<p>I don't want to hijack the important thread about Dec51995's son so I'm starting a new one. I thought the discussion about facial recognition, mental maps, perfect pitch and other brain differences was an interesting one. I always kind of take it for granted that finding your way around is easy, but I know some people have trouble. My D has some trouble in the city but, like her dad, can spot a deer out of the window of a moving car and a fish in the bottom of a creek. Me . . . . not so much. My mom has perfect pitch but poor spacial skills. I am all about spacial skills but can't tune an instrument to save my life. I have a kid who has amazing rhythm and an to polyrhythms and hands and feet doing different things and easily change time signatures - he just thinks that way and always has. We were at a student jazz festival yesterday and there are definitely some kids out there with bad time. Just musing but I find the human variation interesting.</p>
<p>Here is the quiz posted by compmom that got got us thinking about this topic . . .</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/”>http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/</a></p>
<p>.I have perfect pitch, so what is the question?</p>
<p>No question - the topic of facial blindness came up in a serious thread and rather than get off the more central topic I shifted over. I took the quiz that compmom posted and missed one and also find that I ma REALLY good with mental mapping and directions but I am equally bad with pitch. I just find it neat that people have brain center or whatever it is that makes them particularly adept at some sensory skills and they may be not so great as other areas. </p>
<p>I’m just curious about how different aptitudes track with one another.</p>
<p>saintfan,
Funny you should mention this because I have three 2E kids. 2E stands for twice exceptional. It is not a term I like because I am not quite sure it captures what is going on. I prefer my own term, which is I have kids strengths and weaknesses are at the tails of the bell curve. My oldest and youngest are not quite as far out on the tails, but my middle child is extreme. Raising him and getting him educated was not an easy task. Many wanted to give up on him. This is a kid who failed to pass Algebra 2 four times in HS but who is going on to get a PhD in Mathematics at a tier 1 institution. It is hard to understand the way our son would struggle to perform in school and yet be capable of understanding the material at a very sophisticated level. Teachers often thought it was because he was not trying or he was not capable. Without professional training most hit a wall when trying to educate him. We were fortunate to find professionals who helped teach him how to learn given how his brain worked and showed him ways to use his strengths to overcome his weaknesses. It was not easy and fortunately our son was motivated to learn so he was willing to do the work. But once he gained those “superpowers” as I like to call them doors opened up and he seems able to learn anything he wants to. He still has his weaknesses. He will never test well on standardized tests. He will always take more time to read material. </p>
<p>The reason this is relates to what you write is that my youngest son was talking about his frustration with something he is working on with ear training. And he was speculating that his struggle might be related to his learning challenges (which are similar to his brother’s but not quite as extreme). We talked about the things we learned to help our son learn how to learn and also perhaps having our son meet with one of the professionals who worked with our son to help him learn how to learn. I suggested our son make sure to use multi sensory techniques to help him with the memory part of ear-training. </p>
<p>Hi…longtime lurker, first time poster here. My son, (hs sophomore), has both face blindness and perfect pitch. He also can’t find his way out of a paper bag! Getting from point A to point B requires serious concentration and memorization on his part. I found this short article that links the two to an inability to generalize or abstract. I find these brain differences fascinating as well. 
<a href=“http://www.memory-key.com/research/news/face-blindness-example-inability-generalize”>http://www.memory-key.com/research/news/face-blindness-example-inability-generalize</a></p>
<p>I haven’t done formal testing and I’m not way out on the tail on anything that I know of, but I’m definitely a visual learner and not so much auditory. Show me a map once and I can get there. I am good with faces. I need to read a problem or passage myself, though, to solve or understand it. I don’t like it when someone wants help or wants to quiz me and reads aloud what they have in front of them. I can’t take it in that way. When I did music I can sight read quickly and translate from eyes to brain to fingers, but don’t ask me to jam or pick something out by ear.</p>
<p>I just now put two and two together here . . . my DH is very auditory and likes to tell these l<em>o</em>n_g stories about his day or some event. I have trouble following and will ask him to just give me the ABCs of it up front then fill in with all his detail . . . just cut to the chase. Saintkid, also very auditory, used to listen to CDs of storytellers while falling asleep as a toddler. He loved them but they would drive me insane. Hmmmm . . .</p>
<p>Interesting article - indeestudios. I feel like I am the opposite. I am great at the generalization but can get bogged down by the details. That’s why I hate GPS or a list of directions. Just tell me my endpoint and I’ll figure out the in between even making route adjustments in real time as traffic and other obstacles present. GPS makes me feel like the blind man and the elephant just looking at one 4 square inch patch of skin on the creature’s side. I am really good at recognizing songs within a few bars of intro (the whole) but not good at pitches and keys (the parts).</p>
<p>Hi Saintfan, I’m the one that took the test and got a 100% on it. I always knew I was a visual learner. I am not very musical, that’s the daughter. I do enjoy all types of music and was recently told I have a very good ear for tuning. I can recognize most notes played on an instrument at whatever octave. I have normal to above average hearing capabilities but here is my issue: at times I can’t tell where a certain sound is coming from. Everyone will point in one direction and I’ll point in another. Not always but maybe at certain frequencies? Do you have any idea what that means? </p>
<p>I’m definitely not a visual learner. And I got a poor score: 75% of the celebrities whom I even recognized. I think I recognize people mostly by their hair. ;)</p>
<p>Do we need a just hair quiz? Imagine: Reagan, Trump, Farrah, Hillary, Condoleeza, Gwyneth, Sarah, Clay Matthews, the list of people you could recognize by their hair only goes on and on. </p>
<p>Fabio ;)) </p>
<p>Jennifer Anniston, Goldie Hahn, Steven Segal, Richard Simmons, Richard Sherman . . .</p>
<p>You left out Don King and Albert Einstein.</p>
<p>I got the 97% and missed Tony Blair. I recognize faces everywhere. Sometimes I recognize people I don’t even know but have seen before somewhere and then I have to think until I can come up with where it was I saw the person before. I also can recognize places I’ve only been to once, even as just a passenger in a car, not paying any attention to the route. I never get lost, and I always feel like I know what direction I’m facing, but I occasionally am wrong and then I almost can’t function, fighting the internal compass in my head that is wrong. I don’t have perfect pitch but learned to be able to sing A (and the other notes, by comparison) by taking violin lessons.</p>
<p>S is face blind and place blind. Has perfect pitch. I can’t figure out whose genes he got because no one in our family has this configuration of abilities and disabilities.</p>
<p>I actually just don’t know a lot about celebrities. I had never heard of (or only vaguely hear of) many in the test. I think it’s a flawed test because it has a lot of cultural assumptions. </p>
<p>Now I’ve gotten to wondering if you put celebrity faces in the hair of other celebrities could you both identify the face AND the hair? I’m thinking maybe Ben Stiller in Ann Coulter’s hair . . .</p>
<p>True, glassharmonica- it tries to control for that do a degree by asking if you knew who the person was but just didn’t recognize them. On the margins though, it looks pretty accurate in that I bet most of us Blair missers would have recognized him with hair and a suit and tie. He was just unfamiliar enough to be hard for most without contextual clues.</p>
<p>I definitely missed Tony Blair, but I got all the other politicians. I didn’t know some of the movie stars even though they look familiar because I don’t pay much attention to movie celebrities. If they had put up photos of Hilary Hahn. Joshua Bell, Sarah Chang, and Itzhak Perlman I’d have done better probably. :P</p>
<p>Would you recognize Hilary Hahn in Perlman’s hair? ;)</p>