December 6, 2022 • 47 mins
It’s not that the person who can never remember meeting you is snobby or even absent-minded; they may have a fascinating – and often difficult – neurological condition called prosopagnosia, known more commonly as face blindness.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, sitting in in this bowl session
that we like to call stuff you Should Know to
shooting the bullets, shooting the breeze. That's right, chewing the fact,
(00:24):
sling in some facts, m slinging some facts about something
that is just downright astounding if you ask me, Chuck, Yeah,
when have we talked about this? Oh, buddy, we talked
about it, and I think the Doppelganger episode. I feel
like also in the days of YR we maybe hit
(00:46):
it at some point briefly. Sure, probably can you transplant ahead? No, jeez, kids,
digging deep. I don't know if it was in that
one or not, could have been, but yeah, we've definitely
talked about it. We should say prosopagnosia, which is face
blindness more commonly known, which is a neurological condition, to
(01:08):
just kind of dryly define it right out of the gate,
Uh yeah, and what we're not talking about, although as
you'll see, it is a condition that does exist on
a spectrum. But I think they're but they're saying basically though,
it's not just like I'm not real, real good at
remembering people's faces. While that can also mean you might
(01:30):
have a very low on the spectrum version of prosopagnosia,
it's it's not generally what most people when they say like,
I'm not good with faces, probably don't have it. It's
a very clunky way of saying that. It's pretty rare
and like it doesn't necessarily just have to do with
how good you are remembering people when you meet them.
(01:50):
That just means you're an a hole, right, which is
said because a lot of people with prosopagnosia get kind
of thought of as that because people don't really understand
what their condition is. Yeah, it's not yeah, supposedly he's
self diagnosed. I guess yeah, he's has not been fully diagnosed,
but he does. Just from reading like recent interviews with him,
(02:12):
it seems like it's probably the deal with him and
not just like, hey, I'm busy, but he's you know,
as you'll see, it's a real struggle. It's not just like, oh,
I'm not very good with faces. It's you know, you
may not recognize your family members. If it's severe enough,
you may not recognize your own face. Yeah, and more more,
you know, like kind of in a day to day thing.
(02:32):
I saw it described by I believe it was m.
Sadie Dingfelder, who is a Washington Post writer and also
has severe face blindness. She said, I believe it's her.
Said basically, like you can spend like all day in
a meeting like a boardroom with somebody, like working closely
(02:55):
with them the whole time, and then at the end
of the day, if you both happened to ump into
each other in the lobby after you know, leaving one
another side five minutes before, she would not she would
not recognize that person. Yeah, I mean I will say
that I have. It's not a superpower, but I've always
(03:16):
been really, really, really good at remembering faces. There's something
called super recognizers. I think I might be on that
if that exists on a spectrum, I think I'm on
it because I've had some freakishly weird occurrences of remembering
faces of people I didn't know at all from years before.
Like even as a kid, I remember like seeing a
(03:36):
guy at six Flags one time and then seeing him
like a couple of years later, and I think maybe
I met him, and then somehow got confirmation it wasn't
just me thinking, you know, like it wasn't a mistake,
Like I've always been really good at recognizing faces, is
what I'm saying. You were like, is it him? And
then all of a sudden he puts on a jean
(03:56):
jacket with the iHeart six flags patch on the back.
It is Let's say it may have been something like
that because the clothes, you'll see the clothes and things
can be a way to help you remember people for sure. So,
like you said, the whole thing kind of exists in degrees,
and a lot of people think that, you know, if
(04:17):
you have face blindness blindness, which is weird that I
have trouble saying face blindness too, because the clinical name
is really difficult to say. If you have face blindness,
that if somebody knows that it exists and they have
kind of a general conception of it, they might think that,
like you don't see faces, like it's that really creepy
(04:39):
Twilight zone thing where this sister was missing her mouth,
you know, or everyone looks like Robert the Doll. Yeah,
kind of like that, like but without even eyes or
a nose, like just a blur or something like that.
And apparently there is such a degree of it that
if you saw like a picture of a face maybe
out of context, like you didn't see it attach to
(05:00):
somebody's body or whatever, you would think maybe it was
a rock or just some other roundish object. That there
is like that degree. Apparently that's pretty rare. What's more
likely is that you're seeing all the different parts of
the face. Your brain's just not putting it together in
a cohesive hole like everybody else's brain does. That's that's
(05:24):
one big part of it for sure. Yeah, And I
think what we're going to do the order we settled
on is we're going to kind of talk a lot
about it and then maybe toward the end we're going
to talk about causes and whether or not it can
be fixed and stuff like that. So if that's a cliffhanger,
then there you go, Right, does that count? It? Is?
It does? There's one other thing we need to point out.
(05:45):
There's absolutely nothing wrong with people with prosopagnosias like site.
They can see perfectly fine, right, It's that the sensory
information that's coming in is not being processed correctly. Right.
That's just called far sightedness. Yeah, myopia. Yeah, mister McGoo.
Should we talk about, now, you know what else? The
(06:05):
deal with Magoo? He couldn't see very well. They always
joked about this on the podcast Freedom of whether or
not Magoo had glasses? Uh man, No, they think about it.
I'm not sure if he had glasses. Whatever the answer is,
I can't remember. The opposite is kind of what people
commonly think. I think he doesn't have classes. Yeah, so
(06:26):
people when they see people with really thick glasses would
say like, oh, real Magoo, when in fact people with
no glasses hurt the magoose. Does that make sense? Yeah,
it does. It's kind of like misusing loman on the
totem pole or drink the coolie exactly. You know. All right,
So should we talk about agnosias in general? Yeah, because
(06:46):
prosopagnosia is a specific kind of a mental disorder that
belongs to like a general class of disorders, neurological disorders
called agnosias, And they are about as fascinating as it
can get. They also reveal a tremendous amount of how
our brain works too. Yeah, and it's a Greek if
you're wondering, basically means absence of knowledge, but medically speaking,
(07:10):
it means you have some sort of recognition impairment, and
it is you know, And we'll go through these. They're
very specific. Ed helped us put this together. And the
reason it's so specific, I think, is because it has
to be, because there are some minute differences in some
of these that make a difference, you know, yeah, for sure,
make a big difference. All right, So I guess we'll
(07:34):
start with the three main categories. Color blindness, which we've
talked about before, is a version of an agnosia, word blindness,
which I guess you have with reading the words face blindness,
and what we're talking about today prosopagnosia. But those aren't
the three categories. Those are three types of visual. The
(07:55):
three main categories are visual, auditory, in touch right right right,
visual seems to have the most associated with it. In
addition to all those other ones you just mentioned, there's
one called apperceptive, which is where you can't differentiate objects,
just like a person can't differentiate a face with prosopagnosia.
Like a person with apperceptive visual agnosia, like you can
(08:19):
say say, hey, look at that car, and look at
that toaster over there aren't they really nice to look at,
And they'd be like, I don't really see any difference
between those two things that you're pointing out now, And
I have questions about this. You may not know the
answer too, about why a toaster is out on a
street with a car. That's it. No, it's And to
be fair, toaster and car were probably not great examples
(08:41):
to use because you take into consideration, as you'll see,
if you have any of these disorders, you know the
fact that it's on the street, in a driveway, or
on a counter in a kitchen. Sure, But what I
want to know is is do they do they even
note like the size of something? I don't know. Some
of these are so exotic that there's like just a
(09:03):
handful of cases in the entire history of medicine. I
think a perceptive is a little more common, but I
don't know exactly how they see it, because like a
pair of glasses on a coffee table or a remote
control like that kind of thing makes a little more sense.
Car and toaster blows my mind. Okay, So I'm just
(09:24):
gonna go ahead and confess car and toaster was my example.
I'm just trying to get the point across. Okay, I
just wonder if if it is that severe. I'm sure
it can be, especially if allow this exists on a spectrum.
If there's people out there who can look at a
picture of a face and think it's a rock, I'm
sure there's somebody out there who has a perceptive visual
agnosia that says that toaster in that car, same thing, buddy.
(09:48):
All right, all right, fair enough, I'm putting money on
it now. And you know what we're hoping to do
is hear from some people, because this is really fascinating.
Like you said, there's not a ton of as we'll see,
a lot of people don't come forward because they learn
to deal with it. You're right, totally. So. Associative is
another visual one that's an inability to identify objects whereas
(10:14):
you can, like you can see the coffee cup, you
can reach out and grab it, but you can't identify
its use, like I'm holding the thing, but I don't
know what the heck you do with it, right exactly.
And then there's another one that sounds man, I think
this deserves its own short stuff akin autopsia, and it's
where you can't perceive motion. Yeah, so I saw it
described as like if a car's coming at you. It
(10:35):
just is like a series of like it suddenly jumps
closer and closer and closer. You don't see it moving.
It's like a series of still images. All of life
is like that. Like how if you see somebody like
moving towards you under a strobe light. That's what it's like,
but no need for the strobe light. So it's like
a murder scene in a club in a movie exactly.
(10:57):
That's exactly what life is like for people with can't
atop to you, Wow, you have your auditory ones. Auditory
verbal is when you can't recognize a word that you hear.
They also call it word deafness for obvious reasons. And
then also under auditory is oh I had all these earlier.
(11:18):
How do you do you pronounce that G? There? I
think it's phone agnosia, phone agnosia. Okay, that makes sense.
I think that is not being able to recognize familiar
voice and identify that voice right, understand everything they're saying.
But I would be on this recording right now, as
and often the case, wondering who is this guy? Right?
