Why can't I recognise faces?

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1:04Caroline Steel:Ooh, yes, he's familiar. Don't recognise her. Don't recognise him. You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that answers your science questions. I'm Caroline Steele, and I'm doing my best to recognise a series of famous faces. Oh, God. OK. that could be David Attenborough, and I should 100 % recognise him. Embarrassed, I'm not sure, because I've seen literally everything he's ever done. But I'm going to say yes. I'm going to say that's David Attenborough. Am I right? It is, yes. Thank God. I'm being tested for face blindness, thanks to a question from this week's listener.

1:48Hi, I'm Jeroen. I live in the Netherlands. My question is, is it normal that remembering faces becomes increasingly difficult as I get older?

1:59Caroline Steel:So how long have you struggled to recognise faces for? Do you think this is something that you've always been not good at and it's got worse? Or do you think it's a totally new issue? If I thought it was a totally new issue, I would probably have sent for a neurologist by now. I've always had some difficulty and I had different ways of remembering people, their voices mainly. but the last few years it's been increasingly bad yeah i had it happen to me at the coffee machine at the office a few weeks ago and a guy greets me and starts chatting about something and from context i knew i'd seen him before i mean he was in the office and it's a small company and he referred to a conversation we had earlier and i looked at him i thought sorry mate i really can't remember your face at all.

2:52Caroline Steel:Did you say to him that you can't remember or did you try style it out? No, no. I tried to avoid the issue and quickly grasp what he was on about and which department he was from. But in my mind, I went like, who are you?

3:12Caroline Steel:That's so interesting. I mean, I have such a similar experience. I remember when I was an intern at the BBC my sort of mentor was a tall woman with short hair called Fi yeah and in the same team there were actually two tall women with short hair short blonde hair called Fi yeah and it's only a team of about 20 people and then one day my mentor Fi came up to me and said oh I'm so sorry I couldn't come into the office yesterday I hope the other Fi took good care of you and I basically had spent the whole day before talking to who I thought was my mentor and it turns out it was a stand-in fee and I didn't notice.

3:53Caroline Steel:I thought they were the same person and this is after having worked with this person every day for a month. I still didn't notice that it wasn't her on one of the days. So yes, I empathise. I have a similar experience. Is there anything you particularly want us to find out? I'd like to know if this is unique or not and... I'd like to know if somebody has studied enough to tell me what's next. Is this going to get worse? Can I train to overcome this? And if so, how? It's getting to be very annoying. It's a handicap that makes work harder than it should be, I feel. Thank you so much. I'm really glad you asked this question because it means I get to explore my own experience a bit, which I've never done.

4:40Caroline Steel:I've always struggled to recognise faces. And amazingly, I'm not the only crowd science presenter with this experience. I'm joined in the studio by fellow face forgetter, Marnie Chesterton. Hi, Marnie. Hello. I'm so jealous you're doing this. It's been amazing. So how long have you struggled to recognise faces for? It was university when I realised I had a problem. Oh, yeah. Is there a particular moment that sort of crystallised it for you? Just a series of incidents where I made a fool of myself. So I'm really invested in this programme, Jorun's Question. You're really invested too. Yes. So what is it?

5:19Caroline Steel:Is this like a sliding scale? I know some people don't recognise their own children and I'm not that bad. Well, you can quantify it. So I assume you've never done a face blindness test. I did one online. Ah, OK. So I went to visit Sarah Bate. She's a psychologist at Bournemouth University and we heard from her at the start of the show. She put me through a proper face blindness assessment, which basically consisted of a number of different tests. Interesting. What did they involve? OK, so first there was a series of statements about my day-to-day experiences and I had to say how strongly I agreed or disagreed with the statement.

5:59So what we start with is, first of all, just to get you to answer a questionnaire about your everyday experiences with faces. So I just start this up.

