Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 20:11:01 -0500 From: David DeLaney Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Status: R In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: Matt McIrvin (mmcirvin@world.std.com) wrote: > > "Talysman the Ur-Beatle" (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > > > ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, [...] > > Well, I don't have any trouble with this. Gee, good for you, Matt. Is that also your reaction when someone tells you they have cancer? YAY FOR YOU, MATT! YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE FEWER CONDITION THAN ONE OTHER PERSON! Maybe if you're lucky you're not alone -- I hope you don't turn out to be the only person on the whole Internet not to have prosopagnosia. > [...] > > I think that Kibo is clearly far short of full-blown prosopagnosia, but > I've watched enough TV with him that I think his perception of faces is > a little bit odd. He has trouble distinguishing actors who have some > very general facial characteristics in common, the classic example being > Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen; [...] > And he says he does better with faces on TV than in real life. The more I think about what you just wrote about me, the more cross I am with you right now. First, you seem not to have grasped that if I say something to you when you've invited me to watch your big-screen TV, that things said in your living room are not part of my public life intended to be broadcast to the entire Internet. Even in cases where I've mentioned something relatively inconsequential and you've blabbed about it on a.r.k, I've been somewhat upset, and in this case it's about a mild neurological oddity I have that I've never before felt like I should talk about. Outside my family, you were the first person I ever discussed it with at any length, and I thought you were understanding of it, so I was barely able to work up the courage to mention it on a.r.k the next day, and then I see you deciding to tell everyone your diagnosis of what you think is wrong with me. Second, you could at least get your facts straight. If you're going to gossip about me to practically everyone I know, you should provide more reliable gossip. Haven't I explained to you that the running joke about Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen being interchangeable is due to the (probably deliberately) confusing editing in the middle of "The Terminator"? (The two of them play rather indistinct characters -- by which I mean that neither has a personality, they serve the same function, they are dressed alike, and they are seen mainly in the background. As I recall, when Schwarzenegger shoots up the police station, there are _three_ shots of one or the other of them getting killed, further complicated by one of them entering a scene right as the other exits; I don't know why, but the director seemed to be trying to add some pointless confusion to that sequence, perhaps just so he could get away with slipping in some extra gore when one or the other of them was killed a second time.) I do have trouble with faces, but that was a joke; The joke may have been partly inspired by my face issue causing me to rewind that scene a couple times to try to figure out whether it was the director's fault or my fault that the movie was confusing, but that doesn't make it a piece of evidence for you to broadcast in support of your diagnosis. It's not as if I said Linda Hamilton was Linda Hunt or anything. Third, I don't understand why you're going out of your way to try to convince people you seem to think I'm profoundly impaired. I mentioned that I had some difficulty recognizing faces of people I meet, and now suddenly you're telling the entire Internet that I can hardly even watch TV. I hope people don't take you seriously. If people start treating me as if I'm made of glass because they think I have some sort of major neurological impairment, I'm not going to be happy. Has it occurred to you that practically all my friends read a.r.k and you've just tried to make them think I'm too incompetent _to watch television_? You are aware that one of my jobs has been to work as a _designer_, and that people I have done business with (or hope to do business with) are going to see your conclusions about what's wrong with me? Next time, if you allow _me_ to talk about a medical condition of mine, I will try to describe it, which would be preferable to you putting out distorted gossip based on things I said in your living room. For the record, for anyone who's interested: I have some degree of prosopagnosia, a condition which often makes it difficult for me to tell whether I've seen someone before when I meet them the second time (mainly affecting real-life meetings at airports, which is why I always tell people to find me because I may have trouble finding them.) It is a neurological condition (not a mental disorder, not a visual disorder, not a lack of attention) which is usually caused by a blow to the head (in my case, I think it was just naturally-occurring) and doesn't affect my ability to _remember_ faces (it has nothing to do with being unable to remember what name goes with what face, something everyone has trouble with to some degree), just my ability to _recognize_ faces. It affects only faces; I think those who know me (and have seen me talk endlessly about details of typography, paintings, cinematography, etc.) know I am highly visually perceptive. In fact, I suspect my interest in the visual