(11:38):
It's kind of like the auditory version of prosopagnosia, right
with voices instead of faces. There's another one that's called
tactile agnosia, and it's where you can't recognize an object
by touch. And I've really thought about this, and the
best I could come up with is that this would
be problematic at one of those Halloween parties where they
pass around a bowl of spaghetti and tell you it's guts.
(12:00):
It just be lost on you. But that's about the
worst that could come of it from what I can tell. Okay,
because you can still use the thing and recognize what
it's used for. In't that right? I think? So it's
just when you touch it you don't know what it is.
So I'm sure like going to turn off the oven
would be really problematic or something like that. But um, yeah,
(12:21):
it's it's that's It just seems like such a limited thing.
But I'm sure there's much more problems with it than
I can come up with. If you want to get
even rarer, here are some more versions of agnosia's auto autotopagnosia,
which is when you can't recognize and identify specific body
parts of your of your own body. Oh, there's also
(12:43):
my favorite Simultan tang Agnosia, Simultan Agnosia. Yeah, I think
that's it. You got it. Okay. So that one is
where you can see all sorts of different stuff, all
the objects, you can identify all the objects in your
field of viewer in a picture or something. But what
they're doing together, that worms of cohesive whole a scene
is just totally lost on you. You would see a
(13:05):
kid in their pajamas opening a present. There would be
a tree that's decorated. There would be like a couple
of parents like watching the kid or standing off to
the side. You would not put together that this is
a scene of like a Christmas morning, Like you just
you just can't put scenes together. And I saw it
compared to not being able to see the forest from
(13:25):
the trees. Okay, that makes sense, Yeah it does. That's
my favorite one right there. Yeah, all these are so tough,
and it's not I think it's something that's easy for
people to laugh at, Like if someone said, like, why
is there a tree in that living room? Right, It's
it's not funny, you know, and especially when it comes
to the main topic of face blindness, it can be
(13:47):
a very debilitating thing. It can be for sure, but
astoundingly humans who have these conditions are really good at
figuring out ways to kind of make it through life,
just kind of worker out and essentially um and we'll
talk more about that. I say, after a break, how
about that, let's do it. I want to learn about
(14:07):
a terroristort and college dactyl, how to take a perfect moment,
all about fractolki is gone, that's another hun, the Lizzie
Border murders that I have, all runs on the plane,
everything Stubby should know. Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck, Now,
(14:32):
I don't feel at all comfortable making any jokes about
this stuff. You really threw the gauntlet down. Is there
a tree in your living room, Josh? That's not funny
covered with lights? It's Halloween. It's not funny. Uh, it
is not funny. It's a little funny, isn't it. I
think that one specifically to not recognize a scene. All right.
(14:56):
I think you can get a yuck or two out
of that. Okay, Okay, let's move on. Okay. So I
was saying before the break that people with agnosias, and
in particular prosopagnosia, learn to just kind of navigate through
life without the advantages that the rest of us just
totally take for granted and say, I say, the best
(15:17):
way to understand prosopagnosia, I just sounded like foghorn leghorn
for a second. I'll say the best way is to
understand how just people normally perceive faces. Right. Yeah, So
this is something that you know when you're grown up
or whatever. You you just sort of again, you take
(15:38):
it for granted that this is something that you've always
been able to do, but it's actually a learned process.
You develop this over the course of your life. I
think they say, you know, and it kind of makes sense,
like sort of in your prepubescent years around twelve, you're
really spongy at that age at soaking up faces and
getting better, and it just gets better in time. I
(15:58):
think we peek in our third ease. And this also
makes a lot of sense. If you grow up in
a city, you're better if you're exposed to, you know,
a lot of faces than someone who might grow up
in a small town seeing the same people over and over. Yeah,
And so the whole thing of recognizing a face, we've
figured out, and by we I mean you and me, Chuck,
is that it's a two step process, and one is
(16:19):
that that visual information comes in and it gets processed
into a hole. So like we see faces as holes
generally most most people do. And a person's face when
we're taking it in, it's not necessarily whole. We're putting
all of these pieces together automatically instantly. It's called holistic processing.
(16:39):
So you've got a face now in your head, and
then you run it against a database essentially to find
out if it's familiar or not, and all this is
taking like microseconds to do. Yeah, and then if it
comes up like, yes, this is familiar, then you have
what's called recollection memory. I believe if I recall correctly,
(17:01):
and that is this biographical information that we attached to
each person. They've figured out that it seems like that
is attached to the face, and that that's when you
recognize somebody. If you stop and think about it, you're like, oh, yeah,
I'm just inundated with this flood of information about that
person that I know. It's they are figuring out it's
(17:22):
triggered by the face. So they they're finding out that
prosopagnosia patients not only can't recognize faces, they can't retain
the biographical information that other people can because it seems
to be filed away by a person's face. Yeah, and
like you said, you pull up that file and in
your mind, what's happening so so fast is you know,
(17:45):
crooked nose, cheek scar. I went to high school with
that guy. It's Ralph. I saw that guy it's six
flags once. It'd be funny if actually went to my
high school. That's where I knew him. But Ralph. So
let's say, let's take the example of Ralph. You know
that Ralph likes long walks on the beach, that Ralph
doesn't like cockroaches, he's scared of them. You know that
(18:07):
Ralph has a really cool car that you like to
ride in sometimes, like you just know this stuff, like
you just know it, and it's part of it's part
of recognition. And again that's triggered by a face. So
people who have pazzo pagnosia have to kind of make
it through the world without that. And so for you
(18:29):
and me and people who can easily recognize faces, it's
it's really hard to imagine not being able to do that.
But it came up with a really good thought experiment.
I think is the sea apples? Are we there? I
think so? Sure. Yeah. I mean this is kind of
like a Memento, you know, the dude and Memento came
(18:49):
up with a system, and it's all about developing a
system that works. So when you see Ralph, you think
you've learned crooked nose, cheek, scar on the left face.
I know that's my friend, but there's still not that recognition,
which I can't imagine how frustrating that must be. But
in this case, if you're talking about like apples, you
show someone an apple and then you put that apple
(19:12):
on a coffee table with like forty apple buddies, and
then you say, pick up that apple, and it's you know,
you'd be lost, to be very frustrating, But if you
were told to do this several times or you know,
given years or whatever, you would eventually develop a system
to memorizing how to recognize that apple, which could be
(19:33):
the most minute little features of the apple, from the
length of the stem to the dent in the top
corner that you don't want to eat. Yeah, and if
your entire social life, and in some cases your own
survival was predicated I'm being able to recognize individual apples,
you would figure out a way to do that. And
so if you just replace identifying individual apples with identifying faces,
(19:58):
that's what people with pazo pagnosia have to learn how
to do, and they do it, like you said. And
it turns out that if you, um kind of study
how prosopagnosiacs real world from I've seen it a ton
of places, including people who know what they're talking about. Yeah, um,
that you'll find that there are a bunch of little
cues and mannerisms and things that that we have that
(20:19):
we're not aware of that really make us individuals beyond
just what our faces look like. Yeah, because we're literally
just talking the face. So if your friend has a
purple mohawk, then use that like like that's a you
want all your friends to have weird hair. You know,
you grab onto that with all your might. That's right.
Don't let go with the of that mohawk. Uh you
(20:42):
you know, you can still see the eyes and recognize
like eye color or like I said, you know, if
your friend has like you know, broke their nose or
they have a scar on their face or things like that,
or how big their ears are or how they walk,
or what they their mannerisms. Mannerisms are huge or yeah,
obviously things like tattoos or if they have stinky armpits,
(21:03):
or like there's sure, there's a lot of ways you
gotta get that one right or that could be very embarrassing.
But there are a lot of things that we don't
need to use but are still in our own memory banks.
If you don't have prosopagnosia, but just filter out the
face and those are what everyone else with prosopagnosia is using. Right.
(21:24):
There's also a lot of reliance on friends and family
to be like, oh, here comes Ralph. Remember you like
his car, right, and you'd be like, Ralph, good to
see you. Friend. Can I ride in your car? And
Ralph and say, sure, I appreciate you recognizing me. Of
course you can ride in my car. The problem is
you're not always around your friends and family. Some people
(21:44):
are single and don't live in the same town as
their family. Some people's family don't like them. There's all
sorts of reasons that you might not be able to
rely on prompts all the time, And there's also problems
with the strategy of using all sorts of little details
to identify people too, because people change their hair color
exactly once you enter that business world. That purple mohawks
(22:07):
probably gone, right, Yeah, people change their hair color, people
change their clothes. It can be really difficult to keep
up with that stuff. And so there's other potentially better
ways of identifying people. And it seems to have to
do with basically teaching yourself to memorize the people who
are important in your life. Like you would choose a
(22:29):
select group of people and be like, these are the
people I really need to recognize, and you would get
to studying them, like photographs of them at length, yeah,
and which you know that's can also be a little
tricky because let's say you have a friend with Prizo
Pagnosia and you know that this is their strategy, and
they still don't remember you, and you're like, oh, okay,
I didn't make that list of extra study that's right.
(22:51):
Yeah awkward, but no, that is that is one thing
they say. And I think I get the picture that
this is sort of a um sort of a beginning
coping method, which is like get to know the people
around you and get used to like doing that, and
then I feel like the circle probably broadens from there
once you're like kind of have your techniques down, Yeah,
(23:14):
I would guess so for sure. Another one that I
thought was pretty interesting, a coping skill for people with
face blindness is using conversation skills. Using general small talk,
you can kind of create like certain situations with conversation
to see how a person reacts, like if you're like, yeah,
(23:35):
you know, would you vote for right? Exactly? So like
you can use conversation to figure out who you're talking to.