6:11Caroline Steel:I feel like I frequently offend people by not recognising who they are. Yes, that happened literally two days ago. Somewhat agree. It is easy for me to recognise individuals in situations that require people to wear similar clothes. it is easy uh no similar clothes is worse strongly disagree so then i ranked how frequently i experience different aspects of face blindness so these are what we've identified to be the core symptoms of face blindness interesting okay let's give it a go i'm unable to identify a familiar person in an unexpected context yes i had an ex-boyfriend who i ran into after having been with him for six months and I didn't recognise him.

6:54Caroline Steel:So yes, at the time I didn't realise that wasn't normal and he was like, what the hell? Wow, what a burn. Yes, and it was quite scary actually. Okay, so this test is testing how bad you are. Yeah, so the first half was questions about my experiences. Then we moved on to the next part of the test. So we've got a famous faces test next so in this task you're going to see 60 faces yeah and your task is to decide whether that person is familiar to you or not from celebrities in the media great so these are very well-known celebrities is this person familiar to you nope never seen her before I have no idea no idea oh i tell you what i think i know who that is but i'm not confident so i think this person is familiar to me and i think he was the president of the united states that's correct yay i've got one and it's bill clinton okay no idea who that is i'm semi-convinced these are just random photos you've taken and not actual celebrities.

8:10Caroline Steel:Oh, I can do him as well. That's Boris Johnson. Wow. Congratulations for recognising our Prime Minister of what, four years ago? Yeah, I was semi-pleased with that one. He's quite distinctive looking, isn't he? You won't believe who I didn't recognise, Marnie. So I've asked for a list. I'll give you some top names. I didn't recognise Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Colin Firth, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks and you know many many others. That's astonishing. I'm pretty sure that I'd get Bob Dylan and Colin Firth and Harrison Ford. I'm not that good on sort of just people or if I'm shown a face remembering if I've seen that face before.

8:56So here's the scores on the doors.

8:59Caroline Steel:I don't think anyone's going to be surprised by this. So we started off with the symptom questionnaires. So the first one that you completed, there were 20 questions and you got a score of 66 on that one, which is within the range for face blindness. Interesting. And I scored very high on the second symptoms test too, which is further evidence of my inability to recognise faces. So then we did the famous faces test. You got a score of 23 out of 60 in terms of... It is good. A typical person gets about 80 to 90 % correct in that one. So a little bit higher. Yeah, because they are highly familiar people.

9:4180 to 90 %? Yeah, your average person would be able to look at those faces.

9:46Caroline Steel:So what percentage does that translate to? So you're below 50 % there, aren't you, with 23? Yes, you are, Caroline. That's about 40 % 23 out of 60. Initially I was pleased with that but then when I heard 80 to 90 % is typical. Wow. I tanked that. Maybe my worst scoring test of all time. You Tom hanked that. For me the major thing is that famous faces test. And I tanked that one. Yeah. I don't think you can get more striking than that where the faces are supposed to be highly familiar to you. yeah so based on the pattern of results that we've seen today I would suggest that you you do fall in the range for face blindness I hope that gives you some comfort yeah I think I'd be I'd be more shocked if I didn't I'd be like well then what am I struggling with so congratulations you are officially face thank you I feel quite good about that diagnosis actually so did Sarah also tell you what's going on inside your head that means that you're face blind Interesting.

10:52Caroline Steel:Okay, so we're coming to that. For now, I just have a score that says my performance is in line with being face blind, which has been great therapy for me. But we're here to answer listener Yeroen's question, which is, is it normal for recognising faces to get harder as you get older? He thinks he might have struggled with it for a while, but he's noticed it's got sort of dramatically worse with age. So let's start with what face blindness actually is. Here's Sarah again. So face blindness is a neuropsychological condition where people simply don't have the ability to recognise facial identity.

11:32So we think there's two basic forms of this condition. For some people, quite rarely, they actually acquire the condition after experiencing some form of brain damage. It might be through an illness such as encephalitis or an infection of the brain or after stroke, for example. You said that's quite rare. That is quite rare. So we don't meet an awful lot of people who experience face blindness through those means. What we do see much more commonly is a large number of people who think they've never had the ability to recognise faces. And we've referred to this as a developmental or even a congenital type of condition.

