[60 Minutes] Face Blindness1: When everyone is a stranger

4. Face Blindness-1: When everyone is a stranger

 

(CBS News) Imagine going to school to pick up your child and not being certain which kid is yours. Imagine brushing your teeth every morning and not wholly recognizing the face in the mirror. All of this is unimaginable for most of us, but a basic fact of life for people with the mysterious neurological condition called "face blindness" -- or prosopagnosia - which can make it almost impossible to recognize faces, even of one's nearest and dearest. Dr. Oliver Sacks knows something about the condition, and not only because he's a neurologist, but also because Dr. Sacks himself is face blind. Lesley Stahl reports.

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7402685n&tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.8

 

Most of us take for granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. It's so automatic, it almost sounds silly to even say it. Friends can put on a hat, cut their hair, and still we know them by their face. We can do this for thousands upon thousands of faces without ever giving it a moment's thought. But imagine for a second what life would be like if you couldn't, if your wife or husband looked like a stranger; you couldn't tell your kids apart; couldn't recognize yourself in a mirror. Well that's what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, that can make it nearly impossible to recognize or identify faces.

 

If you've never heard of face blindness, you're not alone -- chances are your doctor hasn't either. It's been unknown to most of the medical world until very recently. Hearing about it can feel a little like entering the twilight zone. But for people who are face blind, the condition is very real.

 

For more information on face blindness -- and to take a test -- click here

To visit Dr. Oliver Sack's website, click here

 

Jacob Hodes is one of them. He's 31 years old, he has a college degree, has had great jobs, and he seems perfectly normal -- just don't ask him to identify any faces.

 

Lesley Stahl: We're going to put up the first one, even very famous ones.

 

 

Jacob Hodes: [Picture of John Travolta] No idea.

 

We showed Jacob faces without hair, a pure test of facial recognition.

 

Jacob Hodes: [Will Smith] No.

 

Clearly Jacob could see my face, but he says if we happened to run into each other in a few days, he wouldn't know me from any other woman with short blonde hair.

 

Brad Duchaine: They meet somebody, they have a good time with them, they have a nice relationship. Then, a week later, they walk past them.

 

Brad Duchaine is a professor at Dartmouth College who has been studying face blindness for nearly 15 years. He says the hardest thing to understand is how people can see a familiar face but not recognize it. So he created a demonstration to give me a little taste. Faces turned upside down.

 

Brad Duchaine: So here are some famous faces. You're gonna be tempted to twist your head, but don't do it.

 

Lesley Stahl: OK.

 

Brad Duchaine: You know, can you--

 

Lesley Stahl: Boy, that is hard.

 

Brad Duchaine: Can you identify any of these people?

 

I was completely at a loss.

 

Lesley Stahl: You think I'd know all of these people?

 

Brad Duchaine: You've seen them all a lot.

 

Lesley Stahl: I don't know any of these people. I really don't.

 

Brad Duchaine: You wanna see 'em upright?

 

Lesley Stahl: Sure.

 

It was astonishing. With just that click, they became recognizable people before my eyes.

 

Lesley Stahl: I know John Travolta. I know Morley.

 

And there was Denzel Washington, Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock. But the one that really got me was the young woman on the lower right, my daughter.

 

Lesley Stahl: I didn't know my own daughter?

 

Brad Duchaine: Yeah.

 

Lesley Stahl: I didn't know my own daughter. Wow.

 

Lesley Stahl: So is this-- am I getting a feeling for what people with face blindness have?

 

Brad Duchaine: This is, when you look at that, there's clearl-- there's a face there.

 

Lesley Stahl: Oh yeah.

 

Brad Duchaine: There are parts. There are eyes. There's mouth. But you just can't put it together.

 

Lesley Stahl: Wow. That's stunning. I feel terrible for them now.

 

Brad Duchaine: Yeah. It's really difficult.

