Face Value

Transcript

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Speaker 44 Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here.

Speaker 47 Today I'm in the studio with my producer, Lucy Sullivan. Lucy?

Speaker 44 Hi, Malcolm.

Speaker 48 I understand you have a story for me about a particular misunderstanding.

Speaker 12 That is true. We're here because I want to tell you about something I'm calling the Missy Incident.

Speaker 1 Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 12 It totally changed the way that I think about something foundational, and it also reminded me of you.

Speaker 8 Of me? Of you.

Speaker 49 Oh, my God.

Speaker 44 Where are you?

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 So it all happened at this coffee shop that I go to all the time.

Speaker 33 Can you tell me what the name of the coffee shop is?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 44 Oh, it's that good?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So the person at the center of this, her name is Missy Kurzweil.

Speaker 12 She was fresh off of maternity leave with her second kid when the incident happened.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So Missy is looking for a place to work outside of her home office and she finds this coffee shop.

Speaker 12 On her third morning, kind of feeling out this place, is this where she wants to set up camp for her HQ?

Speaker 12 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 Good.

Speaker 13 So JJ and Missy are sitting down together.

Speaker 1 What happens?

Speaker 12 Missy's on the phone with her kids' 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.

Speaker 12 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 Sonny.

Speaker 12 They both are freelancers. He's a cookbook writer.
She's also a writer. So for me, it was like on many levels was just really

Speaker 12 kind of a special bond instantly. And I don't know if this is normal for you, but like I don't usually, I'm not usually chatting it up with people at the coffee shop.

Speaker 1 But these two, and there's nothing romantic going on here.

Speaker 12 Nothing romantic. Yeah.
Strictly friends who are just like, wow, we have so much in common.

Speaker 12 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 seemingly genuinely interested in what you have to say and what are all these details about your life.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And so for the next few days, Missy and JJ sit together, work together, crucially always at the same spot in the front. But one day she comes in and their usual table is taken.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And I start to say, hey, JJ,

Speaker 12 but he looks at me and sort of kind of registers it and turns around and walks the other way.

Speaker 47 He ghosts her.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 52 He turned around.

Speaker 12 So now Missy's like, what is going on here?

Speaker 12 Like she had just met his wife a couple of days before and she's like, maybe the wife wasn't comfortable with like, or maybe she's thinking something's going on.

Speaker 12 Maybe I said something weird to him. Like she's really like spinning her wheels.
She's reeling.

Speaker 1 She's reeling.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And now I'm like, okay, I think I might have said something that offended him.

Speaker 44 My name is Malcolm Globwell.

Speaker 53 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 12 So, Missy is obviously super bummed about this.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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 queue, JJ walks in.
And he sees me and his face lights up.

Speaker 12 And he's like, Missy, you haven't been here in like a week or two. I've missed you.
Where have you been?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 8 Like nothing happened.

Speaker 12 Like absolutely nothing happened.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 12 And I was so confused.

Speaker 12 I did not know what to make of that, but I was kind of just relieved that the, the freeze out was over.

Speaker 44 And so I just went with it and was like, oh, you know, good to see you again.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 51 And I was like, what? You seemed like you were friends with her.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And then I think I paused and I said something like, is that why you broke up with me six months ago?

Speaker 12 And this is the part that made me think of you, Malcolm, faceblindness. Because I've heard that you also might be a little faceblind yourself.

Speaker 48 Yes, yes, that's true.

Speaker 1 This happens to me all the time.

Speaker 47 I won't remember if I need to expose to a face.

Speaker 54 a person on multiple occasions before their face becomes meaningful or even there.

Speaker 54 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

Speaker 12 like you're not just gonna remember someone that you've met once or twice no 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

Speaker 54 There's a guy who runs the wine shop across the street.

Speaker 1 His name is Michael. I'd known Michael for for years.

Speaker 1 And I see Michael, or I think it's Michael, and I see a slender man in his 50s, about five, nine, with glasses and a baseball cap across the street from the wine shop.

Speaker 13 And I think, oh, that's got to be Michael.

Speaker 44 And I go, Michael.

Speaker 44 And the guy looks at me like really weird and comes over.

Speaker 49 And it was like my nightmare.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 13 But that was my system failed.

Speaker 55 It's very rare for me to risk it like that.

Speaker 1 that, but I risked it because I thought, if Michael thinks, I had the reverse JJ, if Michael thinks I'm ignoring him,

Speaker 13 then that's really bad because I go to the wine shop all the time and I like Michael.

Speaker 12 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 going to pretend like I don't know.

Speaker 52 You always remember.

Speaker 12 I always remember. And I always remember people who are completely insignificant to me.
Like, not in any sort of value judgment way.

Speaker 12 It's just like, oh, I met you once at my friend's friend's party four years ago, and now you are standing next to me in line at Target.

Speaker 47 That's so completely foreign.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 12 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 faceblind.

Speaker 12 He has trouble recognizing people. And I was like,

Speaker 12 okay, like, yeah, he's faceblind. Like, because I was thinking, like.

