no one knows what causes lifelong face blindness it was discovered so recently scientists are just beginning to unravel its secrets and some of the clues are coming from people who once had normal face recognition but lost it after suffering damage to part of the brain and in an interesting twist those people are also offering insight into the way the rest of us recognize faces imagine waking up after a trauma and not being able to recognize the people closest to you the story will continue in a moment that's what happened to Colleen castaldo up until the fall of 2009 did you have any trouble recognizing faces at all no not at all like everybody else like everybody else yeah that all changed late one night when Colleen had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital her doctors found a brain tumor and did surgery to remove it but as she recovered she started noticing that something wasn't right the nurses I thought that I was meeting them each for the first time and then I would you know listen to them and think I don't know they they were acting like they knew me already oh disorienting she figured it was the medication until her close friend Dorene came to visit wearing white and Colleen assumed she was part of the medical staff I looked at her smiled and I turned back to my husband and started to talk to him and he stood up and said Dorene and I looked I thought dorine and then it hit me I knew right then and there this is the problem I had been having that I yeah faces now even faces she knew well before no okay well that's George Clooney oh wow no I wouldn't know that are a mystery toor no I don't know who that is who is it the president so this is the right hemisphere here Brad duain showed me an MRI scan of Colleen's brain is that a hole in her brain that's right it's in the right temporal dop so back here that's right and the location of that hole where the tumor had been was a clue if removing that area caused the loss of face recognition could that be where all our brains PR faces it turns out that neuroscientists have been trying to figure out how it is that our brains recognize faces for decades face recognition is a very difficult problem because all faces are basically the same MIT neuroscientists Nancy caner there're these two roundish things here there's this thing there there's this thing there they're all the same and so discriminating one face from another is a very computationally difficult thing because it's those subtle differences in the same basic struct structure that distinguish one thing from another and it is exactly those subtle differences face blind people like Joe Livingston Miss um I could describe anything that I can put into words eye color General overall shape um whether your ears stick out but those things would bring it down perhaps from the population of the world to a few million so she could say this person has dark eyes high cheekbones and oval face which would allow Joe to distinguish her from from this person but this face and this face impossible I can say what I can see but I cannot say the micro measurements that are what tell a normal person that it's you and not somebody of the same specification but how is it that the rest of us can perceive these two people as distinct individuals despite the similarities an important clue comes from what we can't distinguish as we saw earlier faces upside down like these two Duan showed me which looked very similar maybe you don't even see that there's any difference different in the lower look eyes are a little different on the eyes are a little different but then if I show them to you upright so here's the one that you saw on the left there looks perfectly normal and then here's the one you saw on the right you saw upside down my goodness the eyes and mouth and the photo on the right had been turned upside down and now the face looks really grotesque yeah but but upside down upside down it's really hard to see that if you look at a face upside down you're very bad at recognizing it if you look at a word or an object or a scene you can recognize it fine upside down so what did that tell you it tells you that there's something very special about face recognition it works in a very different way from recognition of everything else and that got can Wisher wondering if there might be a part of the brain responsible just for seeing faces she started putting people with normal face recognition into MRI scanners and watching what happens in their brains as they looked at different images is this what she's seeing this is what she's seeing she's seeing faces exactly okay and now she's seeing objects because we want to know not just what parts of the brain are active when you see faces but what parts are more active when you see faces than when you see objects can Wisher discovered that there was indeed a place in the brain that becomes very active when we look at faces and in every subject boom there was this nice big response there it was very exciting and it was right in the the same area where Colleen's tumor had been it's called the fusiform face area so could that be what's missing in people with lifelong face blindness like Jacob Hodes can Wisher put him in the scanner to find out I really did not expect to see a fusiform face area so you thought there'd be nothing there like as if instead of having a bullet go through it he was just born without it that's right okay that's right and he looked at the data and his face area was beautiful it's textbook here she scanned Joe Ben and Meg as well and they had fusiform face areas too so what does that say to you it tells us that the problem is not that this thing doesn't exist there it is but see that's a fun of science it's fun to be told you're