Industry Figure Tom Chappell

I’m famous for it — I can’t recognize faces. I’ll give you some quick examples, but understand that these are just a few of many that I could tell you:

1. I used to work at home, and I would often pick up my son Sean at school, every day, really. It would often happen, and especially one day, that I just wasn’t sure if the kid coming toward me was my son or not. My actual son, whom I love and see every day. I really wasn’t sure until he saw me, smiled and waved. On other days, it was some other kid.

2. Once, about a year ago, I went my co-worker Teresa’s baby shower, and happened to have rushed to work without shaving. To top things off, when my good friend Larry Helmerich took my picture, I made a face. Later, looking at the picture on his web site while at work, I thought that I didn’t look too attractive, and asked him to remove that bad picture. He wrote me back that he had “taken action,” and when I went to look at the site, the picture was still there, but not so bad. When I told Larry that “the picture doesn’t look as bad on my Macintosh as it did on my PC at work, for some reason,” he replied, “I removed your face and replaced it with Brad Pitt’s, you idiot!”

…or five other stories that I could tell you. I just really can’t recognize faces.

This week’s Economist has an interesting (though short) story about the malady, with wonderful new words:

face-blindness — The inability to recongize faces.

prosopagnosia — face-blindness.

greebles — computer-generated, stylized doo-jobs, designed to see if face-blind people have a generalized pattern-recognition deficit, or something specific to faces. It turns out that it’s something specific to faces: face-blind people have no trouble with greebles.

“About Face”
The Economist
December 2, 2004