And I also saw that a lot of people with
prosopagnosia walk around half pretending like they know everybody, so
that if they come upon somebody who actually knows them,
they can already be primed to be like, yeah, how's
(23:57):
it going, kind of things like overly friendly, almost yes
exactly that they're all smiles all the time, and they're
doing that. It's like a coping mechanism to basically trick
people into thinking that they recognize them. And then also
they found at least Sadie Dingfelder has found that if
you get people to talk about themselves, if you ask questions,
(24:19):
first of all, they're going to love talking to you,
because people love talking about themselves. But then secondly, they're
going to give up enough biographical information pretty quickly that
you're going to know who you're talking to. This is
fascinating stuff, isn't it. Yeah, it's almost like being a
really skilled detective slash detective interviewer. Well Sadie Dingfelder attributes
(24:40):
her success as a reporter for The Washington Post as
being able being comfortable talking to strangers because she said,
everyone's a stranger in my life, and then also like
it really helped her honor conversation and interviewing skills too. Yeah,
that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's I feel
like sometimes there are these disorders that end up having
(25:00):
you certain superpowers at the same time. For sure, that's
a great way to put it. If you are someone
with Prosa pagnosia and you were watching a TV show
or a movie, that can be problematic from episode to
episode because you may literally not know who this person
is on the screen, and that could make it very hard.
(25:20):
And I know it's you know, it's like, oh, you're
only watching a movie, but like that'd be really frustrating
a consuming entertainment was there was an ade layer of
difficulty to that. You know, it's an impossibility. From what
I can tell, there's this guy named Tim Rymel who
wrote a little article about what it's like to live
with it, and he was saying, like, you just you
just can't You just stop watching after like ten minutes,
(25:43):
because you just lose patience. It'd be kind of like
watching a double feature of Happiness in Life during Wartime? Wait,
which one was Life during Wartime? That was the sequel
to Happiness where he kept the same characters but replaced
them with all new actors. I don't think I saw
that one. It's really weird to watch. It's really discomforting.
(26:06):
I mean, it's already just horrible, like inhumane material to
begin with, Todd Sollins and stuff. Yeah, but just it's
just really unsettling to see new people playing the same
characters and trying to keep up with who they are.
So actually, that'd be a really good exercise in what
it's like to be a prozo pagnosiac. I don't know
(26:29):
if I would recommend everybody watching Happiness in Life during Wartime.
Maybe read a little bit about it first before you
watch it, and then if you go ahead and watch it,
don't play me. But if you're good with those movies.
That would be a pretty good way to be Like,
this is what it's like to have prazo pagnosia. Yeah,
I would imagine for entertainment consumption, music and reading become
even more important, you know. Yeah, And you know you
(26:51):
can imagine isolating that can be too, and not just
like oh I can't sit in and talk about TV
shows with other people, but it's an isolated in condition,
to be sure. Like the people that have overcome it
to the point where they're extroverted and overly friendly, like
hats off to them, you know, yeah, because a lot
of people go the opposite route. They become very introverted, yeah,
(27:13):
and don't like to go out because they're so they
become so socially anxious about the shame and embarrassment of
not recognizing somebody and how awkward it can be, especially
if that person has no idea what their condition is,
that they just stop going out. It's just easier to
stay home, and so it can be a really isolating condition.
And then also all the stuff we've been talking about,
(27:33):
all those coping skills that is really mentally exhausting. Yeah,
Like it's so just natural to us to just recognize
somebody by the face. That to have to study somebody
and remember it and memorize pictures of your friends and
loved ones. That is a lot of work. So it
can be isolating, it can be exhausting, and then, I guess, sadly,
(27:56):
at least for now, those coping skills are also basically
the extent of treatment for prosopagnosia as as it currently stands.
That's kind of it. It's it's learned all these strategies
to deal with it to whatever extent you're comfortable, and
and that's about all you can do. It's it's basically, uh, well,
we'll talk a little bit about the permanency of the condition,
(28:18):
but it's it's almost always permanent. Um yeah, let's hold
off on that though, because there there are a couple
of different ways you can get it that we'll get to. Okay,
But there have been it feels like the last few
decades there's been a lot more research than there ever
was before. There are, of course, you know, previous to
(28:38):
you know, the last couple of decades. You may not
even like your doctor probably and this might still be
the case in some cases, your doctor may not even
know like what the heck is going on? It's that rare.
So nowadays there are support groups and there a therapist
and people might generally and that's you know, another reason
we're doing this is it's sort of always like to
(28:59):
help get the word out on these rare things. But
previous to a couple of decades ago, I can't imagine
what it would have been like living in the world.
It's probably just a secret that you keep. Yeah, And
it was chalked up. Oliver Sacks actually had it. The
fame neurologist to Awakenings was based on his work, and
he wrote awesome books like The Man Who Mystic his
(29:20):
wife for a hat, There you go, and an Anthropologist
on Mars I think was one of his two. He
had like severely, and he just chalked it up to
being kind of flighty, kind of absent minded, to being
aloof and a lot of people just kind of chalk
it up to that and just go through life because
they don't. They weren't aware of it. And he was
(29:41):
a neurologist and he wasn't making aware of it, and
he had it. Apparently Jane goodall the primatologists had it.
And Chuck Close the awesome portraitist. You look up his work.
I'm sure you've seen it before. He frequently makes giant
canvases of faces, close up of faces, but they're made
(30:02):
of little squares and he's really good, but it just
kind of alters what the person looks like. And then
once you figure out that he has pazo pagnosia, and
you're like, Okay, that's really interesting that he dedicated his
career to faces. You know. Yeah, and I'm telling you
that Brad Pitt People magazine article I read, he says that,
(30:23):
you know, it's kind of been a thorn in his
side where people think he's a jerk or whatever. And
he said, for a while he was trying to use
a strategy of like, you know, because of course you
meet way more people when you're Brad Pitt than the
average person. Sure, just constantly meeting new people because of
your job. But he said he used his strategy for
a while like you know, hey remind me, like in
(30:44):
a really friendly way, like hey remind me where we met.
And he said sometimes that was even worse, like people
get more offended if you've asked out loud, which is
like that's the really the right way to handle that
when you don't recognize someone in life, you know, it
can be very awkward. But the right way to handle
this say I'm so sorry, like I know we've met,
but who were you again? And you know it's a
(31:07):
tough thing to say. Imagine saying that over and over
and over in your life. Right, and one of those
people who got deeply offended with Shania Twain, I'm guessing
I never thought i'd say this, but poor Brad Pitt, Right.
I think another part of it too, that actually makes
it a little more difficult on him than the average
person is because he's such a celebrity. He's put up
(31:27):
on a pedestal and so people him not recognizing people
makes him he's already primed to be viewed as arrogant
or can you think he's above everybody else? And then
if you combine his condition with that, I would guess
it's harder on him than most people. Yeah, and I
will tell you this is that when someone is famous
and they do recognize you know, the the craft service
(31:52):
person or the guy who parks their car, like, people
make a really big deal out of that, like he's
such a good dude, he parked this guy's car like
three times a year and he remember me every time.
That ends up to be like a legend passed around
on Reddit, right kind of thing exactly. So you want
to take our second break and come back and talk
about diagnosing prosopagnosia and then what's going on in the brain. Yes, please,
(32:16):
I want to learn about a terris ort and college verydactyl,
how to take a purgect moment, all about fractol thinks gone,
that's another hun the Lizzie Border murders all runs on
the plane. Everything should know. Word up, Jerry. So if
(32:42):
you go back in the way back machine and look
at the earliest cases of this, you'll see that some
of the first cases that they found were diagnosed because
of a like a brain injury. And that is one
of the two ways that you can get this is
and we'll talk about the parts of the brain is
sec but is either by some sort of injury or
maybe a tumor pressing on this part of the brain.
(33:03):
But what they found is that is far and away
the more rare kind, and that it's usually something that
you're born with, yeah, the congenital kind, but the acquired
kind is so dramatic when you suddenly lose the ability
to recognize faces. Those were the first cases that were described.
And the guy who coined the term prosopagnosia is Joaquim Bottomer,
(33:29):
and he studied a World War Two veterans who'd been
shot in the head and couldn't recognize people any longer.
And I had a certain idea and conception of what
the World War Two veterans Bottomer was studying were like
until I found out that he was a German neurologist
and that he was studying them in like nineteen forty four.
So apparently the earliest ones were Nazis, who were the
(33:51):
ones who kind of turned the world onto the idea
of prazo pagnosia. Oh interest, and that jarring. It's kind
of like there was this episode of the Office where
Dwight's talking about how his grandfather fought in World War
Two and was captured in Hell as a pow, and
then he says something at the end that reveals that
his grandfather was German. It was a Nazi, And it's
(34:12):
just such like a jarring turn because you're just thinking
about this greatest generation, you know, person over there, Yeah, yeah,
you know, just kicking Germany around in Europe, and all
of a sudden, it's not, Well, that's a pretty funny
character thing because only Dwight Trute would brag about right,
you know, or hold up their Nazi grandfather as a
(34:32):
as a wounded veteran. That's funny. It was. It was
good character development for sure. So as far as how
rare it is, we've talked a little bit about it
and said, you know, it's really rare. I've seen some
stuff that that it's not as rare as you might think.
I think psychology today said two percent of the population
or somewhere on that spectrum. Yeah, about one and fifty.
(34:52):
And that's not just them. That's pretty widespread that. Yeah,
I mean, that's not that rare. But I get the
feeling that it's the spectrum side of things where it
gets more and more rare to the people that see
faces rock. But if you put fifty people in a room,
one of those people is going to be thinking who
are all these people? Yeah? So um yeah, And I
(35:14):
think it does have to do with the spectrum thing,
like you're saying too, you know, like there's a lot
of people out there who are just not very good
at it, but there's just some sort of breakdown, but
it's not a full breakdown in one of the processes.
