“Super-recognizers” appear to be the opposites of prosopagnosics, people who suffer from “face blindness,” sometimes even failing to recognize immediate family members. Prosopagnosia, a term that combines the Greek words prosopon, or face, and agnosia, or ignorance, is believed to affect 2 percent of the population and can be congenital or the result of a brain injury or a stroke.
Facial recognition is both extremely complex and vitally essential, said Dr. Marlene Behrmann, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Behrmann has found that in prosopagnosics, structural fibers connecting the subregions of the brain involved in facial recognition are compromised.
“These regions are optimized for something that is really important and that, evolutionarily, is perhaps the most important thing we do,” she said. “You’ve go to know friend from foe really quickly. It’s crucial.”
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