Quote:
Originally posted by Dorito2
Our face is naturally the most unique part of our bodies, I think. Humans are adapted to recognize a human face from among other human faces.
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The disorders that make people face-blind are interesting.
First, there is a part of our visual cortex that detects "face-like" things. It then shunts the "face-information" over to our special-purpose "face-processing" part of our brain. Everything else goes to general pattern recognition, which isn't nearly as good.
So, normal people use a special purpose part of the brain to identify faces. We see more in the face than we do elsewhere, it isn't just practice, it's hard-wired.
Face-blindness is a somewhat rare condition. There are two kinds.
The first kind of face-blindness is a problem with the "face-shunt". Basically, faces get sent to the general pattern recognition. They see faces as nothing special: they are as likely to recognize you by your hands, your clothes, your hair, as they are by your face.
The second kind of face-blindness is even wierder. The "face-shunt" works fine, but the special purpose "face-processor" doesn't. So, whenever you see a face, it gets shunted off into ... a broken system. Not only don't they have the special face-skills the rest of us do, they can't even use general pattern recognition on it. Face-like structures don't get recognized. These people cannot recognize you based on your face, period: it is as if you had a blank mask on.
I believe the first kind is more common than the second.