Speaker 12 I've never forgotten. I just don't forget people's faces.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And it would be kind of nice to have an excuse like, oh, I don't remember you because I'm like faceblind or whatever. But I just couldn't believe that that was true until I heard the story.

Speaker 49 Yeah, no, no, I do.

Speaker 8 And it makes me feel bad because I, we're, you know, I mean, I feel for JJ because

Speaker 54 it's, you're in this constant state of worry about

Speaker 47 that you're going to be perceived as cold or aloof and you're not.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I really wanted to understand what's actually going on in our brains when all this happens.

Speaker 33 After the break, Lucy Sullivan takes us behind the face and into the brain.

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Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 And we had this conversation where I was like, How is everything?

Speaker 50 Things are good with me. Like, I didn't mention any, there was no specifics because I wanted to make, like, I didn't want it.
If you walked in and someone had no idea who you were, you would feel

Speaker 44 bad about yourself.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 When my wife and I were watching a show,

Speaker 44 I'll be like, who's that guy?

Speaker 50 And she's like, it's 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 12 It's worth noting that JJ himself is easy to spot. He was born with one arm.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 They said Oliver Sachs, the science writer, had it too. And that's when it clicked for JJ.

Speaker 50 So it is a little bit of the 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.

Speaker 12 This is Dr. Joe DeGudis.
He's a cognitive neuroscientist and he studies facial recognition. DeGudis teaches at Harvard Medical School and runs a lab out of the Boston VA hospital.

Speaker 50 We've studied how people become aware that they have this. and often it's a little rocky.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 They have all these attributions they can give.

Speaker 12 The thing about people who are quote unquote faceblind is that they're not actually blind. They're not seeing blurs where people's faces are.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 The best estimates I could find suggests 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.

Speaker 12 Scientists think it could be genetic or that the network in the brain that recognizes faces just doesn't develop normally.

Speaker 12 But for most of us, a face is the trigger that calls up all the information we know about a person.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 So it has this kind of privileged role in terms of getting all this other information out.

Speaker 12 The clinical term for faceblindness is prozopagnosia. An agnosia is an inability to recognize something.
Prozopagnosia uses the Greek word for face, prosopo.

Speaker 12 which also happens to be the Greek word for person.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 It's something that is also very special about humans.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 One of the things that we do with faces more than any other.

Speaker 50 like visual object is you process it as a gestalt as a whole because we have to kind of recognize them and not just just like, okay, that's a face, that's a face.

Speaker 50 We have to be like, okay, that's my friend. Oh, that's not, that's Moy, that's the person at work who I need to avoid.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And researchers think that's part of why humans developed this special recognition network in our brains. Because it served us.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Well, most of us, anyways.

Speaker 12 DeGudis told me that the ability to recognize faces is a spectrum.

Speaker 50 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?

Speaker 12 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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Speaker 12 One morning, back in 1984, a little kid named Frank Vaughan was about to have a very exciting day of school.

Speaker 57 I was nine years old, and my fourth grade class was invited on a school field trip to the governor's office in Little Rock.

Speaker 12 That's Governor Bill Clinton's office, to be exact.

Speaker 57 They arranged us all in a semicircle in cross-legged style, and we waited for the man to show up.

Speaker 44 And typical of politicians, he was around 15 minutes late.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 57 And she took off on a dead run for his inner office to go grab that Pepsi.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Frank said that he and his classmates were so excited about meeting the governor.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 57 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?

Speaker 57 And after witnessing everything I had just seen, the only answer I could come up with was, I want to be you.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 That was that.

Speaker 12 Okay, so now we're going to fast forward 13 years later, March of 1997.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 25 people were killed, dozens were injured, 1,200 buildings were leveled. It was a huge disaster.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 It's obvious that you all have done a lot of work here in just a couple of days.

Speaker 12 Everybody has really pitched things.

Speaker 12 Frank Vaughan is no longer a little boy. He's a six-foot-one college student attending Wachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia.

Speaker 12 That feathery blonde hair is now closely cropped in the style typical of his fellow members of the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 44 He's the president. And I was wrong.

Speaker 12 President Clinton, ever the people person, starts making his way into the crowd, shaking hands and taking pictures with kids.

Speaker 57 There was a limited about a three-block area that we were allowed to stand on from street to street to street.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 57 I mean, he spent a good four hours just walking these blocks and shaking hands with people.

Speaker 12 And then Clinton gets to where Frank and his friends are standing.

Speaker 57 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?

Speaker 12 Frank said that he almost passed out.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 44 And listen, when I tell this story, I know it's hard to believe.

Speaker 57 I understand that it seems almost impossible. But if, as we say back home, if I'm lying, I'm dying.

Speaker 12 I asked Frank how he thought Clinton could possibly have remembered him.

Speaker 57 Some people are just like that, I guess.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 44 You don't get there without talent.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 The comedian John Mulaney has a whole bit in his 2015 comedy special about Clinton's ability to remember people.

Speaker 50 I want to tell you one more story before I get out of here about the night I met a guy named Bill Clinton.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Apparently, he would sometimes walk her home from the library in college.

