The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (48 page)

In those years I had to take the Boston Post Road to get from Mount Vernon to the hospital where I worked, on Allerton Avenue in the Bronx. Though I took the same route twice a day for eight years, the road never became familiar to me, I never recognized the buildings on either side, and I often took the wrong turn, realizing it only when I came to one of two landmarks that were unmistakable, even for me: at one end, Allerton Avenue, which had a large sign, or the Bronx River Parkway, which loomed over the Boston Road.

I had been working with my assistant, Kate, for about six years when we arranged to rendezvous in a midtown office for a meeting with my publisher. I arrived and announced myself to the receptionist, but failed to note that Kate had already arrived and was sitting in the waiting area. That is, I saw a young woman there but did not realize that it was her. After about five minutes, smiling, she said, "Hello, Oliver. I was wondering how long it would take you to recognize me."

Parties, even my own birthday parties, are a challenge. (More than once, Kate has asked my guests to wear name tags.) I have been accused of "absent-mindedness," and no doubt this is true. But I think that a significant part of what is variously called my "shyness," my "reclusiveness," my "social ineptitude," my "eccentricity," even my "Asperger's syndrome," is a consequence and a misinterpretation of my difficulty recognizing faces.

My problem with recognizing faces extends not only to my nearest and dearest but also to myself. Thus, on several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror. The opposite situation once occurred at a restaurant. Sitting at a sidewalk table, I turned toward the restaurant window and began grooming my beard, as I often do. I then realized that what I had taken to be my reflection was not grooming himself but looking at me oddly.

In 1988 I met Franco Magnani, the "memory artist," and during the next couple of years I spent weeks with him, talking about his paintings, his life, and even traveling to Italy with him to visit the village where he grew up. When I finally submitted an article about him to
The New Yorker,
Robert Gottlieb, who was then the magazine's editor-in-chief, read the piece and said, "Very nice, fascinating—but what does he
look
like? Can you add some description?" I parried this awkward (and, to me, unanswerable) question by saying, "Who cares what he looks like? The piece is about his work."

"Our readers will want to know," Bob said. "They need to picture him."

"I will have to ask Kate," I said. Bob gave me a peculiar look.

***

I assumed that I was just very bad at recognizing faces, as my friend Jonathan was very good at it—that this was within the limits of normal variation, and that he and I just stood at opposite ends of a spectrum. It was only when I went to Australia to visit my older brother Marcus, whom I had scarcely seen in thirty-five years, and discovered that he, too, had exactly the same difficulties recognizing faces and places, that it dawned on me that this was something beyond normal variation, that we both had a specific trait, a so-called prosopagnosia, probably with a distinctive genetic basis.

(Our other two brothers seemed to have normal powers of facial recognition. My father, a general practitioner, was immensely gregarious and seemed to know hundreds of people, not to mention the thousands of patients in his practice. My mother, in contrast, seemed almost pathologically shy. She had a small circle of intimates—family members and colleagues—and was very ill at ease in large gatherings. I cannot help wondering, in retrospect, if some of her "shyness" was due to a mild prosopagnosia.)

That there were others like me was brought home in various ways. The meeting of two people with prosopagnosia, in particular, can be very challenging. A few years ago, I wrote to one of my colleagues to tell him that I admired his new book. His assistant then phoned Kate to arrange a dinner, and they settled on a weekend meeting at a restaurant in my neighborhood.

"There may be a problem," Kate said. "Dr. Sacks cannot recognize anyone."

"It's the same with Dr. W.," his assistant replied.

"And another thing," Kate added. "Dr. Sacks cannot find restaurants or other places; he gets lost very easily—he can't even recognize his own building sometimes."

"Yes, it's the same with Dr. W.," his assistant said.

Somehow, we did manage to meet, and enjoyed dinner together. But I have no idea what Dr. W. looks like, and he probably wouldn't recognize me, either.

Although such examples may seem comical, they are sometimes quite devastating. A person with very severe prosopagnosia may be unable to recognize his spouse or to pick out his own child in a group of people.

