After giving a lecture in Windsor, England last February, neuroscientist Bradley Duchaine was approached by a man who'd been in the audience. He told Duchaine, professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, that he sometimes had trouble recognizing faces, even those of people he knew. Duchaine brought him to his lab, ran some tests, and diagnosed him with prosopagnosia, characterized as an inability to recognize familiar faces. "He was certainly atrocious" at recognizing faces, says Duchaine. When given face-memory tests and shown a battery of celebrity photos, "most people get about 80% correct. This [person] scored about 40%." He was British, but "he wasn't recognizing Tony Blair."
While developmental prosopagnosia is estimated to affect some two percent of the world's population, research on the subject is still being accumulated, mostly because human subjects are few and far between. Most of the people Duchaine has tested had found ...