The problem is because it is generally rare, and because
it is pretty recent that people have just started to
understand it. I keep seeing the Oliver Sacks wrote an
(35:35):
article which I read is in The New Yorker in
twenty ten. I just read it like last night or whatever,
but not to say like, oh, I read it way back. Yeah,
but I keep seeing that sited is like basically the
beginning of spreading awareness of facebindness. It was that recent.
So there's plenty of doctors who've had people come to
them with prosopagnosia and other agnosias and just had no
(35:58):
idea what they were looking at and then probably misdiagnosed them.
So they probably misdiagnosed the kid is having a learning
disability because they weren't picking up on words that they
were reading but they could, you know, hear them just fine,
or that they had some sort of problem with their
site with prosopagnosia, and so the people were left to
(36:19):
kind of, like we talked about, figure out workarounds to
kind of make it through life before people understood that
there was such a thing as prosopagnosia. Well, they didn't
even come up with a really great test for it
until two thousand and six when they started using and
I think it's still kind of the most widely used test,
the Cambridge Face memory test. And this is when they
(36:41):
show you faces that it's just faces. There's there's no hair,
there's no clothes or anything like that, so no medallions.
No medallion's disgust too would be a dead giveaway. So
just a face against a black background, only faces, and
then on the next screen, it will show you this
face along with two other faces, and you're supposed to
(37:03):
select the face that you just saw on the slide before.
Right the computer shouts who's it right at you every time.
It's really jarring. But one of the troubling parts about
this test is that they only had white male faces
on the test for a long time. I think just
this year they finally started featuring women's faces, still only
(37:23):
white faces, which I don't know if that was purposeful.
I didn't see I looked. I didn't see anything about
any ethnic group being more apt to suffer from this,
did you No? I don't get it, especially with the
new version debuted into twenty twenty two. And the problem
with it is is not just because it's not inclusive,
it's a flaw on the test. Yeah, because there's something
(37:45):
called the other race effect. It's very well documented. Yeah,
if you were raised generally among Yeah, if you were
raised generally among white people, and you're a white person,
you're going to have trouble differentiating people of other ethnic groups.
It's just and vice versa. If you're Asian, same thing,
if you're a Black, same thing, And if you were
raised around a mixed group of ethnicities, you're actually going
(38:08):
to be really good at differentiating among those ethnicities. But
the thing is most people aren't raised among a bunch
of ethnicities, and so if you show someone who is,
say black, a bunch of Caucasian faces, it might not
be that they're face blind. It might just be the
other race effect is coming into into play and that
they're being misdiagnosed. Actually, yeah, super interesting. We talked in
(38:31):
the Doppelganger episode, which was very recently, about the fusiform gyrus,
which is the part of the brain that they have
kind of finally figured out is really where face recognition
happens kind of full stop. That's where all the action
takes place. And I think they even have called it
now the fusiform face area. And if you have any
(38:55):
sort of damage to the fusiform gyrus, and again this
is the more rare kind, and is he acquired or
if you have a tumor pressing against it or something
like that, then that's probably going to be the cause.
It's damage your fusiform gyrus, right, And they found that
for congenital patients, it seems that their fusiform gyrus is
(39:15):
thicker than someone who doesn't have prosopagnosia. And the theory
that I read there was a guy named doctor Joe
de Guidas who was a Harvard neuroscientist, and he was
on the American Psychology Associations or Psychological Associations Speaking of
Psychology podcast, and he was basically saying that the theory
(39:38):
is that as you get as you're exposed to more
and more faces, your fusiform gyrus just gets rid of
like neural connections it doesn't need. It gets so like
lean and mean and efficient that a thinner fusiform gyrus
is going to be better at recognizing faces than a
thicker one. Was that doctor's name really what I think?
(40:01):
Joe Degudis Deguttas. Okay, he said the guide us at first,
and I was like, that would be really interesting if
a doctor had a last name with ITAs at the
end of it, right, Okay, de Guttis or goodis it's
d e g u t I s let's just call
him Joe from now on, doctor Joe. Doctor Joe sounds
like a chiropractor. The interesting thing about these UM experiments
(40:24):
they've done with the fuse from Gyrus, and that's what
we talked about in the Doppelganger EPP was we now
have an answer of whether or not we evolved like
a very specific function to recognize a face because we
have UM that. You know, the theories were out there
about like did we recognize like a prey hunting a
(40:44):
predator to like recognize different predators, And now we have
an answer to that, and that is yes, yeah, so
they think that UM. There was like a really large
debate going on, Chuck, where it's like, Okay, do we
actually have like a section of the brain that just
does faces. That seems unlikely. Instead, the opposite explanation was
that we have an object recognition system, the same thing
(41:07):
as recognizing a rock or a car or a toaster,
and that faces were just another object, but because they
were so vital to our social life and survival, that
we were experts at recognizing faces, but really to our
brain they were just another object. And the fusiform that
the confirmation that the fusiform gyrus just does faces kind
(41:28):
of throws that out the window because in the in
the experiment that we talked about in the Doppelganger episode,
this guy had his his um, the fusiform gyrus electro stimulated,
and the researcher's face just morphed. But his tie didn't change.
None of the objects in the room, the chairs didn't change,
so objects remain the same, just his face changed. So yeah,
(41:50):
it basically said, yes, we have a fusiform gyrus. It
functions for recognizing faces and that is all it does.
That's how important facial recognition is. Well, and imagine in
you know, the earliest days of different tuk tuks mulling
around the savannah is friend or enemy? You know, it
(42:11):
became very important, very quickly to recognize people that have
done you wrong or done you right right, exactly for sure.
And I think also that probably also supports the other
race effect too, where it's like you don't need to
differentiate between somebody like an outside or an outgroup. You
just need to know like they're part of the outgroup.
(42:34):
It's the people in your in group that you need
to have more specified social connections with. And yeah, we're
just we've socially evolved enough that now we have a
problem with this relic, this remnant from our evolutionary past
that we still haven't physically evolved out of. We just
socially evolved past it. And it's just problematic now. I
(42:57):
wonder if there's anything too. And a short stuff on
on having a face that's naturally uh the kindest way
to say this average, No, naturally adverse looking. What do
you mean like scowli like, you know, like resting scowl face.
(43:19):
Let's go BRF. I don't know what that is. I'll
tell you later, Okay, No, but you know what I
mean is is some people have like a their resting
look is just not inviting. Let's just say, and I
don't mean any not attractive or not at all. I
mean like literally like that person isn't doesn't look like
(43:40):
someone that would welcome me to come up and say hello. Right,
they look angry, and they're like, this is how I
always look. I'm sorry. I think we should look into
that for a short stuff, because I'm sure that's research
into it. Yeah. Yeah, because most of the time when
you do talk to them or whatever, they like light up.
Their facial expression totally changes. So you hope that it's
not just a charade, that they're just their faces their
(44:03):
normal resting faces just happens to look like that they're
not mad all the time. Who knows, let's get to
the bottom of it. As far as animals go. If
you're wondering kind of to put a cherry on top
of this thing, there has been research that have shown
that recognizing faces in maccaques has been detected maccaque monkeys,
(44:24):
so it's been around longer than we have, and that
they've found that other non primates like are good at
this sheep. Apparently you're really good. I don't know if
that transfers to goats are across the street. Neighborhoodn't have
goats any longer, which is very sad, but I feel
like those goats or maybe they just recognized us as
the people coming across from that house, but we would
(44:46):
always bring them food scraps and when we walk out
the door, they would come run into the fence and
braying and braying. So we never did an experiment where
we came from around the corner or something. I'm curious
if it was the same with goats with us creepy eyes. Yeah,
I wonder too, Or was it like your scent that
they were picking up on? What was it you know?
(45:06):
Or was it faces? It was probably just us coming
out of the house with a bucket of food. Everything right,
every other day it would be my guess. So prazo pagnoja. Huh,
good one, I think so too. If you have prosopagnoja,
please write in and let us know what it's like.
And if you didn't realize you had prosopagnoja until you
listen to this episode, please also write in and let
(45:29):
us know that. And in the meantime, I think it's
time for a listener mail. That's right. I'm going to
call this a gentle correction or not a correction actually,
just a question answered, which we always love. Hey guys
live in the high desert of California. I listen to
the show whenever I'm in the car on my hour
long drive to the LA area. Today's show you mentioned,
(45:51):
and this is the one on fake towns. You mentioned
how the Boeing plant and Seattle had camouflaged their factory
with a fake town on the roof, and you were
wrapping it up, and I think one of you said
something about wondering if the West Coast was ever bombed,
and I think Chuck said no, I don't think so.
I was wrong. California was indeed shelled from offshore by
a Japanese submarine on February twenty third, nineteen forty two,
(46:14):
just north of Galida, a town called Elwood. The submarine
took aim at a rich Field oil storage facility and
landed between twelve and twenty five rounds, destroying a pumphouse,
defended Derek and giving credit or credits due. I first
heard about this incident while watching an episode of Huel
(46:35):
Houser's California Gold, a show on public television. Casey et
out of LA. The pace of the link, if you're interested,
could be a good subject of its own. The day
California got bombed, and that is from Craig Tim in
Rosamond to California. Very nice. Thanks a lot of Craig.
