Face blindness and prosopagnosia: causes and characteristics

¶ … Blind by Joshua Davis is an introduction to prosopagnosia, the neurological condition responsible for the inability of some people to recognize human faces or distinguish one from the next. Prior to the contributions of neuropsychologist Brad Duchaine, individuals suffering from the condition rarely recognized that they were abnormal and simply assumed they were "bad with faces." Between the fact that those with the condition often had no idea that they were different from anybody else and the fact that most of the cases that were recognized wee caused by traumatic brain injury, prosopagnosia was not a condition that lent itself to easy study. That is why, prior to Duchaine's contribution to the field, about all that was known about the process of facial recognition in humans was that there was a certain region of the brain responsible for that specific function.

The essay also highlights the importance of facial recognition to the concept of human love, particularly in the meeting of Zoe Hunn, the young British model who had told her physician that she could not connect with anybody emotionally because she everyone looked the same to her. She fell almost instantly in love with the first person she managed to recognize, because facial recognition was so important to her that "It didn't matter that he was a 38-year-old trying to make ends meet. She could see him" (p. 73). That passage is doubly interesting because from the psychological perspective, the basis of the psychology of human love is, precisely, mutual visibility, in the metaphorical sense. That raises the first question I would pose to my classmates: How much of human love depends on physical appearance and superficial attraction and how much depends on other aspects of a person?

The other passage that I liked was the description of Duchaine's evolution into a respected professional after the way his earlier academic career suggested that he might just as easily have become a neuropsychology graduate school dropout playing video games. In that regard, I liked the simple description (p 71) that "[i]n exchange for shining a light on the disorder, prosopagnosia had made him an adult."

That also raises another question I would pose to my classmates: At what point does a person become an adult? What do you think Duchaine would have done with his life if he had never discovered Bill Choisser's website?