arts, and good "eye" for art, is something of a reaction to the prosopagnosia -- I have always concentrated on analysis of everything I see because the part of my visual comprehension which works, the part that makes up the bulk of human perception, is the part that can analyze things rationally in terms of shape, color, texture, etc., as prosopagnosia only affects a specialized category of visual perception. The belief is that the human visual system has special wiring designed for perceiving faces in addition to all the general-purpose visual- analysis stuff, and I'm missing the magic unit that likes to take pictures of faces. For instance, for most people, if you were asked to describe someone you know, you'd summon up an image of that person's face, and then you'd mentally "look" at it and pull off details like what shape the nose is, what color eyes there are, etc., whereas I would draw a blank unless I had studied that person well enough to have deliberately _memorized_ details of what the nose is, what the eyes are, etc. I have an excellent visual memory -- if you ask me to sketch Dali's "The Persistence Of Memory" I can put the trees and watches in the right place, if you ask me about the Times Roman "R" I can draw it in every detail from memory -- but most people have some extra circuitry that basically takes snapshots of faces as single units, whereas I have to put the same effort into learning a face that I do into remembering anything else. And recognizing faces, even when I've memorized their details, is still a problem because faces show up at different angles, in different lighting, at different distances, with different hairstyles, with different expressions, whenever you see them. (Cecilia Burman's prosopagnosia site, http://www.prosopagnosia.com , has a really great demonstration of how this works by showing some photos of faces and some photos of rocks, showing that most people "just can" recognize faces under all sorts of conditions, but you have to really work to learn the specific shape of a rock in order to recognize it under even mildly different conditions, because the brain doesn't have special "rock" circuits.) This doesn't normally bother me at all, because it mainly makes little problems when I have to meet someone at an airport, etc., or when someone says "Hi!" on the street and I wonder if I've ever met them before. People I know well turn out to be quite recognizable because I work at learning how to recognize them -- most people have a distinctive style of dress (even though they don't wear the same clothes all the time, I've developed a fashion sense to be able to say "He likes desaturated solid colors, and they like stripes of tertiaries...") and a recognizable height, hair color, gait, voice, and so on. I don't understand why I do well recognizing actors and newsmakers and so on in photos and on TV (although I'm not quite as good as average, I'm not terrible at it either; I actually scored above-average on an online test at recognizing photos of famous people last night.) I think it's because photos and movies tend to try to make people easy to recognize (good lighting, etc.) and I can study the image without the face moving around. (And of course it's usually a picture of someone I've seen a zillion times!) There's no real way of illustrating what a face looks like to someone like me; Cecilia Burman has some pictures of Mickey Mouse with his face blurred, and Bill Choisser's site ( http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/ ) has a pixelated photo of him, but those are more illustrations of "This is how hard it is for some people," it's not possible to illustrate _what_ the perceptual difficulty is. I can see the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. quite clearly, I just don't get it as "this is a face", just as "here's a complicated collection of body parts that have to be studied individually, like a puzzle." It's a very difficult thing to explain, particularly as the effect is so subtle (most people aren't even aware that this condition exists because it doesn't affect people like me in any way that might be noticed, except in terms of some social awkwardness when people say hi on the street.) It's a lot like trying to explain color-blindness to someone with full color vision -- they probably always ask, "If red and green look the same to you, do they both look red, or do they both look green?" You can't describe how what you see is different from what other people see, you just know there's a little bit of extra information that other people are getting. With prosopagnosia, the most common response seems to be "I have trouble remembering what name goes with what face too. Why don't you just pay more attention?" But you wouldn't tell a color-blind person to try harder to see the difference between red and green. You'd just expect them to deal with it. Just as a color-blind person knows that the red is on the top of the traffic light and the green is on the bottom, I know that a person of height X with stride Y and hair Z is probably a specific friend, and if I hadn't gone out of my way to bring up the subject as an interesting minor difference between me and other people, you folks would never be aware I was different in this way (unless you met me at the airport and wondered why I told you to wave to me.) Just as it's a little tricky to understand how prosopagnosia works, it's also tricky to figure out where I fit in on the spectrum of people with this disorder. I think I have a relatively mild case