Ginia Bellafante at the New York Times:
From a young age my son demonstrated a keen ability for facial recall. As we watched movies and television shows, he might blurt out — at seeing Ray Milland guest-star as a murderous botanist in a “Columbo” episode — that the same actor had played a villainous husband in “Dial M for Murder,” released two decades earlier, and which we’d watched more than a year prior. But actors making vanishingly brief cameos left equally striking impressions.
According to Fay Bound-Alberti, a professor of modern history at King’s College in London, the 2 percent of the population who possess this skill, one that apparently cannot be taught, are known as “super recognizers,” a term coined by Harvard researchers.
As we learn in “The Face,” a cultural unpacking of our most scrutinized organ, another 2 percent, on the other side of the bell curve, manage prosopagnosia — or face blindness — a condition that makes remembering faces and the identities attached to them a persistent challenge. Bound-Alberti counts herself among the affected (so does Brad Pitt).
More here.
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