On Prosopagnosia

[gaudior]

Oh, hey, look, it is an opportunity to explain how people look to me!

As I've mentioned before, I have prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. I think it's hard for people who don't have it to understand what that means. I mean, Hannibal had a character who had it, and tried to replicate the effect by always blurring everyone's faces whenever they appeared from that character's point of view, which is entirely wrong. "Face-blindness" doesn't mean I can't see faces, I can see faces just fine. They just don't make more of an impression on me than anything else I see-- trees, furniture, hands, etc. I think that most people with a functioning fusiform gyrus don't realize when you're using it, don't realize that you perceive faces differently from how you perceive everything else.

But here is an incredibly useful visual aid. This artist, Sandro Miller, has recreated iconic portraits with John Malkovich as the subject.

So: I can tell that John Malkovich is not Che Guevara (I think because the photo quality is too good) or Marilyn Monroe, or probably Arbus' identical twins, though I don't know the original photo. But the rest of them, I would instantly identify as whoever they're labeled as. They have all the right cues-- hair, clothing, facial expression, background-- that would tell me who they are, plus their names are helpfully at the bottom of the photo. So I would have no reason to think that they are John Malkovich. They don't look like John Malkovich.

I'm curious-- can other people identify him from these pictures?

--R

Comments

[hunningham]

I would not be able to identify any of these photographs as John Malkovich, nor would I (unless told) have ever realised that they were all the same person. Knowing that it's the same person throughout, I can look at the shape of the mouth or eyes and see it repeated, but I have to pattern-match facial elements, I can't see the same face in any of the photos.

It takes me a long time to learn new faces, and I tend to identify characters in films by clothing and hair. And I have always hated war films - put everyone in a uniform, shave their hair and no chance. Just lots of identical clones running around shouting and shooting.

Interesting. I'm going to show the images to my partner tomorrow and see how they do with the faces.

[genarti]

I wouldn't look at the pictures and identify John Malkovich, in part because I don't watch enough movies to have a really solid sense of what John Malkovich looks like. But I look at most of the pictures and think "Oh, that's a recreation; that's not the original face."

Hitchcock's apparently iconic picture I don't know well enough to have reacted with knowing the original, but if you told me that was meant to be Hitchcock and showed me that picture, I'd say, "...Really?" because the face doesn't look like his; the jowls and eyes are all wrong. Ditto Mick Jagger's. Earnest Hemingway I don't know well enough to have identified without googling for the picture anyway; having looked at it, they look different around the eyes, but it's a very good recreation, and without knowing Earnest Hemingway's face well enough to ID it I can't know if I'd've twigged to the difference if just shown that picture if I did know it. The Albert Einstein and Dali ones are definitely the most convincing to me, and the Nicholson because that kind of heavy makeup does a lot to disguise the underlying face anyway.