How well do you recognize faces? [View all]

[Lionel Mandrake]

Where do you lie on the continuum between Oliver Sacks and Jennifer Jarett?

Best-selling author Oliver Sacks can't recognize himself in a mirror. Nor can he recognize anyone else's face, including his close relatives. He suffers from an extreme form of prosopagnosia, i. e., face-blindness.

Jennifer Jarett is at the other end of the continuum: she is a super-recognizer, as the following excerpt shows:

A Memory for Faces, Extreme Version

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: May 25, 2009
Jennifer Jarett never forgets a face.

A few years ago, shortly after she moved to New York City, one of her friends pointed out a young man standing on the other side of the room at a party. Ms. Jarett took one look and said, “Oh, I know who he is — I went to Hebrew school with him in fourth grade.”

At the time, Ms. Jarett, who is now 38, had not seen the boy in nearly two decades, since they were both children.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/health/26face.html?_r=0

I am more like Oliver than Jennifer. I can recognize the faces of people who are close to me, but I have always had difficulty recognizing the faces of casual acquaintances. In school I often didn't recognize my teachers when I saw them outside of their regular classrooms. I often mistook one kid for another. This was embarrassing, to say the least. I still marvel at the ability of most people to recognize hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of different faces.