Jane Goodall also has a certain degree of prosopagnosia. Her problems extend to recognizing chimpanzees as well as people—thus, she says, she is often unable to distinguish individual chimps by their faces. Once she knows a particular chimp well, she ceases to have difficulties; similarly, she has no problem with family and friends. But, she says, "I have huge problems with people with 'average' faces ... I have to search for a mole or something. I find it very embarrassing! I can be all day with someone and not know them the next day."

She added that she, too, has difficulty recognizing places: "I just don't know where I am until I am very familiar with the route. I have to turn and look at landmarks so I can find my way back. This was a problem in the forest, and I often got lost."

In 1985 I published a case history called "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," about Dr. P., who had a very severe visual agnosia. He was not able to recognize faces or their expressions. Moreover, he could not identify, or even categorize, objects; thus, he was unable to recognize a glove, to distinguish it as an article of clothing, or to perceive that it resembled a hand.

After Dr. P.'s story was published, I began to get letters from correspondents who would compare their difficulties in recognizing places and faces with his. In 1991 Anne F. wrote to me, describing her experiences:

I believe that three people in my immediate family have visual agnosias: my father, a sister, and myself. We each have traits in common with your Dr. P., but, hopefully, not to the same degree. The most striking behavior we all share in common with Dr. P. is the prosopagnosia. My father, a man who has had a successful radio career here in Canada (his particular gift is an ability to mimic voices), was unable to recognize his wife ... in a recent photograph. At a wedding reception, he asked a stranger to identify the man sitting next to his daughter (my husband of five years at the time).

I have walked past my husband, while staring directly at his face, on several occasions without recognizing him. I have no difficulty recognizing him, however, in situations or places where I am expecting to see him. I am also able to recognize people immediately when they begin to speak, even if I've heard their voice only once in the past.

Unlike Dr. P., I feel I can read people well on an emotional level ... I don't have the degree of agnosia for common objects that Dr. P. had. [However], like Dr. P., I am totally incapable of establishing a topographical representation of space ... I have no memory for where I put things unless I verbally encode the location. Once an object leaves my hands, it drops off the edge of the world into a void.

While Anne F. seems to have prosopagnosia and topographical agnosia on a genetic or familial basis, others may develop this (or any other form of agnosia) in consequence of a stroke, a tumor, an infection, or an injury—or, like Dr. P., a degenerative disease such as Alzheimer's—that has damaged a particular part of the brain. Joan C., another correspondent, had an unusual history in this regard: she had developed a brain tumor in the right occipital lobe, and this was removed when she was fourteen. It seems likely, though it is difficult to be certain, that her prosopagnosia was the result of the tumor or the surgery. Her inability to recognize faces has often been misinterpreted by others: "I've been told that I'm rude, or a space cadet, or (according to a psychiatrist) suffering from a psychiatric disorder."

As I continued to receive more and more letters from people with prosopagnosia or topographical agnosia, it became clear to me that "my" visual problem was not uncommon and must affect many people around the world.

 

Face recognition is crucially important for humans, and the vast majority of us are able to identify thousands of faces individually or to easily pick out familiar faces in a crowd. A special expertise is needed to make such distinctions, and this expertise is nearly universal, not only in humans but in other primates. How, then, do people with prosopagnosia manage?

In the past few decades, we have become very conscious of the brain's plasticity—how one part or system of the brain may take over the functions of a defective or damaged one. But this does not seem to occur with prosopagnosia or topographical agnosia—they are usually lifelong conditions that do not lessen as one grows older. People with prosopagnosia, therefore, need to be resourceful and inventive in finding strategies for circumventing their deficits: recognizing people by an unusual nose or beard, for example, or by their spectacles or a certain type of clothing.

Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and, of course, context and expectation are paramount—one expects to see one's students at school, one's colleagues at the office, and so on. Such strategies, both conscious and unconscious, become so automatic that people with moderate prosopagnosia can remain unaware of how poor their facial recognition actually is, and are startled if it is revealed to them by testing (for example, with photographs that omit ancillary clues like hair or eyeglasses).

The artist Chuck Close, who is famous for his gigantic portraits of faces, has severe, lifelong prosopagnosia. He believes it has played a crucial role in driving his unique artistic vision. "I don't know who anyone is and essentially have no memory at all for people in real space," he says. "But when I flatten them out in a photograph I can commit that image to memory."

Perhaps this "flattening" allows him to memorize certain features. Although I myself may be unable to recognize a particular face, I can recognize various things
about
a face: that there is a large nose, a pointed chin, tufted eyebrows, or protruding ears. Such features become the identifying markers by which I recognize people. (I think that for similar reasons I find it easier to recognize a caricature than a straightforward portrait or a photograph.) I am reasonably good at judging age and gender, though I have made a few embarrassing blunders. I am far better at recognizing people by the way they move, their "motor style." And even if I cannot recognize particular faces, I am sensitive to the beauty of faces, and to their expressions.

I avoid conferences, parties, and large gatherings as much as I can, knowing that they will lead to anxiety and embarrassing situations, since I not only fail to recognize people that I know well but tend also to greet strangers as old friends. (Like many prosopagnosics, I avoid greeting people by name, lest I use the wrong one, and I depend on others to save me from egregious social blunders.)

I am much better at recognizing my neighbors' dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbors themselves. Thus, when I see a youngish woman with a Rhodesian ridgeback hound, I realize that she lives in the apartment next to mine. If I see an older lady with a friendly golden retriever, I know that this is someone from down the block. But if I should pass either woman on the street without her dog she might as well be a complete stranger.

***

The idea that "the mind," an immaterial, airy thing, could be embodied in a lump of flesh—the brain—was intolerable to seventeenth-century religious thinking; hence the dualism of Descartes and others. But physicians, observing the effects of strokes and other brain injuries, had long had reason to suspect that the functions of the mind and the brain were linked. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the anatomist Franz Joseph Gall proposed that all mental functions must arise from the brain—not from the "soul," as many people imagined, or from the heart or the liver. Instead, he envisioned within the brain a collection of twenty-seven "organs," each responsible for a different moral or mental faculty. Such faculties, for Gall, included what we now call perceptual functions, such as the sensation of color or sound; cognitive faculties, like memory, mechanical aptitude, and speech and language; and even "moral" traits, such as friendship, benevolence, and pride. (For these heretical ideas, he was exiled from Vienna and would eventually end up in revolutionary France, where he hoped a more scientific approach might be embraced.)

The physiologist Marie Jean Pierre Flourens decided to investigate Gall's theory by removing slices of the brain in living animals, chiefly pigeons. But he could not find any evidence to correlate specific areas of the cortex with specific faculties (perhaps because one needs very delicate and discrete ablations in order to do so, especially in the tiny pigeon cortex). The cortex, he concluded, was equipotential, as homogeneous and undifferentiated as the liver. "The brain," it is said, "secretes thought as the liver secretes bile."

Flourens's notion of an equipotential cortex dominated thought until the studies of Paul Broca in the 1860s. Broca performed autopsies on many patients with expressive aphasia, all of whom, he showed, had damage that was limited to the frontal lobes on the left side. In 1865 he was able to say, famously, "We speak with the left hemisphere," and the notion of a homogeneous and undifferentiated brain, it seemed, was laid to rest. Broca felt that he had located a "motor center for words" in a particular part of the left frontal lobe (an area that we now call Broca's area).

This seemed to promise a new sort of localization, a genuine correlation of neurological and cognitive functions with specific centers in the brain. Neurology moved confidently ahead, identifying "centers" of every sort: Broca's motor center for words was followed by Wernicke's auditory center for words, and Déjerine's visual center for words—all in the left hemisphere, the language hemisphere—and a center for visual recognition in the right hemisphere.