12:08The congenital being because we actually think it can run in families. And what percentage of people are affected by face blindness? We've always, as a research community, sort of stuck to this 2 % figure, which is 1 in 50 people.

12:23Caroline Steel:1 in 50 people. What do you reckon, Marnie? That seems like a lot of people. That's higher than I was expecting too, because for me, you and the producer of this programme, Joe, are the only people that I've met that struggle with recognising faces. I think maybe people don't talk about it that much. Yeah, I've always imagined that most people are just somewhere on this line of not really recognising people and most people are just winging it. So I asked Sarah, other than working on crowd science, what causes face blindness? So potentially there's a gene there. We don't know that. Those investigations haven't been carried out.

13:04But as we do know, generally from psychology, it's never as simple as there being a single gene, which will be responsible just for face recognition itself. It tends to be a much more complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors. But those familial cases really do support that there must be some sort of genetic influences in some cases.

13:24Caroline Steel:So, Caroline, is there anyone in your family who's also? No. Oh, my sister's exceptionally good at recognising faces. Or I think she's exceptionally good. Maybe she's average. So Sarah mentioned something to me about early childhood experiences that's really stuck. In other individuals, sometimes people describe a period of unusual visual experience when they were a child. So we think there's perhaps these special sort of age ranges in development, which might be really critical for normal development of face recognition skills. So if a child wasn't given glasses, for example, when they needed them, or perhaps they were born with cataracts, which prevented some or all of their vision.

14:07Caroline Steel:Interesting. So I had a lazy eye, so wore an eye patch for like a large chunk of time as a child. So I wonder if that might be related potentially. Quite possibly. It's actually quite a common story that I hear from people who have experienced face blindness for most of their lives. So entirely possible that that might be a related factor. That's fascinating. Right? I had no idea these things could be linked. Did you have any early vision issues? Did you? Yes. No way. So I needed glasses, but I didn't find out I needed glasses until I was 15, 16, and I was at the back of the chemistry class. And I just assumed, you know, if you're at the back of the class, you can't read the board.

14:54Caroline Steel:And then the person next to me was writing down the things from the board. And I was like, it's a blank board. And they went, maybe you should get your eyes tested. That's so interesting. OK, so we both had vision difficulties as a child. Wow. OK, so we know our visual experiences play into it. We know our genes can play into it. But there's even more going on. There's some evidence to suggest there might be some social and emotional factors in development that might also contribute to this. So we know, for example, from autism spectrum conditions where some people might not feel comfortable to make eye contact with others or they're less likely to be able to do that or want to do that in social situations that quite a large number of people with those conditions also struggle with face recognition skills.

15:43what we do see is they might not be severe as people who have what we might refer to as classical face blindness which tells us that perhaps there's a separate cause we also know that some children who are brought up in orphanages or perhaps have had very little social contact with others for for various sorts of reasons might not go on to develop normal face recognition skills once they enter adulthood or go out into sort of wider experiences.

16:14Caroline Steel:So for many people like us, face blindness probably begins in childhood. And we have a number of things that can contribute to how likely you are to experience face blindness. Can I test you, Marnie? Can you remember what they are? Fewer social interactions or autism, visual impairment in childhood. I've got a tick on that one. Yeah, me too. Okay, is anyone looking at what's happening in the brains of people with face blindness? Yes, so I spoke to a neuroscientist about what's going on in our brains when we recognise or don't recognise faces. And that's coming up next. This is summer at its peak.

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17:27Caroline Steel:And today on our show, we look at the origins and evolution of made in China because it actually wasn't inevitable. What we're talking about is the world's largest communist nation is at the beating heart of the capitalist system. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:56Caroline Steel:You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that uses science to help us see the world around us more clearly. I'm Caroline Steele and I'm joined by the lovely Marnie Chesterton. Hello. And we're answering a question from listener Jeroen in the Netherlands. He wants to know, is it normal to struggle to recognise faces as we age? So, so far, we've found that face blindness can begin before you're even born. It's part of the genetic hand you've been dealt. And the early childhood experiences play a big part too. Yes. Now, Jeroen isn't sure when his difficulty recognising faces began.

