portraits: «Others paint apples or bottles, but I care for a ble for apples and bottles. The faces of people are an urgency for me, nothing is as important as knowing who people are, “he justified.

Pandemia has filled the streets of Embozadas and this basic recognition task has become much more film, to the point that they become very aware of the difficulties to identify. “It has complicated us all, but logically, even more for people who do not have good ability to remember the faces,” says Diego Redolar. As a neuroscientist, however, it is more concerned with a different aspect of the situation, which has to do with conditioning of the surroundings of the neuronal circuits participating in this process. «We have a lot of evidence that The network that interprets the face of the face is born very immature, and then adapts to the society in which we live. We have a year of Pandemie and the children who are in that critical age, those who have the circuits at that time of flexibility can experience the consequences in that system To live surrounded by people with masks. We don’t know, we don’t even know the age at which that happens, but there will certainly be a kind of affect.

The ‘Super -recocerous and the police

If we coordinate humanity on the basis of their ability to remember the factions of others, the most serious cases of prosopagnosia will be those people who can watch their parents, their spouses or their children as if they were strangers. But at the other point of the spectrum we will also find unique people, to which the label of ‘Super -Recaonoscience’ is usually used for more than a decade.

It was in 2009 when a study documented its existence, to verify that some people do not lie when an extraordinary ability to remember faces were attributed. These are individuals who recognize someone with whom they occasionally had a treatment, although it has changed the appearance radically, or who see an extra in the cinema and know in which other film the fleeting on the screen on the screen. Many of them are also used to hiding their wonderful ‘super power’, because it often increases the bewilderment or even the distrust of the other people, who are afraid to undergo a dark espionage.

Oliver Sacks occasionally wrote that the difference between the great ‘recognizers’ and who, like him, suffered ‘face blindness’, could be compared “with what exists between people with an intellectual quotient of 150 and the one who has 50”. The skills of the ‘Super -Recoceum’ can have very interesting applications in a very concrete area: the police and forensic. Of course they are a treasure like witnesses of any crime, or in a recognition wheel, but that contribution can be professionally. In 2015, the London Metropolitan Police formed a team of people with this feature to devote them to assessing images recorded by security cameras. Most people experience serious difficulties in identifying faces photographed or filmed with poor lighting or with a mediocre definition, especially when it comes to linking two different images of a strange, but these ‘tops’ of face recognition can play that task with striking security.

In fact, various scientific studies have concluded that, given the enormous differences between some individuals and others in this task, police services have to submit to their workforce to choose the most suitable jobs, such as the assessment of identity documents on the limits.