That was indeed a gentle question, answered her question, gently
(46:58):
answered short. I kind of got her on too. If
you want to be like Craig and gently answer one
of our questions, or make a correction or just say hi,
it does not matter. We're always open to an email
from you. You can wrap it up, spank it on
the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(47:20):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, sitting in in this bowl session
that we like to call stuff you Should Know to
shooting the bullets, shooting the breeze. That's right, chewing the fact,
(00:24):
sling in some facts, m slinging some facts about something
that is just downright astounding if you ask me, Chuck, Yeah,
when have we talked about this? Oh, buddy, we talked
about it, and I think the Doppelganger episode. I feel
like also in the days of YR we maybe hit
(00:46):
it at some point briefly. Sure, probably can you transplant ahead? No, jeez, kids,
digging deep. I don't know if it was in that
one or not, could have been, but yeah, we've definitely
talked about it. We should say prosopagnosia, which is face
blindness more commonly known, which is a neurological condition, to
(01:08):
just kind of dryly define it right out of the gate,
Uh yeah, and what we're not talking about, although as
you'll see, it is a condition that does exist on
a spectrum. But I think they're but they're saying basically though,
it's not just like I'm not real, real good at
remembering people's faces. While that can also mean you might
(01:30):
have a very low on the spectrum version of prosopagnosia,
it's it's not generally what most people when they say like,
I'm not good with faces, probably don't have it. It's
a very clunky way of saying that. It's pretty rare
and like it doesn't necessarily just have to do with
how good you are remembering people when you meet them.
(01:50):
That just means you're an a hole, right, which is
said because a lot of people with prosopagnosia get kind
of thought of as that because people don't really understand
what their condition is. Yeah, it's not yeah, supposedly he's
self diagnosed. I guess yeah, he's has not been fully diagnosed,
but he does. Just from reading like recent interviews with him,
(02:12):
it seems like it's probably the deal with him and
not just like, hey, I'm busy, but he's you know,
as you'll see, it's a real struggle. It's not just like, oh,
I'm not very good with faces. It's you know, you
may not recognize your family members. If it's severe enough,
you may not recognize your own face. Yeah, and more more,
you know, like kind of in a day to day thing.
(02:32):
I saw it described by I believe it was m.
Sadie Dingfelder, who is a Washington Post writer and also
has severe face blindness. She said, I believe it's her.
Said basically, like you can spend like all day in
a meeting like a boardroom with somebody, like working closely
(02:55):
with them the whole time, and then at the end
of the day, if you both happened to ump into
each other in the lobby after you know, leaving one
another side five minutes before, she would not she would
not recognize that person. Yeah, I mean I will say
that I have. It's not a superpower, but I've always
(03:16):
been really, really, really good at remembering faces. There's something
called super recognizers. I think I might be on that
if that exists on a spectrum, I think I'm on
it because I've had some freakishly weird occurrences of remembering
faces of people I didn't know at all from years before.
Like even as a kid, I remember like seeing a
(03:36):
guy at six Flags one time and then seeing him
like a couple of years later, and I think maybe
I met him, and then somehow got confirmation it wasn't
just me thinking, you know, like it wasn't a mistake,
Like I've always been really good at recognizing faces, is
what I'm saying. You were like, is it him? And
then all of a sudden he puts on a jean
(03:56):
jacket with the iHeart six flags patch on the back.
It is Let's say it may have been something like
that because the clothes, you'll see the clothes and things
can be a way to help you remember people for sure. So,
like you said, the whole thing kind of exists in degrees,
and a lot of people think that, you know, if
(04:17):
you have face blindness blindness, which is weird that I
have trouble saying face blindness too, because the clinical name
is really difficult to say. If you have face blindness,
that if somebody knows that it exists and they have
kind of a general conception of it, they might think that,
like you don't see faces, like it's that really creepy
(04:39):
Twilight zone thing where this sister was missing her mouth,
you know, or everyone looks like Robert the Doll. Yeah,
kind of like that, like but without even eyes or
a nose, like just a blur or something like that.
And apparently there is such a degree of it that
if you saw like a picture of a face maybe
out of context, like you didn't see it attach to
(05:00):
somebody's body or whatever, you would think maybe it was
a rock or just some other roundish object. That there
is like that degree. Apparently that's pretty rare. What's more
likely is that you're seeing all the different parts of
the face. Your brain's just not putting it together in
a cohesive hole like everybody else's brain does. That's that's
(05:24):
one big part of it for sure. Yeah, And I
think what we're going to do the order we settled
on is we're going to kind of talk a lot
about it and then maybe toward the end we're going
to talk about causes and whether or not it can
be fixed and stuff like that. So if that's a cliffhanger,
then there you go, Right, does that count? It? Is?
It does? There's one other thing we need to point out.
(05:45):
There's absolutely nothing wrong with people with prosopagnosias like site.
They can see perfectly fine, right, It's that the sensory
information that's coming in is not being processed correctly. Right.
That's just called far sightedness. Yeah, myopia. Yeah, mister McGoo.
Should we talk about, now, you know what else? The
(06:05):
deal with Magoo? He couldn't see very well. They always
joked about this on the podcast Freedom of whether or
not Magoo had glasses? Uh man, No, they think about it.
I'm not sure if he had glasses. Whatever the answer is,
I can't remember. The opposite is kind of what people
commonly think. I think he doesn't have classes. Yeah, so
(06:26):
people when they see people with really thick glasses would
say like, oh, real Magoo, when in fact people with
no glasses hurt the magoose. Does that make sense? Yeah,
it does. It's kind of like misusing loman on the
totem pole or drink the coolie exactly. You know. All right,
So should we talk about agnosias in general? Yeah, because
(06:46):
prosopagnosia is a specific kind of a mental disorder that
belongs to like a general class of disorders, neurological disorders
called agnosias, And they are about as fascinating as it
can get. They also reveal a tremendous amount of how
our brain works too. Yeah, and it's a Greek if
you're wondering, basically means absence of knowledge, but medically speaking,
(07:10):
it means you have some sort of recognition impairment, and
it is you know, And we'll go through these. They're
very specific. Ed helped us put this together. And the
reason it's so specific, I think, is because it has
to be, because there are some minute differences in some
of these that make a difference, you know, yeah, for sure,
make a big difference. All right, So I guess we'll
(07:34):
start with the three main categories. Color blindness, which we've
talked about before, is a version of an agnosia, word blindness,
which I guess you have with reading the words face blindness,
and what we're talking about today prosopagnosia. But those aren't
the three categories. Those are three types of visual. The
(07:55):
three main categories are visual, auditory, in touch right right right,
visual seems to have the most associated with it. In
addition to all those other ones you just mentioned, there's
one called apperceptive, which is where you can't differentiate objects,
just like a person can't differentiate a face with prosopagnosia.
Like a person with apperceptive visual agnosia, like you can
(08:19):
say say, hey, look at that car, and look at
that toaster over there aren't they really nice to look at,
And they'd be like, I don't really see any difference
between those two things that you're pointing out now, And
I have questions about this. You may not know the
answer too, about why a toaster is out on a
street with a car. That's it. No, it's And to
be fair, toaster and car were probably not great examples
(08:41):
to use because you take into consideration, as you'll see,
if you have any of these disorders, you know the
fact that it's on the street, in a driveway, or
on a counter in a kitchen. Sure, But what I
want to know is is do they do they even
note like the size of something? I don't know. Some
of these are so exotic that there's like just a
(09:03):
handful of cases in the entire history of medicine. I
think a perceptive is a little more common, but I
don't know exactly how they see it, because like a
pair of glasses on a coffee table or a remote
control like that kind of thing makes a little more sense.
Car and toaster blows my mind. Okay, So I'm just
(09:24):
gonna go ahead and confess car and toaster was my example.
I'm just trying to get the point across. Okay, I
just wonder if if it is that severe. I'm sure
it can be, especially if allow this exists on a spectrum.
If there's people out there who can look at a
picture of a face and think it's a rock, I'm
sure there's somebody out there who has a perceptive visual
agnosia that says that toaster in that car, same thing, buddy.
(09:48):
All right, all right, fair enough, I'm putting money on
it now. And you know what we're hoping to do
is hear from some people, because this is really fascinating.
Like you said, there's not a ton of as we'll see,
a lot of people don't come forward because they learn
to deal with it. You're right, totally. So. Associative is
another visual one that's an inability to identify objects whereas
(10:14):
you can, like you can see the coffee cup, you
can reach out and grab it, but you can't identify
its use, like I'm holding the thing, but I don't
know what the heck you do with it, right exactly.
And then there's another one that sounds man, I think
this deserves its own short stuff akin autopsia, and it's
where you can't perceive motion. Yeah, so I saw it
described as like if a car's coming at you. It
(10:35):
just is like a series of like it suddenly jumps
closer and closer and closer. You don't see it moving.
It's like a series of still images. All of life
is like that. Like how if you see somebody like
moving towards you under a strobe light. That's what it's like,
but no need for the strobe light. So it's like
a murder scene in a club in a movie exactly.
(10:57):
That's exactly what life is like for people with can't
atop to you, Wow, you have your auditory ones. Auditory
verbal is when you can't recognize a word that you hear.
They also call it word deafness for obvious reasons. And
then also under auditory is oh I had all these earlier.
(11:18):
How do you do you pronounce that G? There? I
think it's phone agnosia, phone agnosia. Okay, that makes sense.
I think that is not being able to recognize familiar
voice and identify that voice right, understand everything they're saying.
But I would be on this recording right now, as
and often the case, wondering who is this guy? Right?
(11:38):
It's kind of like the auditory version of prosopagnosia, right
with voices instead of faces. There's another one that's called
tactile agnosia, and it's where you can't recognize an object
by touch. And I've really thought about this, and the
best I could come up with is that this would
be problematic at one of those Halloween parties where they
pass around a bowl of spaghetti and tell you it's guts.
