<p>(This is relevant to high school because high school involves meeting and recognizing people. >__> Also, I like HSL better than CCC.)</p>
<p>Okay, so... (unnecessary but interesting, IMO, back-story time!) I was at my research mentor's site today. He's a professor of Cognitive Science and he runs tests on people with abnormal neurological conditions as well as on normal people, both in the hopes of uncovering universal principles about human cognition. He's super nice and chill (and brilliant.) ANYWAYS, one of his test subjects is this really nice woman in her 50s with PCA (Posterial Cortical Atrophy), which is similar to Alzheimer's Disease in that it is a neurodegenerative disorder -- it is progressive and can be described as the wasting away of the brain -- except that it targets a particular area rather than the whole brain. It's a really unfortunate condition. :( We run a lot of tests on her in order to analyze her visual perception (orientation of objects, relationships between objects, etc.) as well as her (sadly, deteriorating) memory and linguistic abilities. </p>
<p>One of the tests we ran today was a memory test thinly veiled as a... not memory test. We showed the patient 50 words, one at a time, giving her three seconds to judge them aloud as "pleasant" or "not pleasant." The judgments weren't the point of the experiment, though -- immediately after going through the list, we gave her 50 pairs of words, one at a time, each of which contained one word that had been in the activity, and had her identify which one she had just seen. She got 29/50, which isn't too good -- chance alone dictates that she'd get 25/50. :/</p>
<p>THEN (I'm getting to the point) we did the same test except with faces. We showed her 50 pictures of faces, one at a time for three seconds each, having her judge them as pleasant-looking or unpleasant-looking. Afterward, we showed her the pairs of faces, each containing an unfamiliar one and a familiar one, and asked her to tell us which one she'd seen before. This time, she performed extremely well. She spoke with a confidence that we'd rarely heard from her and got 41/50, which is just below normal for her age range. We were amazed by the discrepancy between the two scores. I was amazed by the 41/50 -- watching the test, I didn't think I'd have gotten even half of them right. </p>
<p>My mentor explained to me later that according to many scientists, the brain undergoes entirely different processes in recognizing faces from those that it undergoes when identifying objects, utilizing regions of the brain that are separate from the visual cortex. I told him that I've often wondered if I had a problem with facial recognition, and he told me that he has similar problems. Some symptoms that we share: </p>
<p>-- Not being able to recognize celebrities.<br>
-- Not being able to recognize actors, regardless of celebrity status/knowing their names, from one instance to another. For example, when people say "Oh, [Movie X] has that guy who played [Character] in [Movie Y]," I'm like, "Wait, you remember what that person looked like?! I forgot two seconds after the movie..."
-- Not being able to keep track of characters even within a movie. My friends hate watching movies with me because I'm constantly asking for explanation, since I don't understand what character is doing what.
-- Not recognizing people after meeting them two or three times.
-- Even if I see someone often in one context, not recognizing them in a different, unexpected context. </p>
<p>He told me that there exists a condition called [prosopagnosia[/url</a>], commonly referred to as face blindness. Usually it occurs as a result of injury, but there's a type that is congenital. </p>
<p>So I've been online researching it and I found some tests for it on [url=<a href="http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php%5DVisual">http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php]Visual</a> and Face Recognition Tests on the Internet](<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia%5Dprosopagnosia%5B/url">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia) ... I didn't take the first one 'cause I'm gonna take an official one in the lab next week and I didn't want to ruin my score by practicing, lol. But I started the famous faces one, got through three, and closed the window in disgust with myself, haha. I suckkkk. </p>
<p>Now I'm not gonna lie, I'm somewhat of a hypochondriac. I always diagnose myself with diseases/mental conditions... I mean, I'm still pretty sure I have narcolepsy, lol. But considering that (especially lately) I've been talking to my friends and my parents about most of the symptoms I just listed above -- I noticed them BEFORE learning about prosopagnosia today or even knowing that there was such a condition -- I think this is a little more legit than my normal hypochondriac episodes. I guess I'll find out if I'm just being paranoid or if I actually have this when I take the Cambridge diagnosis test next Friday.</p>
<p>Sooo yeah. This post is unnecessarily long but I wanted to tell my whole FASCINATING story instead of just being like "HAY GUYS DISCUSS/TAKE THIS TEST FOR PROSOPAGNOSIA!" Sorry if it was a waste of your time. But uhm... discuss/take this test for prosopagnosia pl0x.</p>