 

And largely unknown. Prosopagnosia only got its name in the 1940s, when a couple of soldiers came back from World War II with head injuries and couldn't recognize their wife or parents. And it took another 50 years for science to discover that people could be born face blind, like Jacob Hodes and Jo Livingston, a retired teacher, Ben Dubrovsky, a software products designer, and Meg Novotny, a doctor.

 

Lesley Stahl: If I were your patient, we-- you'd spent a long time with me discussing a problem. I come back the next time.

 

Meg Novotny: Oh, no, no, no. You walk out to the window at the front and start checking out and I walk out of the room and I don't know who you are.

 

Lesley Stahl: Come on.

 

She relies on patient charts, she told us but there aren't any of those in Ben's office where lunch in the cafeteria can be tricky.

 

Ben Dubrovsky: I was sitting down at lunch having a discussion with someone about one of my projects and the guy across the table gets up from lunch and says, "God, that's really interesting. When you have that meeting can you invite me? Thanks. See ya." Who is it? I don't know.

 

Lesley Stahl: Who is it?

 

Ben Dubrovsky: I have no idea.

 

Lesley Stahl: Is it a memory issue?

 

Jacob Hodes: Not only.

 

Jo Livingston: The memory is never created.

 

Lesley Stahl: The face doesn't get put--

 

Jo Livingston: It doesn't get filed.

 

So they have to rely on other strategies to identify people: hair, body shape, the way people walk, their voice, even style of dress. But Jacob told us it can all fall apart when someone changes their hair, like a colleague named Sylvia who he couldn't find one day until she started putting her hair into her usual ponytail.

 

Jacob Hodes: And she like put it into the ponytail. And once it was in place that was Sylvia. It clicked. Then she took her hair back out of that ponytail.

 

Lesley Stahl: Right then and there?

 

Jacob Hodes: Yep. She just put it in and then took it out and--

 

Lesley Stahl: So she went from Sylvia, not Sylvia, Sylvia, not Sylvia?

 

Jacob Hodes: She disappeared.

 

Lesley Stahl: Come on.

 

Jacob Hodes: Yeah.

 

To him it was as though her face had changed into someone else's before his eyes.

 

Jacob Hodes: So now I'm confronted with this situation that got weird. Because I knew this person was Sylvia, but it didn't feel like Sylvia.

 

Faces mean so much to us: identity, beauty, character, a place to hang all our memories about a person. Faces have captivated artists forever, so it may surprise you to learn that the man who painted these faces, renowned portraitist Chuck Close is also face blind, and severely so.

 

Lesley Stahl: Let's say you went out to have dinner with somebody and then you saw her the next day--

 

Chuck Close: Wouldn't remember her.

 

And yet he has spent his career -- even after a collapsed spinal artery left him mostly paralyzed -- painting, well...

 

Lesley Stahl: Faces. Chuck Close has face blindness and he paints faces.

 

Chuck Close: The reason I think I was driven to it was to take images of people that matter to me and commit them to memory in the best way I can, which is to slow the whole process down, break it down into lots of little memorable pieces.

 

Which is exactly how he creates these works. He can't make sense of a whole face, so he works from a photograph with a grid on it, and translates what he sees -- square by square -- onto his canvas.

 

Lesley Stahl: Well, guess what we've done?

 

Chuck Close: I don't know.

 

Lesley Stahl: We put together a quiz for you.

 

We brought some of our famous faces along to show him...

 

Chuck Close: From the chin, I think it's-- um, Leno.

 

...and were surprised that he did pretty darn well.

 

Chuck Close: Well, from the lips, I think it's Tiger Woods.

 

Lesley Stahl: Yeah, well you're pretty good.

 

But of course not perfect...

 

Chuck Close: I don't have a clue.

 

Lesley Stahl: That's Tom Cruise.

 

Chuck Close: Right now, my guts are tied in knots because this very activity is the thing that makes me most nervous. Oh, now I have to figure out who this person is...

 

Because he isn't recognizing these faces the way most of us do. Every face is a puzzle he has to solve.

 

Chuck Close: What I'm thinking? You don't see too many people with just a mustache anymore, so that means it's probably somebody who's not alive. So if it's an African American of a certain age with a mustache, it might be Martin Luther King.

