Could you identify the Starbucks barista who served you two weeks ago in a busy crowd at a concert?
If so, you could be one of the 0.1 to one percent of people known as “super recognizers,” whose brains have an astonishing ability to remember faces.
For these people, a brief glance is enough to identify an incognito celebrity or remember a complete stranger, even years later.
Some can also identify or match faces they have seen once, even if they are flipped, pixelated, or shown at a different angle.
TO pandemic era study He even discovered that super recognizers could identify a masked person based on their eyes alone.
Although the research is still new, experts suspect that super-recognizers have spikes in brain activity when they recognize a face, telling their brain that this is important visual information.
Instead of the brain discarding that data in favor of something different in the coming days, weeks, and months, these people’s brains continue to retain it.
Dr. Richard Russell, professor of psychology at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, said in 2021: “Society operates under the assumption that everyone is more or less the same when it comes to recognizing faces and that everyone sees the world in the same way. “That’s simply not true.”
If you think you’re a connoisseur, try identifying the upside-down celebrity photos below.
Can you recognize this actress or this billionaire? If you can, you can be a super recognizer
Dr. Russell was part of a team of researchers who coined the term “super recognizer” in 2009 with a study of four Americans who claimed to have “exceptional” memory for faces.
They were able to identify photographs of celebrities from before they were famous and photographs from different angles and with pixelation.
Dr. Meike Ramon, assistant professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, told the Washington Post that super recognizers have a “unique ability to derive a three-dimensional representation of a face, even when viewing only a 2D image of the person.”
Dr. Ramón’s research suggests that super-recognizers are also particularly drawn to faces.
See if you were right: on the left is actress Angelina Jolie, while Elon Musk is on the right
in a study 2022She and her colleagues found that even when super-recognizers were shown random images from everyday life (someone using a computer, for example), they spent most of their time looking at faces.
Their eyes were also drawn to faces immediately, regardless of where the face was in the photo.
Dr Ramon said: “It appears that faces are extremely salient to super recognizers for reasons we do not yet know.”
He noted that their brains also seem to respond differently to images the second they see them.
How about this political influencer and star athlete? Less than one percent of the population can recognize them backwards
TO study 2024 The study conducted by Dr. Ramón’s laboratory analyzed the brain activity of 16 super-recognizers and 17 controls while the participants looked at images of plants, animals, faces and other scenes.
In just 65 milliseconds of an image appearing, which is faster than the blink of an eye, their brains immediately responded differently than the control group.
At the other end of the super-recognizer spectrum are people with prosopagnosia, better known as face blindness.
Two or three in every 100 Americans with this condition have trouble recognizing even the most familiar faces, including their own, as well as noticing emotions or a person’s age or gender.
Most people acquire face blindness due to neurological conditions such as dementia, brain tumors and seizures, as they can cause brain lesions that destroy the cells responsible for processing visual information.
However, some people can be born with it due to genetic mutations.
Meanwhile, the second batch of upside down photos were Ivanka Trump and Tom Brady.
Experts noted that while super recognizers have exceptional memories, their skills are not perfect.
Dr. David White, a senior researcher at the Face Research Laboratory at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told the Washington Post that, like typical people, super-recognizers also have a harder time distinguishing people’s faces. people of different ethnicities than their own. .
However, a study His team’s study showed that when super-recognizers made mistakes, they were more confident than other professionals who need to study faces, such as police officers.
If you’re trying to improve your face memory, Dr. White’s research suggests focusing on features like scars, ears, freckles, and blemishes.
His team also developed a online test to determine if you are a super recognizer.
It comes after a study earlier this year revealed the terrifying condition known as “demon face syndrome”.
Only one in 1,000 people is super-recogniser and can distinguish these two actors in just one second.
Known medically as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), only about 75 cases of this syndrome have been documented, in which a person perceives unusual, often grotesque, distortions when staring at a human face.
But one rare individual with this condition, a 58-year-old man who contacted neuropsychologists at Dartmouth, has the unique ability to see faces normally on paper and on screens, despite having seen creepier “demon faces” in his real life. .
This division allowed him and the researchers to reliably illustrate, for the first time, what the faces of a person living with the disturbing vision of PMO may look like.
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“Most articles on PMO have been brief reports of individual cases,” Professor Brad Duchaine of Dartmouth told DailyMail.com, “written by neurologists who encountered them in their clinical practice.”
“Our report is especially interesting,” he said, “because … we can be sure that the distortions in your visualizations accurately reflect what you experience.”
A rare individual with a variation of “demon face syndrome” has the unique ability to see faces normally on paper and on screens, despite seeing creepier “demon faces” in his real life.
The split allowed researchers to properly illustrate, for the first time, what faces look like in a person living with the demon-tinted lenses of prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).