Prosopagnosia...

its whats for dinner!


Seriously though, tonight I wanted to talk about Prosopagnosia aka "face blindness".

Face blindness is essentially the inability to recognize people from just their face. There are different nuances to the condition that I wont get into, but I will start off by stating it effects people differently. Some people can't even recognize their own family, at all. Without a contextual cue. For example a man can come home and know the woman in the house is likely his wife, and act accordingly. Yet if she surprised him in the grocery store he'd have no clue who she was unless he recognized her outfit. This is because theres no context to cue him as to who she is. Without context she could be his mail lady for all he knows.

I'm no where near that severe. However there is a noticeable deficit now that I deal with reasonable amounts of people on a daily basis. I really can't think of any instance of this happening in childhood or even early adulthood, but I don't doubt it existed. I've never had large circles of people around me and my contexts were pretty limited, so there really weren't any situations to bring it to my attention. No proverbial wife to surprise me at the grocery store.

Today I had a client in class. This is one of my regulars and I noticed she didn't bring her husband like she normally does. When he arrived later during class, he hung back for a while watching. I always like to play the game in my head of "who does the guy belong to" and see if I can correctly guess who's husband had showed up. To my startle (or rather not) he belonged to my regular client.

This wouldn't be profound except I've met the guy probably about 15 times now. I've had conversations with this couple. At length. But without him being next to her for context, I would have sworn I'd never laid eyes on him.

This is just one of countless examples I could bring up. Sometimes people arrive and I recognize the dog and not the owner. AT ALL. These are people I've spent time with. One time I had two owners reversed in my mind. Like they had swapped dogs. I'd even fudged the dog context. Instead their body type PLUS the dog was the context and when two people with the same body types showed up at the same time, my brain found them interchangeable.

I have a theory however.

Face blindness is pretty much considered either Brain damage or hereditary. I know I was never dropped and I already know there's some odd genes present in me so we'll run with that a bit. The thought with it being hereditary is there is an actual physiological difference causing the impairment.

I hate the word impairment. Firstly.

here's the slippery slope. I CAN remember faces if I want to. If you asked me to remember a persons face I CAN do it. More and more I am reminding myself to do so, for careers sake. This would suggest the ability is in fact intact but my brain is just not running the program automatically.

Also I remember some people automatically and others my brain simply skips over. Its picking and chosing  which faces are important to attend to, and thus, who it can remember at a later date. I can pass all the celebrity face blindness tests I should add.

So I took this one. Without famous faces.

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php

Overall I scored decent. 85% was my lowest score, and on one of the tests I got 100%. So what the heck gives?

I got bored.
 

During the test I had to force myself to focus on the faces. Focusing on a task is what I do best. I am the exact opposite of ADD. I tend to be understimulated.  I can handle and process a very large (non social) information load. In fact I'd say I can handle pretty large social loads as well as long as its not direct interaction (for example, noisy crowds don't bother me) I also pick up on details others do not. Pretty much I'm an info junky in every sense of the word and if the environment isn't stimulating enough I get very bored. ( aka most of my childhood) In this case I found my eyes kept leaving the screen and my mind would wander in the middle of it. It was so unlike me that I was pretty startled. I am the test taker, the task doer, the finish things quick and now. I'm not the kind of person to wander off mentally in the middle of something.

Yet, as I suspected, this is what my mind does when confronted with human faces. It wanted nothing to do with the task at hand. I could feel my mind saying "c'mon theres gotta be other stimuli here thats way more important". And when I ignored its whining, it tried to leave the room anyway.

 I remembered the asymmetrical eyes and the odd teeth easily and struggled with the rest. Pretty much my brain is an information junky and unless I find something entertaining, odd, or distinctly memorable, my mind decides its uniportant and that the texture of the carpet is more interesting. Basically, my brain decides that recognizing and remembering faces is not important and instead attends to the other cues as to who the person is.

This makes me wonder how much of the typical eye contact issues are less about being uncomfortable and more about our brains saying its an unimportant behavior . Then as you age, society demands it and you feel awkward about it because it wasn't ingrained as a child. Your brain sees it as an "expensive"  behavior and not worth the calories it burns. After all, people aren't the most interesting thing in the room, most of the time.

 I will also note that while I have no issues with giving or receiving eye contact typically, I find if I'm tired, overstimulated or lazy that day, or don't find that person important (like someone bothering me), I'll fall into not looking at people, like a habit. I'm not uncomfortable with it, its just too much effort for no real benefit to me as far as information gathering if I'm conserving energy. When taxed I'll spend my calories on other things that will reap more benefits. You aren't thinking about digestion when your running from a lion.

