Neuroscientists are just beginning to understand the human brain's remarkable capacity to recognise faces
Researchers are now studying 'super-recognisers' who have the uncanny ability to never forget a face
"I am much better at recognising my neighbours' dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbours themselves," renowned neurologist and prolific writer Oliver Sacks wrote in his book "The Mind's Eye."
Sacks was a prosopagnosic, someone who has difficulties recognising familiar faces — even, sometimes, their own. The condition, prosopagnosia, is a word that combines the Greek words "prosopon," or face, with "agnos," or lack of knowledge.
In the 1990s, researchers identified a region of the brain that is thought to play a key role in our ability to identify a face. They named it the fusiform face area.
Some people who've experienced brain damage to that region suffer from prosopagnosia, but more recently, researchers have diagnosed the condition in people without brain damage as well. This type of prosopagnosia is known as developmental prosopagnosia — its sufferers appear to be born with it. Nevertheless, the deficit doesn't appear to negatively affect other intellectual efforts in those people.
Initially, researchers assumed that there were only two groups of people when it came to facial recognition: prosopagnosics, or people who were face-blind, and everyone else.
They no longer think it's quite that simple.