18:32Caroline Steel:Maybe, like you and me, Marnie, he's always found it a bit challenging, but he has really noticed a big change with age. And Jeroen wants to know if that's normal. So to understand if or how our ability to recognise faces is impacted by ageing, we need to know exactly what's going on in the brain, right? So I spoke to Zaira Cataneo. She's a neuroscientist at the University of Bergamo in Italy, and she researches face perception. So basically, we have a specific brain circuit for face recognition, for face processing. So it all starts in the back of the brain in sensory regions and these sensory regions became extremely selective for faces.

19:14Caroline Steel:Okay, so what I know about the back of the brain is it's where vision begins and it's home to something called, is it the occipital lobe? Occipital, yeah. Occipital lobe. So that's just under your occipital condyle, which is that if you feel that lump at the back of your skull, That's where your skull rests at the top of your vertebrae. Under that, you've got the occipital lobe, and that contains the primary visual cortex, which is where sight first gets processed. So when you see a face, the face basically travels in your brain. It starts in the visual cortex and then reaches the temporal cortex where semantic information is.

19:53So we have a specific circuit that activates just for faces, but not for objects.

19:58Caroline Steel:What she's saying is that there's a brain circuit and it starts in the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain before signals travel to the temporal cortex. Yes. And the temporal cortex sits behind your temples and that helps attach semantic meaning or what something actually is to what we see. It means that at this point you do not just recognise a face, but you also know whether the face is familiar, which is this person. You can add a name and all the semantic and biographical information about the person. And then that information travels from the temporal lobes to the prefrontal cortex, which sits behind our foreheads.

20:46Caroline Steel:And that's a bit like the brain's control centre. Is that a fair summary for the prefrontal cortex? would you say brains control center? Yeah, yeah. I've heard brain CEO. Yeah. It is in the prefrontal cortex that we basically represent consciously the face because most of the sensory processing is not conscious so we are not aware of it. So in order to consciously perceive a face also the prefrontal cortex needs to take part in the process. There's something right at the start that goes, oh, this is a face, not just some random shapes. And then that gets kind of extra information tagged onto it as it goes further forward.

21:25Caroline Steel:And then it becomes this fully formed, oh, by the way, this is someone that you should know. Yeah, and for some reason, you know, our circuit isn't the strongest, but it is a serious team effort. There are so many brain regions involved. Here's Zaira again. So in neuroscience now, we pay much more attention to connectivity than to single brain regions, because we have learned that our brain works through networks. There are, of course, specific brain regions that are devoted to specific functions, but our brain tends to work through networks. So I want to know what's going on in face blindness.

22:06Caroline Steel:Is it a network issue or is one of the brain regions not doing their job? These people might have less connectivity between nodes of the face circuit. So maybe the single regions are still working fine, but it's their connectivity that is suffering more, that is working differently. So it could be that the regions of the brain involved in face recognition are just as active as someone who isn't face blind, but the connectivity between the regions isn't working quite the same. Exactly. So, Moni, given that we know which regions of the brain are involved and we know how they're connected, I wondered if there's anything that can be done to help us face blind people.

22:51So we can basically entrain the brain to oscillate at a frequency that we want it to oscillate because we know that this frequency is related to efficient perception.

23:06Caroline Steel:Oscillate, as in what jiggled the brain around. So brain cells or neurons that make up the facial recognition circuit fire together at a certain synchronised frequency. And Zira and her team have used a weak electrical current applied through the scalp, so it's not invasive, to encourage these neurons to synchronise. And so there have been successful attempts to improve object recognition, but also face recognition using this technique. So do you think there's a world in which people with extreme face blindness might use some of this equipment in the future to make their lives a bit easier? Maybe that can be a future perspective, although we need to be realistic because sometimes the risk is that people go to these techniques thinking that they are miraculous.