What's in a face? ProsopagnosiaWhat's in a face? Prosopagnosia
All In The Mind
The faces of our friends and family are instantly recognisable to us—but about 1 in 50 of us say that looking at a face is like looking at a brick wall.
28:52•21 Jan 2018
Face Blindness: Life When Every Face Looks the Same
Episode Overview
- Prosopagnosia affects about 2% of adults and can make even close family members’ faces hard to recognise.
- People with face blindness often rely on cues like voice, posture, clothing and hairstyle instead of facial features.
- Brain imaging shows specialised networks in the occipital and temporal lobes are strongly tuned to faces.
- Face recognition ability lies on a continuum, from severe prosopagnosia through average ability to super recognisers.
- Intensive training can bring small improvements, but current methods do not remove prosopagnosia entirely.
“To me, a face is no more individual than the back of their hand is, or their elbows, or their throat.”
Curious about how others cope when faces simply don’t “stick” in memory? This highlight from *All In The Mind* looks at prosopagnosia, or face blindness, through vivid personal stories and cutting‑edge brain science. You’ll hear from people like Peter Wilson, who jokes that dating is tricky when even his cousin can feel like a stranger, and Tim Hughes, who once failed to recognise his own son standing right beside him.
Dorothea Rossellini explains how others misread her difficulty as arrogance, saying, "This isn't my personality, this really is something about how I perceive things." Their stories bring home how socially isolating it can be when familiar faces don’t register. ABC science communicator Dr Karl Kruszelnicki adds his own experiences, describing faces as "basically like looking at a bunch of bricks" and relying instead on voices, posture and clothing.
He talks about the effort it takes to remember colleagues, repeating their names to keep them in mind. On the scientific side, Professor Brad Duchaine explains that the brain has specialised "face areas" that respond much more strongly to faces than other objects, and that this system can vary widely.
At one end are people with developmental prosopagnosia, who struggle to recognise even loved ones; at the other are "super recognisers", who can spot someone years after a brief encounter and are now being used by police to identify suspects from images. Associate Professor Romina Palermo discusses how prosopagnosia can affect both perception and memory of faces, how it sometimes spreads to similar objects, and how testing often shows people are poor judges of their own face-recognition skills.
There’s talk of training programmes that bring small improvements, plus the mental health impact of missing out on social and romantic connections. By the end, you may find yourself wondering: how good are *you* at recognising the faces in your life?
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