just completely and totally wrong because now you have to go back and you know think a new and one thing she and other researchers are thinking about is a phenomenon as mystifying as face blindness thank you you have a good day it's polar opposite super recognizers like Jennifer Jarrett who say they recognize almost every face they have ever seen waiters yes salespeople yes yes like of course yes I'll be walking down the street and I'll see someone and I'll think oh retail and then I'll remember oh okay that person works it a whatever store and that's where I or they used to work at that store 10 years ago and then I remember 10 years ago yes yes so there it doesn't matter how far back you saw these people so as long as you look at a person and take notice they're in there I I don't even know how to get rid of people only a handful of super recognizers have been discovered so far and duchan and his colleagues had to come up with a whole new way to test them so here are three faces here which you're familiar with I am it's called the before they were famous test because super recognizers can also recognize faces as they change through time does that help at all he no longer has hair yeah that's Dick Cheney oh my God that's Dick Cheney yeah he told me the top right was Richard Gear and the bottom Nancy Pelosi those three people have changed dramatically he even gave me a hint with this one he's now an actor and I'm supposed to know this actor clearly I am not a super recognizer that's George Clooney man and these super recognizers just are really good at recognizing these faces um George Clooney how could you tell it was George Clooney it just looked like George Clooney to me is oh Prince Charles oh Madonna uh Michael Jordan oh that's uh KO kin the OJ Simpson trial wow you are good but we thought we had finally stumped her with this one she said she only had a guess if I were to guess I would say Mike Wallace that is Mike Wallace she recognized Mike Wallace as a six-year-old I I don't even understand how you do that I can't fathom it as people age I guess the aging process somehow in my brain just seems very sort of superficial and you know as if if someone gets a haircut you you can still recognize them still the same face to me it's just the adult version so why is 60 years like a haircut to her while face blind people can't recognize someone they just saw a team of scientists at Harvard has begun scanning the brains of super recognizers too to see if they might yield any clues the science of facial recognition is in its infancy but new discoveries can't come fast enough for one last person we'd like you to meet 13-year-old Tim mcdna from Boston who was severely faceblind so can you describe what it feels like when someone comes up you know you're supposed to know who they are I usually just say you know hi nice to see you so you you sometimes pretend yeah you fake it I fake it out yeah do you think it's not your mom yeah okay um so that actually was your mom Tim is working with the Harvard team to see if they can help him learn to rec ize his mother's face now is this one your mom or not we could start at the top we could do eyebrows Eyes Nose you could even use the cheeks there it's part of a pilot program to see if face blindness might someday be treatable this one's a little bit harder so far it's not I don't know I just hope that nobody tries to talk to me because if they do they yeah they want to talk about something you've done with them or something and I don't know who they are so it must be really hard to make friends it is yeah takes me a while to make friends it turns out making friends can be tricky at both ends of the face recognition Spectrum super recognizers can seem like stalkers I would see someone you know weeks or months later at a party and people would say oh do you know each other and I'd say yeah and the other person would say no and I'd say no don't you remember the first week of classes you were walking to English class with someone and people would look at me really strangely and sort of uncomfortably I think a lot Jennifer says she's now learned to take cues from others ironically just as face blind people do I'll play this eye contact game where I'll wait I'm not going to really look at you but I'll wait to see if you look at me and then oh you look at me oh look oh hi so you're always waiting for a cue from them yeah I'll hang back a little bit which I don't want to do in any social situation are you always a little anxious I'm more than a little anxious and I and I I tend to uh to keep my mouth closed before I make some awful blunder of course another tactic strategy is to smile at everybody that's what Chuck Close told us he does you have to be really Charming if you are going to insult them by not remembering them you just have to be extremely Charming so that people don't hold this stuff against you do you feel now that you're missing out on something oh yeah yeah mhm yeah I notice a loss I understand someone by an abstraction I put together a set of information that to me means mother or means lesie but it's not a visualization of a face and the question the thing that I wonder next you know uh is how does it affect even things like love how does it when people talk about love they say I carry the person with me I carry their image with me I don't carry their image does that mean I experience it differently and how would I ever know I don't know there's a long tale of stuff that happens that you're missing connections you're not making still oh yeah yeah yeah yeah at least now we understand why yeah right and it's therapeutic but it doesn't fix it go to 60 minutes overtime.com to take a test to see if you're a super recognizer sponsored by Viagra