Wow! This is Amazing!

This article is about people who cannot recognize faces; including their own face, their mother's, wife, girlfriends, family members. Here are some excepts from the article.

Face Blind
Wired News
Oct 26, 2006

....TOM UGLOW, A GRAPHIC DESIGNER in London, didn't have a problem perceiving that it was a girl watching him across the bar. Her blond hair had a nice sheen. She seemed pretty. Uglow ordered another beer, downed it, and walked her way. He was about to introduce himself when she cut him off.
"Hi, Tom," she said, no longer smiling. "Why were you making eyes at me?"
"Damn," he thought. "This isn't going as planned."
Her voice sounded familiar. He searched her face but couldn't place her. This happened more than he liked to admit.
"How've you been?" he asked, casually trying to fish for a clue as to who she was.
"Better now that we're broken up."
Ah! It was his ex-girlfriend. Once he'd had a moment to process her voice, he was able to place her. They had dated for a year. Definitely not a good person to be hitting on. It was a problem: Every time he saw a face, it felt like it was for the first time......

.....BILL CHOISSER WAS 48 when he first recognized himself. He was standing in his bathroom, looking in the mirror when it happened. A strand of hair fell down – he had been growing it out for the first time. The strand draped toward a nose. He understood that it was a nose, but then it hit him forcefully that it was his nose. He looked a little higher, stared into his own eyes, and saw … himself.

.....MORDECHAI HOUSMAN, A GENIAL, portly Hasidic Jew, is playing Minesweeper on his computer at home in Brooklyn. One of his three young sons sits next to him – though Housman isn't sure which.
"Who are you?" Housman finally asks with a smile.
"I'm Abraham, Dad," Abraham says. The 6-year-old has heard this question before and thinks his father is just kidding. It's like a family joke. He doesn't understand that his dad really can't tell him apart from other kids on the street.

.....In 2005, the two conducted a study to determine the extent of prosopagnosia in the general population. They assessed 1,600 people online, running them through a face-recognition test the researchers had invented, and found that 32 had severely impaired face recognition. At the same time, a German researcher tested 680 high school and college students and identified 17 prosopagnosics. Both studies suggested a prevalence of roughly 2 percent. If the ratio held, it would mean that nearly 6 million people in the US are face blind.......

....Duchaine's questions touch on some fundamental social and cultural issues. For instance, what would it mean if there were a particular part of the brain devoted to recognizing gender? Bill Choisser reports that he has more trouble perceiving women's faces, and that could be one of the reasons he's gay. Another prosopagnosic says that his inability to distinguish between men and women explains his bisexuality. Is it possible that our sexuality is influenced by the wiring in the face-processing system?.....

The article is really fasinating and it is very interesting, if you got the time I would recoment reading it.