Struggle to Recognize Faces? Face Blindness May Be More Common Than Scientists Assumed
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Loading... - Rogers Griffiths
- 03 Mar 2023
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When someone looks at a familiar face, it takes less than half a second for their brain to match the nose, eyes, mouth, chin, and cheeks to an identity.
That superpower-like instinct happens so effortlessly for most of us that we never even think about it. But not everyone has that luxury.
Some people struggle their whole lives with a mystifying condition known as developmental prosopagnosia, in which known faces look unfamiliar, or the faces of strangers look tantalizingly recognizable. Some who have so-called face blindness can't even recognize themselves in a mirror.
Today, most estimates predict about 2 to 2.5 percent of the world's population has some form of this cognitive disorder, and yet according to new research from Harvard University, it may not be as rare as first thought.
As the condition has gained greater media attention in recent years, more people have come forward to express their own personal struggles with face blindness.
More than half of those who think they were born with the condition don't meet the most common diagnostic standards. These milder cases are not included in research, and yet they clearly stand out at a population level.
When researchers at Harvard gave a variety of tests and questionnaires on facial recognition to more than 3,100 adult participants in the United States, they found a cluster of people who scored quite poorly. Read More…