So pretty much my physiology is saying; Social interactions are not important unless its someone you find interesting. This seems to match up with my behavior in other, more tangible realms.

Fascinating, but nonetheless, it basically means that if I recognize you at the grocery store, your in a good place in my mind :)

The dragons are biting.

If it has a mouth...it bites.


Dogs bite, cats bite, shit...fish bite...HUMANS bite...ask any cop or preschool teacher...


I get this "does it bite?" question ALOT. I always say that if it has a mouth it can bite you...If its som'thing that tends to be docile, I say "these tend not to bite". I can not remember a time in recent years where I've told som'one an animal was not going to bite them, in an absolute :never: way.

I find myself, more and more pondering peoples motivations behind pets. I mean, I was one of them, so I can understand it on that level, but I have "moved on" in many ways...as in, I like to have animals, but the need to go out and actively acquire new ones is a need that has left me for the most part.

I once was a consumer. Iam still, technically a producer. Even though I have for the most part shunned my former breeding operations, I still produce animals professionally, and due to my "career" assist novices in producing animals. Helping the novices, tends to produce more ill feelings than me producing my own animals, due to the sheer number of people who have bad motivators...and then here Iam, being the one having to deal with aggressive offspring from aggressive parents, having to baby non feeder snakes, which can from parents that were likely non feeders, and having to find homes for, or euthanize animals born with birth defects, when their producers reject responsibility for them

Ah, to cull or not to cull. Iam all for culling, in the spay neuter sense. As in, this dog is not perfect, lets bar it from breeding, but spare its life, and find it a home. But in reptiles, its not so easy. I can't spay/neuter a bearded dragon, and no matter how well I screen people, every year, som' tool decides that that kinked tail shouldn't stop lizzy from having babies. Or the School teacher, that year after year, produced tiny, pathetic, weakling bearded dragons, that grew slowly, the great majority of them with birth defects, and me doing everything, from reasoning, to pleading with her, not to pair the parents anymore. Every year, I'd find her eggs in the incubator, until finally, exhasted, as female beardeds become from egg laying, the mother of the weaklings passed on.

And there in lies the other evil. Egg laying. I'd say 90+% of the female beardeds I've known have died in egg laying. They get old, they get thin and their bodies just can't push them out. Its inevitable. Those that don't die in egg laying, die of accidents, or being euthanized when disease strikes their aging bodies. Males die generally of kidney failure or obesity, tho they do get to live twice as long as the girls do.

I used to say I've been bitten by beardeds twice. I remember both times...one was a very skittish animal that a person saved from a classroom where the kids were caugh torturing it. It nailed me as I tried to examine it for health. It was scared out of its mind.

The second animal, was an animal that belonged to a customer, and he felt the need to retell you its pedigree every time they brought it into the store (which was often). Reminds me of the people who approach you with their dog and blurt out "shes a champion such and such, when you hadn't even noticed the animal yet.....Of course pedigrees in bearded dragons for the most part are simply pretty animals bred to pretty animals, selected for color or pattern mutations. Anyway, despite its pedigree, it was a rather mediore looking animal, and it nailed me as I held up a nail clipper. It gave no signals, it just bit me, let go and was fine. The top of my finger was not fine

but these two stories, while I say they are the only ones, really aren't. I get bitten by babies almost daily now...som'thing I couldn't have said 6 years ago. Baby beardeds seem to be becoming more and more aggressive as the years pass, I have also noticed an increase in flightly skittish animals. Beardeds so skittish, they are almost impossible to handle, and they take quite a bit of forced interactions to 'grow out of it".

I remember a specific group of leatherbacks imported from europe. I have never dealt with beardeds that were so aggressive at a juvenile age. Absolutely untrustworthy and "evil" as we called them. They weren't a hard sell tho, they were a rare morph, and no doubt every last one of them went on to reproduce.

I have seen birth defects increase, with a big peak around 2008, I see fewer today, but I think thats due to most of the novices no longer breeding, and have given away their adults.

Thats the other thing...where are all these dragons going? This year and last, people in mass gave up their pets. It was insane. It was like I missed the "everyone relinquish anything alive" memo. People poured in wanting to give up the animals they swore were family members...many people saying the reason was the animals babies could no longer fund the hobby...ironic since the majority of people who buy a bearded dragon or two are not thinking about breeding for money...yet, once they have, and the money flow stops, the animals are worthless to them

Ironically, the pet, the exotic pet, that makes people different, is slowly going the way of the poorly bred purebred dog.

I see many more bites in my future.