(12:00):
It just be lost on you. But that's about the
worst that could come of it from what I can tell. Okay,
because you can still use the thing and recognize what
it's used for. In't that right? I think? So it's
just when you touch it you don't know what it is.
So I'm sure like going to turn off the oven
would be really problematic or something like that. But um, yeah,
(12:21):
it's it's that's It just seems like such a limited thing.
But I'm sure there's much more problems with it than
I can come up with. If you want to get
even rarer, here are some more versions of agnosia's auto autotopagnosia,
which is when you can't recognize and identify specific body
parts of your of your own body. Oh, there's also
(12:43):
my favorite Simultan tang Agnosia, Simultan Agnosia. Yeah, I think
that's it. You got it. Okay. So that one is
where you can see all sorts of different stuff, all
the objects, you can identify all the objects in your
field of viewer in a picture or something. But what
they're doing together, that worms of cohesive whole a scene
is just totally lost on you. You would see a
(13:05):
kid in their pajamas opening a present. There would be
a tree that's decorated. There would be like a couple
of parents like watching the kid or standing off to
the side. You would not put together that this is
a scene of like a Christmas morning, Like you just
you just can't put scenes together. And I saw it
compared to not being able to see the forest from
(13:25):
the trees. Okay, that makes sense, Yeah it does. That's
my favorite one right there. Yeah, all these are so tough,
and it's not I think it's something that's easy for
people to laugh at, Like if someone said, like, why
is there a tree in that living room? Right, It's
it's not funny, you know, and especially when it comes
to the main topic of face blindness, it can be
(13:47):
a very debilitating thing. It can be for sure, but
astoundingly humans who have these conditions are really good at
figuring out ways to kind of make it through life,
just kind of worker out and essentially um and we'll
talk more about that. I say, after a break, how
about that, let's do it. I want to learn about
(14:07):
a terroristort and college dactyl, how to take a perfect moment,
all about fractolki is gone, that's another hun, the Lizzie
Border murders that I have, all runs on the plane,
everything Stubby should know. Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck, Now,
(14:32):
I don't feel at all comfortable making any jokes about
this stuff. You really threw the gauntlet down. Is there
a tree in your living room, Josh? That's not funny
covered with lights? It's Halloween. It's not funny. Uh, it
is not funny. It's a little funny, isn't it. I
think that one specifically to not recognize a scene. All right.
(14:56):
I think you can get a yuck or two out
of that. Okay, Okay, let's move on. Okay. So I
was saying before the break that people with agnosias, and
in particular prosopagnosia, learn to just kind of navigate through
life without the advantages that the rest of us just
totally take for granted and say, I say, the best
(15:17):
way to understand prosopagnosia, I just sounded like foghorn leghorn
for a second. I'll say the best way is to
understand how just people normally perceive faces. Right. Yeah, So
this is something that you know when you're grown up
or whatever. You you just sort of again, you take
(15:38):
it for granted that this is something that you've always
been able to do, but it's actually a learned process.
You develop this over the course of your life. I
think they say, you know, and it kind of makes sense,
like sort of in your prepubescent years around twelve, you're
really spongy at that age at soaking up faces and
getting better, and it just gets better in time. I
(15:58):
think we peek in our third ease. And this also
makes a lot of sense. If you grow up in
a city, you're better if you're exposed to, you know,
a lot of faces than someone who might grow up
in a small town seeing the same people over and over. Yeah,
And so the whole thing of recognizing a face, we've
figured out, and by we I mean you and me, Chuck,
is that it's a two step process, and one is
(16:19):
that that visual information comes in and it gets processed
into a hole. So like we see faces as holes
generally most most people do. And a person's face when
we're taking it in, it's not necessarily whole. We're putting
all of these pieces together automatically instantly. It's called holistic processing.
(16:39):
So you've got a face now in your head, and
then you run it against a database essentially to find
out if it's familiar or not, and all this is
taking like microseconds to do. Yeah, and then if it
comes up like, yes, this is familiar, then you have
what's called recollection memory. I believe if I recall correctly,
(17:01):
and that is this biographical information that we attached to
each person. They've figured out that it seems like that
is attached to the face, and that that's when you
recognize somebody. If you stop and think about it, you're like, oh, yeah,
I'm just inundated with this flood of information about that
person that I know. It's they are figuring out it's
(17:22):
triggered by the face. So they they're finding out that
prosopagnosia patients not only can't recognize faces, they can't retain
the biographical information that other people can because it seems
to be filed away by a person's face. Yeah, and
like you said, you pull up that file and in
your mind, what's happening so so fast is you know,
(17:45):
crooked nose, cheek scar. I went to high school with
that guy. It's Ralph. I saw that guy it's six
flags once. It'd be funny if actually went to my
high school. That's where I knew him. But Ralph. So
let's say, let's take the example of Ralph. You know
that Ralph likes long walks on the beach, that Ralph
doesn't like cockroaches, he's scared of them. You know that
(18:07):
Ralph has a really cool car that you like to
ride in sometimes, like you just know this stuff, like
you just know it, and it's part of it's part
of recognition. And again that's triggered by a face. So
people who have pazzo pagnosia have to kind of make
it through the world without that. And so for you
(18:29):
and me and people who can easily recognize faces, it's
it's really hard to imagine not being able to do that.
But it came up with a really good thought experiment.
I think is the sea apples? Are we there? I
think so? Sure. Yeah. I mean this is kind of
like a Memento, you know, the dude and Memento came
(18:49):
up with a system, and it's all about developing a
system that works. So when you see Ralph, you think
you've learned crooked nose, cheek, scar on the left face.
I know that's my friend, but there's still not that recognition,
which I can't imagine how frustrating that must be. But
in this case, if you're talking about like apples, you
show someone an apple and then you put that apple
(19:12):
on a coffee table with like forty apple buddies, and
then you say, pick up that apple, and it's you know,
you'd be lost, to be very frustrating, But if you
were told to do this several times or you know,
given years or whatever, you would eventually develop a system
to memorizing how to recognize that apple, which could be
(19:33):
the most minute little features of the apple, from the
length of the stem to the dent in the top
corner that you don't want to eat. Yeah, and if
your entire social life, and in some cases your own
survival was predicated I'm being able to recognize individual apples,
you would figure out a way to do that. And
so if you just replace identifying individual apples with identifying faces,
(19:58):
that's what people with pazo pagnosia have to learn how
to do, and they do it, like you said. And
it turns out that if you, um kind of study
how prosopagnosiacs real world from I've seen it a ton
of places, including people who know what they're talking about. Yeah, um,
that you'll find that there are a bunch of little
cues and mannerisms and things that that we have that
(20:19):
we're not aware of that really make us individuals beyond
just what our faces look like. Yeah, because we're literally
just talking the face. So if your friend has a
purple mohawk, then use that like like that's a you
want all your friends to have weird hair. You know,
you grab onto that with all your might. That's right.
Don't let go with the of that mohawk. Uh you
(20:42):
you know, you can still see the eyes and recognize
like eye color or like I said, you know, if
your friend has like you know, broke their nose or
they have a scar on their face or things like that,
or how big their ears are or how they walk,
or what they their mannerisms. Mannerisms are huge or yeah,
obviously things like tattoos or if they have stinky armpits,
(21:03):
or like there's sure, there's a lot of ways you
gotta get that one right or that could be very embarrassing.
But there are a lot of things that we don't
need to use but are still in our own memory banks.
If you don't have prosopagnosia, but just filter out the
face and those are what everyone else with prosopagnosia is using. Right.
(21:24):
There's also a lot of reliance on friends and family
to be like, oh, here comes Ralph. Remember you like
his car, right, and you'd be like, Ralph, good to
see you. Friend. Can I ride in your car? And
Ralph and say, sure, I appreciate you recognizing me. Of
course you can ride in my car. The problem is
you're not always around your friends and family. Some people
(21:44):
are single and don't live in the same town as
their family. Some people's family don't like them. There's all
sorts of reasons that you might not be able to
rely on prompts all the time, And there's also problems
with the strategy of using all sorts of little details
to identify people too, because people change their hair color
exactly once you enter that business world. That purple mohawks
(22:07):
probably gone, right, Yeah, people change their hair color, people
change their clothes. It can be really difficult to keep
up with that stuff. And so there's other potentially better
ways of identifying people. And it seems to have to
do with basically teaching yourself to memorize the people who
are important in your life. Like you would choose a
(22:29):
select group of people and be like, these are the
people I really need to recognize, and you would get
to studying them, like photographs of them at length, yeah,
and which you know that's can also be a little
tricky because let's say you have a friend with Prizo
Pagnosia and you know that this is their strategy, and
they still don't remember you, and you're like, oh, okay,
I didn't make that list of extra study that's right.
(22:51):
Yeah awkward, but no, that is that is one thing
they say. And I think I get the picture that
this is sort of a um sort of a beginning
coping method, which is like get to know the people
around you and get used to like doing that, and
then I feel like the circle probably broadens from there
once you're like kind of have your techniques down, Yeah,
(23:14):
I would guess so for sure. Another one that I
thought was pretty interesting, a coping skill for people with
face blindness is using conversation skills. Using general small talk,
you can kind of create like certain situations with conversation
to see how a person reacts, like if you're like, yeah,
(23:35):
you know, would you vote for right? Exactly? So like
you can use conversation to figure out who you're talking to.
