Can you pick out the Starbucks barista who served you in the crowd two weeks ago?
If so, you could be one of the 0.1 to one percent of people known as ‘super recognizers’ whose brains have the amazing ability to remember faces.
For these people, a short glance is enough Identifying an anonymous celebrity Or remember Totally strangeEven years later.
Even if some of them are flipped upside down, pixelated, or viewed from a different angle, you can recognize or match images you’ve seen once.
A Epidemic era study They even found that super-recognizers could identify a masked person just by looking at their eyes.
Although the research is still new, experts are skeptical that it has super-credentials. Spots in brain activity When they recognize a face that tells their brain that this is important visual information.
In the following days, weeks, and months, instead of that information being discarded by the brain, these people’s brains retain it.
Dr. Richard Russell, professor of psychology at Gettysburg College PennsylvaniaIn the year In 2021, he said: ‘Society operates on the assumption that everyone is the same when it comes to recognizing faces, and that everyone sees the world in the same way. ‘This is simply not true.’
If you’re a super recognizer, see if you can spot the flipped celebrity photos below.
Can you identify this actor or this billionaire? If you can, you can be a super creditor
Dr. Russell In 2009, he was part of a team of researchers who coined the term ‘extraordinary recognition’ in a study of four Americans who said they were ‘special’. keep in mind When it comes to faces.
Before they became famous, they were able to distinguish between photographs of famous people and images from different angles and pixels.
Dr. Mike Ramon, an assistant professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, said The Washington Post Super recognizers ‘have the unique ability to produce a three-dimensional representation of a person’s face, even when only seeing a single 2D image of the person.’
According to Dr. Ramon’s research, super recognizers are especially drawn to the future.
See, you guessed it: actress Angelina Jolie is on the left, while Elon Musk is on the right.
as if 2022 studyShe and her colleagues, though, spend their time looking at faces when super-recognizers are shown random pictures of everyday life — a person using a computer, for example.
No matter where the face is in the photo, their eyes are immediately drawn forward.
“For reasons we still don’t know, faces seem to be very good for super recognizers,” Dr. Ramon said.
She also said that their brains react differently the second they see the images.
What about this political influencer and star athlete? Less than one percent of the population can recognize it upside down.
A 2024 study A study conducted in Dr. Ramon’s lab looked at the brain activity of 16 super recognizers and 17 controls, while participants viewed images of plants, animals, faces, and other scenes.
After being shown an image within 65 milliseconds, which is faster than the blink of an eye, their brains immediately responded differently than the control group.
At the other end of the spectrum from super-recognizers are people with prosopagnosia, who are more recognizable. Face blindness.
Two to three in 100 Americans with the condition have trouble recognizing even the most familiar faces, including their own, as well as emotions or recognizing a person’s age or gender.
Many people experience face blindness from conditions such as dementia, brain tumors, and epilepsy, because these can cause brain damage that damages the cells responsible for processing visual information.
However, some people may be born with it due to a genetic mutation.
Meanwhile, the second flipped photos were of Ivanka Trump and Tom Brady.
Experts have pointed out that although super recognizers have exceptional memories, their skills are not perfect.
Dr. David White, head of the Face Research Laboratory at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told the Washington Post that, just like normal people, super recognizers have a harder time identifying faces of different ethnicities than their own. .
however, A study His team showed that when super-recognizers make mistakes, they maintain more confidence than other professionals who need to study faces, such as police officers.
If you’re trying to improve your facial recognition, Dr. White’s research suggests focusing on features like scars, ears, freckles, and blemishes.
His team also prepared one Online test To determine if you are a super creditor.
This is after a study conducted earlier this year revealed the known horror ‘Demon face syndrome’
Only one in 1,000 people is a super recognizer and can pick out these two actors in one second.
Only about 75 cases have been reported of a syndrome known medically as prosopametamorphopsia (PMO), in which people perceive unusual and often distorted changes in their faces.
But one rare individual with the condition, a 58-year-old man who spoke to neuropsychologists at Dartmouth, has the unique ability to see faces regularly on paper and screens, despite seeing more terrifying ‘demon faces’ in real life.
This dissociation allowed him and his researchers to reliably describe, for the first time, what faces might look like to someone with PMO’s shameful vision.
Actors Timothée Chalamet and Sidney Sweeney were the final two for the reversal. how good were you
Dartmouth professor Brad Duchaine told DailyMail.com that most articles about PMO are written by neurologists who have experienced it in their clinical practice.
‘Our account is particularly interesting’ because (…) we can be sure that his distorted views accurately reflect what he experienced.
A rare individual with the variant ‘Demon Face Syndrome’ has the unique ability to see faces on paper and screens normally, despite seeing more terrifying ‘demon faces’ in real life.
The split allowed researchers for the first time to accurately describe what the face of someone living with demonic prosopametamorphosis (PMO) looked like.