of it -- enough to make it hard to recognize people's faces, but not the degree some people have where they are unable to read people's emotions from their facial expressions, and some people aren't able to perceive faces _at all_. (The more general form of agnosia causes some people to have generalized perceptual problems, making them unable to recognize things of any sort, as in Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Prosopagnosia is face-recognition-specific, agnosia is a broad category of disorders that fall into the category of "trouble recognizing something".) After the terrorist attack on New York in 2001, there was a brief fad for installing "face-recognition" cameras in buildings, stadiums, and so on, in hopes that computers would be able to identify terrorists by looking at them through a cheap little video camera and applying some digital-image-processing snake-oil. I could've told them that wouldn't work. Most humans have the wonderful gift of just automatically being able to _know_ they've seen a face before without thinking about it, but I deal with faces in the same way a computer does, by looking for clues such as shapes and colors and positions of the parts, and thus I know that no grid of pixels pointed at a three-dimensional face with a variable hairstyle and bad lighting can put those pixels together into the equivalent of the automatic "Aha! It's Mary!" moment humans usually have. The most fascinating thing about this is that it's so specific -- as someone who's done a lot of computer programming, I always tended to assume that the brain was like a computer and followed well-defined rules about what did what (even if we can't specify what each part does, it still seems like it ought to work more like a computer) but it turns out that there are things in our brains that perform tasks well beyond the sophistication of any artificial intelligence we could create any time soon. Think of how hard it is for a computer to scan a printed page and determine that the "a"s are "a"s, the "b"s are "b"s, and so on (scanned text tends to come out with a lot of garbled words) and then imagine how complicated the task is of answering the question of, "Who is that person down the hallway?" We don't understand how most people can do this without furrowing their brows and hunting for clues, but I know what it's like to try to do it in the more computery way of having to consciously match faces to a database I've been keeping of people's bits and parts. I have to use the generalized "studying stuff" algorithms for everything, while most people also have "seeing whole faces" tricks. I don't look on it as being a problem for me -- it only causes a little trouble in specific circumstances and as I mentioned earlier, I think its side effect is that it caused me to get really good at the visual analysis of visual media other than faces, such as ad layouts, clothes, movie scenes, calligraphy, and so on. It's a flaw, but I think on the whole it's helped me as much as it's hurt me. The only thing I've concluded I just will never be able to do is to become a painter of fine portraits. (I can sketch okay, except for faces! That's probably why my design work tends to revolve around logos and lettering and layout, rather then trying to emulate Rembrandt.) And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net. I hope it helps everyone understand that I, like most people, am a little different from everyone else, but I hope that bringing up the subject doesn't lead to people thinking I'm having great difficulties or the new Rain Man or some sort of bizarre crazed genius. (Well, actually, the prosopagnosia isn't the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. But there is insufficient space on the Internet for me to list all the ways in which I'm weird. For purposes of this discussion, I just wanted to talk about one perceptual difficulty caused by a bug in my wetware.) -- K. Now, as far as being a supertaster goes, that's another tiny genetic difference that makes me better than the Muggles, even if it makes dark chocolate taste really nasty. Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 23:08:39 -0500 Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Status: R In alt.religion.kibology, stacia@io.com wrote: James Kibo Parry wrote: > If people start treating me > as if I'm made of glass because they think I have some sort of > major neurological impairment, I'm not going to be happy. No offense, but you're not happy now. I'M JUST SAYIN'. Anyhow, I personally plan on treating you as if you were made of clay and moss and call you Mr Chia. > Has it occurred to you that practically all my friends read a.r.k Does this mean we're your friends? Hooray! > I actually scored above-average on > an online test at recognizing photos of famous people last night.) Geez, Matt, you made Kibo take an on-line test. I hope you're happy now. It probably had photos of Ken Wahl, and who can recover from THAT? > ... the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. Dear Kibo: We know why you are a bizarre crazed genius. It's the Pez. Wuv, Everybody In the Universe Also P.S. and stuff: In case you haven't noticed, all the regulars on ARK, 100% of them, everybody, no exceptions, is COMPLETELY FUCKED IN THE HEAD. We love you no matter what, even if your Death Ray is woefully misaligned and your obsession with serifs is obscene, to say the least. So please stop being mad and come be as messed up as the rest of us. Stacia WE ACCEPT HIM WE ACCEPT HIM ONE OF US ONE OF US