And I also saw that a lot of people with
prosopagnosia walk around half pretending like they know everybody, so
that if they come upon somebody who actually knows them,
they can already be primed to be like, yeah, how's
(23:57):
it going, kind of things like overly friendly, almost yes
exactly that they're all smiles all the time, and they're
doing that. It's like a coping mechanism to basically trick
people into thinking that they recognize them. And then also
they found at least Sadie Dingfelder has found that if
you get people to talk about themselves, if you ask questions,
(24:19):
first of all, they're going to love talking to you,
because people love talking about themselves. But then secondly, they're
going to give up enough biographical information pretty quickly that
you're going to know who you're talking to. This is
fascinating stuff, isn't it. Yeah, it's almost like being a
really skilled detective slash detective interviewer. Well Sadie Dingfelder attributes
(24:40):
her success as a reporter for The Washington Post as
being able being comfortable talking to strangers because she said,
everyone's a stranger in my life, and then also like
it really helped her honor conversation and interviewing skills too. Yeah,
that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's I feel
like sometimes there are these disorders that end up having
(25:00):
you certain superpowers at the same time. For sure, that's
a great way to put it. If you are someone
with Prosa pagnosia and you were watching a TV show
or a movie, that can be problematic from episode to
episode because you may literally not know who this person
is on the screen, and that could make it very hard.
(25:20):
And I know it's you know, it's like, oh, you're
only watching a movie, but like that'd be really frustrating
a consuming entertainment was there was an ade layer of
difficulty to that. You know, it's an impossibility. From what
I can tell, there's this guy named Tim Rymel who
wrote a little article about what it's like to live
with it, and he was saying, like, you just you
just can't You just stop watching after like ten minutes,
(25:43):
because you just lose patience. It'd be kind of like
watching a double feature of Happiness in Life during Wartime? Wait,
which one was Life during Wartime? That was the sequel
to Happiness where he kept the same characters but replaced
them with all new actors. I don't think I saw
that one. It's really weird to watch. It's really discomforting.
(26:06):
I mean, it's already just horrible, like inhumane material to
begin with, Todd Sollins and stuff. Yeah, but just it's
just really unsettling to see new people playing the same
characters and trying to keep up with who they are.
So actually, that'd be a really good exercise in what
it's like to be a prozo pagnosiac. I don't know
(26:29):
if I would recommend everybody watching Happiness in Life during Wartime.
Maybe read a little bit about it first before you
watch it, and then if you go ahead and watch it,
don't play me. But if you're good with those movies.
That would be a pretty good way to be Like,
this is what it's like to have prazo pagnosia. Yeah,
I would imagine for entertainment consumption, music and reading become
even more important, you know. Yeah, And you know you
(26:51):
can imagine isolating that can be too, and not just
like oh I can't sit in and talk about TV
shows with other people, but it's an isolated in condition,
to be sure. Like the people that have overcome it
to the point where they're extroverted and overly friendly, like
hats off to them, you know, yeah, because a lot
of people go the opposite route. They become very introverted, yeah,
(27:13):
and don't like to go out because they're so they
become so socially anxious about the shame and embarrassment of
not recognizing somebody and how awkward it can be, especially
if that person has no idea what their condition is,
that they just stop going out. It's just easier to
stay home, and so it can be a really isolating condition.
And then also all the stuff we've been talking about,
(27:33):
all those coping skills that is really mentally exhausting. Yeah,
Like it's so just natural to us to just recognize
somebody by the face. That to have to study somebody
and remember it and memorize pictures of your friends and
loved ones. That is a lot of work. So it
can be isolating, it can be exhausting, and then, I guess, sadly,
(27:56):
at least for now, those coping skills are also basically
the extent of treatment for prosopagnosia as as it currently stands.
That's kind of it. It's it's learned all these strategies
to deal with it to whatever extent you're comfortable, and
and that's about all you can do. It's it's basically, uh, well,
we'll talk a little bit about the permanency of the condition,
(28:18):
but it's it's almost always permanent. Um yeah, let's hold
off on that though, because there there are a couple
of different ways you can get it that we'll get to. Okay,
But there have been it feels like the last few
decades there's been a lot more research than there ever
was before. There are, of course, you know, previous to
(28:38):
you know, the last couple of decades. You may not
even like your doctor probably and this might still be
the case in some cases, your doctor may not even
know like what the heck is going on? It's that rare.
So nowadays there are support groups and there a therapist
and people might generally and that's you know, another reason
we're doing this is it's sort of always like to
(28:59):
help get the word out on these rare things. But
previous to a couple of decades ago, I can't imagine
what it would have been like living in the world.
It's probably just a secret that you keep. Yeah, And
it was chalked up. Oliver Sacks actually had it. The
fame neurologist to Awakenings was based on his work, and
he wrote awesome books like The Man Who Mystic his
(29:20):
wife for a hat, There you go, and an Anthropologist
on Mars I think was one of his two. He
had like severely, and he just chalked it up to
being kind of flighty, kind of absent minded, to being
aloof and a lot of people just kind of chalk
it up to that and just go through life because
they don't. They weren't aware of it. And he was
(29:41):
a neurologist and he wasn't making aware of it, and
he had it. Apparently Jane goodall the primatologists had it.
And Chuck Close the awesome portraitist. You look up his work.
I'm sure you've seen it before. He frequently makes giant
canvases of faces, close up of faces, but they're made
(30:02):
of little squares and he's really good, but it just
kind of alters what the person looks like. And then
once you figure out that he has pazo pagnosia, and
you're like, Okay, that's really interesting that he dedicated his
career to faces. You know. Yeah, and I'm telling you
that Brad Pitt People magazine article I read, he says that,
(30:23):
you know, it's kind of been a thorn in his
side where people think he's a jerk or whatever. And
he said, for a while he was trying to use
a strategy of like, you know, because of course you
meet way more people when you're Brad Pitt than the
average person. Sure, just constantly meeting new people because of
your job. But he said he used his strategy for
a while like you know, hey remind me, like in
(30:44):
a really friendly way, like hey remind me where we met.
And he said sometimes that was even worse, like people
get more offended if you've asked out loud, which is
like that's the really the right way to handle that
when you don't recognize someone in life, you know, it
can be very awkward. But the right way to handle
this say I'm so sorry, like I know we've met,
but who were you again? And you know it's a
(31:07):
tough thing to say. Imagine saying that over and over
and over in your life. Right, and one of those
people who got deeply offended with Shania Twain, I'm guessing
I never thought i'd say this, but poor Brad Pitt, Right.
I think another part of it too, that actually makes
it a little more difficult on him than the average
person is because he's such a celebrity. He's put up
(31:27):
on a pedestal and so people him not recognizing people
makes him he's already primed to be viewed as arrogant
or can you think he's above everybody else? And then
if you combine his condition with that, I would guess
it's harder on him than most people. Yeah, and I
will tell you this is that when someone is famous
and they do recognize you know, the the craft service
(31:52):
person or the guy who parks their car, like, people
make a really big deal out of that, like he's
such a good dude, he parked this guy's car like
three times a year and he remember me every time.
That ends up to be like a legend passed around
on Reddit, right kind of thing exactly. So you want
to take our second break and come back and talk
about diagnosing prosopagnosia and then what's going on in the brain. Yes, please,
(32:16):
I want to learn about a terris ort and college verydactyl,
how to take a purgect moment, all about fractol thinks gone,
that's another hun the Lizzie Border murders all runs on
the plane. Everything should know. Word up, Jerry. So if
(32:42):
you go back in the way back machine and look
at the earliest cases of this, you'll see that some
of the first cases that they found were diagnosed because
of a like a brain injury. And that is one
of the two ways that you can get this is
and we'll talk about the parts of the brain is
sec but is either by some sort of injury or
maybe a tumor pressing on this part of the brain.
(33:03):
But what they found is that is far and away
the more rare kind, and that it's usually something that
you're born with, yeah, the congenital kind, but the acquired
kind is so dramatic when you suddenly lose the ability
to recognize faces. Those were the first cases that were described.
And the guy who coined the term prosopagnosia is Joaquim Bottomer,
(33:29):
and he studied a World War Two veterans who'd been
shot in the head and couldn't recognize people any longer.
And I had a certain idea and conception of what
the World War Two veterans Bottomer was studying were like
until I found out that he was a German neurologist
and that he was studying them in like nineteen forty four.
So apparently the earliest ones were Nazis, who were the
(33:51):
ones who kind of turned the world onto the idea
of prazo pagnosia. Oh interest, and that jarring. It's kind
of like there was this episode of the Office where
Dwight's talking about how his grandfather fought in World War
Two and was captured in Hell as a pow, and
then he says something at the end that reveals that
his grandfather was German. It was a Nazi, And it's
(34:12):
just such like a jarring turn because you're just thinking
about this greatest generation, you know, person over there, Yeah, yeah,
you know, just kicking Germany around in Europe, and all
of a sudden, it's not, Well, that's a pretty funny
character thing because only Dwight Trute would brag about right,
you know, or hold up their Nazi grandfather as a
(34:32):
as a wounded veteran. That's funny. It was. It was
good character development for sure. So as far as how
rare it is, we've talked a little bit about it
and said, you know, it's really rare. I've seen some
stuff that that it's not as rare as you might think.
I think psychology today said two percent of the population
or somewhere on that spectrum. Yeah, about one and fifty.
(34:52):
And that's not just them. That's pretty widespread that. Yeah,
I mean, that's not that rare. But I get the
feeling that it's the spectrum side of things where it
gets more and more rare to the people that see
faces rock. But if you put fifty people in a room,
one of those people is going to be thinking who
are all these people? Yeah? So um yeah, And I
(35:14):
think it does have to do with the spectrum thing,
like you're saying too, you know, like there's a lot
of people out there who are just not very good
at it, but there's just some sort of breakdown, but
it's not a full breakdown in one of the processes.