Speaker 12 Mulaney talks about his mom dragging him to a campaign event in the 90s to see if the presidential hopeful still remembered their walks.

Speaker 44 Here's what happens.

Speaker 50 She was swinging me like a snowplow. I was just mowing down fat Chicago Democrats.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 Bill Clinton turns, looks at my mom, and says, hey, Ellen, because he never forgets a bitch, ever.

Speaker 12 Remember, Remember, facial recognition abilities are on a spectrum. Researchers are pretty sure it's a normal distribution with prozopagnosics on the low end.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 This is something that Bill Clinton is very good at.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Joe DeGudis, 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.

Speaker 50 Oh, it's a picture of like, you know, Barack Obama when he was like two years old and super recognizers can like see it.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 While JJ misses the plot of some movies and TV shows, I get distracted by extras.

Speaker 12 Like, for instance, when I notice that a passing character in a 2001 episode of Sex in the City is the guy who, spoiler alert, gets murdered in the first season of the show White Lotus 20 years later.

Speaker 12 Faceblind 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.

Speaker 12 In one of our early calls, I told DeGudis about my theory. And being the good scientist he is, he wasn't sold right away.

Speaker 50 I mean, maybe you just like convinced yourself that you're super and you're not really super.

Speaker 12 He needed cold, hard data, not random buzzfeed quizzes.

Speaker 12 So I hopped on Zoom with his research assistant, Caleb Usil, and took a three-hour battery of tests designed to definitively say whether or not I was a super recognizer.

Speaker 12 Alright, 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 44 Now I'm getting nervous.

Speaker 12 I'm like, I need to want to get these right.

Speaker 12 Which is one of the six target faces?

Speaker 52 One.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 51 That one was so hard.

Speaker 12 Yeah, the Georgia's is really crazy.

Speaker 44 That made me feel like I took drugs or something. I was like, whoa, what's happening here?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 A few days later, the verdict was in.

Speaker 12 DeGudis and I hopped on a Zoom call to go over my results.

Speaker 50 I mean, you're kind of the complete package for Super Recognizer, so I'm

Speaker 50 kind of, 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.

Speaker 43 I think this is

Speaker 12 okay. I have to admit, I was over the moon at being called the complete package.
I said, please go on.

Speaker 50 Actually, looking at your results, you were like perfect on two of the

Speaker 50 on two of the diagnostic tests. Like you didn't get a single item wrong.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 12 Oh, that one was so hard.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 54 You're like the LeBron James of facial recognition.

Speaker 12 He did say I was a complete package, so I will also take LeBron James if you want to call me that.

Speaker 52 I'm not going to argue.

Speaker 54 My experience of you is dramatically different than your experience of me.

Speaker 1 I am forced to find alternate means of recognition.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 28 And because they're not as reliable as the face, we're always getting into trouble.

Speaker 12 Yeah, exactly. This is what JJ Good, the guy from the coffee shop, told me that he tries to do too.

Speaker 50 That's Caitlin with the beautiful chins.

Speaker 50 This is

Speaker 50 Daniel. He has bald head.
I thought I remember him.

Speaker 44 Small, bald.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 Oh, there she is.

Speaker 50 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.

Speaker 50 So I'm worried about that.

Speaker 12 So he told me that he tries really hard to find these cues, but you know, it's still hard for him, and he never wants a repeat of the Missy incident.

Speaker 12 So his solution is to just treat every person that walks in as if they are his friend.

Speaker 50 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,

Speaker 50 hi? And I'm like, hi.

Speaker 50 Just in case I know them and they're like, well, that guy's friendly.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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 faceblindness thing.

Speaker 12 And I just think that's such a lovely way to live.

Speaker 48 That is really beautiful.

Speaker 12 JJ and Missy are great friends now, despite the incident. You can find them working and chatting at the coffee shop most days.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 50 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

Speaker 50 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 extra-friendly.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Faces matter. But it all comes back to what's in our heads.

Speaker 1 Lucy?

Speaker 41 That is, you are Lucy, right?

Speaker 44 Yes, so that's me.

Speaker 52 I changed my shirt, but it's still me.

Speaker 47 This has been a lot of fun.

Speaker 52 This has been great.

Speaker 12 Thanks, Malcolm.

Speaker 12 Provisionist History is produced by me, Lucy Sullivan, with Ben Natapaffery and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Shikurji.
Fact-checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra.

Speaker 12 Scoring, mixing, and mastering on this episode by Echo Mountain. Production support from Luke Lamond.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Brad Duchesne, Bruno Rossian, Sarah Bate, Erica Long, Heather Sellers, Lexi Malkin, Vivek Rao, and Chris Cochran.

Speaker 12 If you suspect you might have a problem recognizing faces faces and you want to get involved with the research they're doing at Dr.

Speaker 12 Joe DeGoudis' 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.

Speaker 45 Don't forget, listen to Fiasco, a ran-contra, for the story of a not-so-secret scandal that captivated the United States.

Speaker 9 Fiasco is available where you're listening right now.

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