 

Lesley Stahl: You're amazing. You deduce, deduce, deduce. You're like Sherlock Holmes here.

 

Chuck Close: Yeah, this is how I get through life.

 

Of course he knew we were showing him famous faces. With our group, we threw in a trick one, a photo of Jo's daughter.

 

Lesley Stahl: Does anybody know who that is? Jo?

 

Jo Livingston: No.

 

Lesley Stahl: Jo, work on it, because it's somebody that Jo knows.

 

Jo Livingston: Well, it may be but nothing's coming.

 

Lesley Stahl: It's someone in your family.

 

But still she didn't get it...

 

Lesley Stahl: It's your daughter. Now can you see it? Is it clear now?

 

Jo Livingston: It is believable now.

 

We were baffled that a condition so extreme it could keep people from recognizing their own children could have been almost completely unknown until very recently. We asked Dr. Oliver Sacks, the famous chronicler of fascinating and bizarre neurological conditions, who wrote about face blindness in his latest book, "The Mind's Eye."

 

[Oliver Sacks: It is with our faces that we face the world...]

 

Lesley Stahl: How do you explain that the medical world did not identify this problem?

 

Oliver Sacks: It is not usually a complaint of people. People do not bring it up. Many people who are color blind, do not know of it until they take an army medical. One sort of assumes that other people are the way one is.

 

Ben Dubrovsky: It never, ever, ever in my life occurred to me that people would look at a face and just get it like that.

 

Jo Livingston: I believed that I was not good with people but I had no idea of the reason. I just thought I was stupid.

 

Jo only learned there was such a thing as face blindness when she stumbled across this article, and came in to be tested in Duchaine's lab. A few hours after her second visit, in a bizarre coincidence, she and Duchaine ended up attending the same event.

 

Brad Duchaine: I kept placing my face in a position where she could see it.

 

Jo Livingston: I realized that one of the group was staring at me in a way that people don't normally.

 

Brad Duchaine: And so finally at one point I said, "Do you know who I am?"

 

Jo Livingston: "Ah."

 

Brad Duchaine: And she put it all together.

 

Duchaine had seen face blindness in action; Jo had seen the missed connections of her life.

 

Jo Livingston: If that had been anybody else, they would have been presumably furious, would not have spoken to me and would have probably never have spoken to me again. But I would never have known they were there.

 

Lesley Stahl: Yeah.

 

Jo Livingston: It made me realize, "How many times have I done this?"

 

Lesley Stahl: Right. How many friends have you offended? How many people aren't talking to you and you don't know why?

 

Jo Livingston: And we'll never know.

 

Oliver Sacks: People do think you may be snubbing them or stupid, or mad, or inattentive. That's why it's so important to recognize what one has. And to admit it.

 

Which is exactly what Sacks himself has just done -- written about the fact that he too is face blind.

 

[Oliver Sacks: I have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as I can remember. My problem extends not only to my nearest and dearest, but also to myself. ]

 

Oliver Sacks: I've sometimes had the experience of apologizing to someone, and realizing it's a mirror.

 

Lesley Stahl: No.

 

Oliver Sacks: I have indeed.

 

Lesley Stahl: No. Because you didn't know it was you?

 

Oliver Sacks: I could see that it was a large, clumsy man with a beard. Now, I've now found a way of dealing with this. I have one special feature. I have rather large ears. If the large, clumsy man with a beard has extra large ears, it's probably me.

 

Lesley Stahl: I shouldn't be smiling, but it's funny.

 

Oliver Sacks: Well, it is. I mean, these things are both comic and serious.

 

And, surprisingly common. Recent studies show as many as 1 in 50 people may be face blind. And the search is on for clues inside their brains. We'll show you what the research is finding, plus, would you believe, super-recognizers...

 

Jennifer Jarett: I would say Mike Wallace.

 

Lesley Stahl: That is Mike Wallace!

 

...who never forget a face...

 

Jennifer Jarett: I don't even know how to get rid of people.

 

...when we come back.