The problem is because it is generally rare, and because
it is pretty recent that people have just started to
understand it. I keep seeing the Oliver Sacks wrote an
(35:35):
article which I read is in The New Yorker in
twenty ten. I just read it like last night or whatever,
but not to say like, oh, I read it way back. Yeah,
but I keep seeing that sited is like basically the
beginning of spreading awareness of facebindness. It was that recent.
So there's plenty of doctors who've had people come to
them with prosopagnosia and other agnosias and just had no
(35:58):
idea what they were looking at and then probably misdiagnosed them.
So they probably misdiagnosed the kid is having a learning
disability because they weren't picking up on words that they
were reading but they could, you know, hear them just fine,
or that they had some sort of problem with their
site with prosopagnosia, and so the people were left to
(36:19):
kind of, like we talked about, figure out workarounds to
kind of make it through life before people understood that
there was such a thing as prosopagnosia. Well, they didn't
even come up with a really great test for it
until two thousand and six when they started using and
I think it's still kind of the most widely used test,
the Cambridge Face memory test. And this is when they
(36:41):
show you faces that it's just faces. There's there's no hair,
there's no clothes or anything like that, so no medallions.
No medallion's disgust too would be a dead giveaway. So
just a face against a black background, only faces, and
then on the next screen, it will show you this
face along with two other faces, and you're supposed to
(37:03):
select the face that you just saw on the slide before.
Right the computer shouts who's it right at you every time.
It's really jarring. But one of the troubling parts about
this test is that they only had white male faces
on the test for a long time. I think just
this year they finally started featuring women's faces, still only
(37:23):
white faces, which I don't know if that was purposeful.
I didn't see I looked. I didn't see anything about
any ethnic group being more apt to suffer from this,
did you No? I don't get it, especially with the
new version debuted into twenty twenty two. And the problem
with it is is not just because it's not inclusive,
it's a flaw on the test. Yeah, because there's something
(37:45):
called the other race effect. It's very well documented. Yeah,
if you were raised generally among Yeah, if you were
raised generally among white people, and you're a white person,
you're going to have trouble differentiating people of other ethnic groups.
It's just and vice versa. If you're Asian, same thing,
if you're a Black, same thing, And if you were
raised around a mixed group of ethnicities, you're actually going
(38:08):
to be really good at differentiating among those ethnicities. But
the thing is most people aren't raised among a bunch
of ethnicities, and so if you show someone who is,
say black, a bunch of Caucasian faces, it might not
be that they're face blind. It might just be the
other race effect is coming into into play and that
they're being misdiagnosed. Actually, yeah, super interesting. We talked in
(38:31):
the Doppelganger episode, which was very recently, about the fusiform gyrus,
which is the part of the brain that they have
kind of finally figured out is really where face recognition
happens kind of full stop. That's where all the action
takes place. And I think they even have called it
now the fusiform face area. And if you have any
(38:55):
sort of damage to the fusiform gyrus, and again this
is the more rare kind, and is he acquired or
if you have a tumor pressing against it or something
like that, then that's probably going to be the cause.
It's damage your fusiform gyrus, right, And they found that
for congenital patients, it seems that their fusiform gyrus is
(39:15):
thicker than someone who doesn't have prosopagnosia. And the theory
that I read there was a guy named doctor Joe
de Guidas who was a Harvard neuroscientist, and he was
on the American Psychology Associations or Psychological Associations Speaking of
Psychology podcast, and he was basically saying that the theory
(39:38):
is that as you get as you're exposed to more
and more faces, your fusiform gyrus just gets rid of
like neural connections it doesn't need. It gets so like
lean and mean and efficient that a thinner fusiform gyrus
is going to be better at recognizing faces than a
thicker one. Was that doctor's name really what I think?
(40:01):
Joe Degudis Deguttas. Okay, he said the guide us at first,
and I was like, that would be really interesting if
a doctor had a last name with ITAs at the
end of it, right, Okay, de Guttis or goodis it's
d e g u t I s let's just call
him Joe from now on, doctor Joe. Doctor Joe sounds
like a chiropractor. The interesting thing about these UM experiments
(40:24):
they've done with the fuse from Gyrus, and that's what
we talked about in the Doppelganger EPP was we now
have an answer of whether or not we evolved like
a very specific function to recognize a face because we
have UM that. You know, the theories were out there
about like did we recognize like a prey hunting a
(40:44):
predator to like recognize different predators, And now we have
an answer to that, and that is yes, yeah, so
they think that UM. There was like a really large
debate going on, Chuck, where it's like, Okay, do we
actually have like a section of the brain that just
does faces. That seems unlikely. Instead, the opposite explanation was
that we have an object recognition system, the same thing
(41:07):
as recognizing a rock or a car or a toaster,
and that faces were just another object, but because they
were so vital to our social life and survival, that
we were experts at recognizing faces, but really to our
brain they were just another object. And the fusiform that
the confirmation that the fusiform gyrus just does faces kind
(41:28):
of throws that out the window because in the in
the experiment that we talked about in the Doppelganger episode,
this guy had his his um, the fusiform gyrus electro stimulated,
and the researcher's face just morphed. But his tie didn't change.
None of the objects in the room, the chairs didn't change,
so objects remain the same, just his face changed. So yeah,
(41:50):
it basically said, yes, we have a fusiform gyrus. It
functions for recognizing faces and that is all it does.
That's how important facial recognition is. Well, and imagine in
you know, the earliest days of different tuk tuks mulling
around the savannah is friend or enemy? You know, it
(42:11):
became very important, very quickly to recognize people that have
done you wrong or done you right right, exactly for sure.
And I think also that probably also supports the other
race effect too, where it's like you don't need to
differentiate between somebody like an outside or an outgroup. You
just need to know like they're part of the outgroup.
(42:34):
It's the people in your in group that you need
to have more specified social connections with. And yeah, we're
just we've socially evolved enough that now we have a
problem with this relic, this remnant from our evolutionary past
that we still haven't physically evolved out of. We just
socially evolved past it. And it's just problematic now. I
(42:57):
wonder if there's anything too. And a short stuff on
on having a face that's naturally uh the kindest way
to say this average, No, naturally adverse looking. What do
you mean like scowli like, you know, like resting scowl face.
(43:19):
Let's go BRF. I don't know what that is. I'll
tell you later, Okay, No, but you know what I
mean is is some people have like a their resting
look is just not inviting. Let's just say, and I
don't mean any not attractive or not at all. I
mean like literally like that person isn't doesn't look like
(43:40):
someone that would welcome me to come up and say hello. Right,
they look angry, and they're like, this is how I
always look. I'm sorry. I think we should look into
that for a short stuff, because I'm sure that's research
into it. Yeah. Yeah, because most of the time when
you do talk to them or whatever, they like light up.
Their facial expression totally changes. So you hope that it's
not just a charade, that they're just their faces their
(44:03):
normal resting faces just happens to look like that they're
not mad all the time. Who knows, let's get to
the bottom of it. As far as animals go. If
you're wondering kind of to put a cherry on top
of this thing, there has been research that have shown
that recognizing faces in maccaques has been detected maccaque monkeys,
(44:24):
so it's been around longer than we have, and that
they've found that other non primates like are good at
this sheep. Apparently you're really good. I don't know if
that transfers to goats are across the street. Neighborhoodn't have
goats any longer, which is very sad, but I feel
like those goats or maybe they just recognized us as
the people coming across from that house, but we would
(44:46):
always bring them food scraps and when we walk out
the door, they would come run into the fence and
braying and braying. So we never did an experiment where
we came from around the corner or something. I'm curious
if it was the same with goats with us creepy eyes. Yeah,
I wonder too, Or was it like your scent that
they were picking up on? What was it you know?
(45:06):
Or was it faces? It was probably just us coming
out of the house with a bucket of food. Everything right,
every other day it would be my guess. So prazo pagnoja. Huh,
good one, I think so too. If you have prosopagnoja,
please write in and let us know what it's like.
And if you didn't realize you had prosopagnoja until you
listen to this episode, please also write in and let
(45:29):
us know that. And in the meantime, I think it's
time for a listener mail. That's right. I'm going to
call this a gentle correction or not a correction actually,
just a question answered, which we always love. Hey guys
live in the high desert of California. I listen to
the show whenever I'm in the car on my hour
long drive to the LA area. Today's show you mentioned,
(45:51):
and this is the one on fake towns. You mentioned
how the Boeing plant and Seattle had camouflaged their factory
with a fake town on the roof, and you were
wrapping it up, and I think one of you said
something about wondering if the West Coast was ever bombed,
and I think Chuck said no, I don't think so.
I was wrong. California was indeed shelled from offshore by
a Japanese submarine on February twenty third, nineteen forty two,
(46:14):
just north of Galida, a town called Elwood. The submarine
took aim at a rich Field oil storage facility and
landed between twelve and twenty five rounds, destroying a pumphouse,
defended Derek and giving credit or credits due. I first
heard about this incident while watching an episode of Huel
(46:35):
Houser's California Gold, a show on public television. Casey et
out of LA. The pace of the link, if you're interested,
could be a good subject of its own. The day
California got bombed, and that is from Craig Tim in
Rosamond to California. Very nice. Thanks a lot of Craig.
That was indeed a gentle question, answered her question, gently
(46:58):
answered short. I kind of got her on too. If
you want to be like Craig and gently answer one
of our questions, or make a correction or just say hi,
it does not matter. We're always open to an email
from you. You can wrap it up, spank it on
the bottom, and send it off to Stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
(47:20):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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