Face

For reasons I accept but will never fully understand, all the characters in the Thomas and Friends series won't look the same to toddlers. Ask a preschooler to get aboard the train Thomas, and he will never mistaken that for Bertie or Gordon. Of course, not everyone can do that. I can't.

It seems that there are both genetic and acquired elements in our ability to recognize faces. Oliver Sacks, the author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, was born with an inability to parse the visual aspects of a face. Dr. Sacks could not even recognize his own face. On one occassion he turned to the restaurant window and began grooming his beard. In fact - and here's the greatest shock - he wasn't looking at his reflection but another gray-bearded man on the other side of the window.

At the other end of face-blindness spectrum, some guys have incredible and indelible memories of almost every face they have ever seen. I happened to meet one such expert few weeks ago at my hospital. I had my usual morning round with my teammates, going through the story and laboratory results of one new patient. He listened carefully, gazed at me, and let me examine him. Then he leaned back and seemed to take a deep breath. "Doctor, were you working in this hospital fifteen years ago?" This was followed by everyone's curious look on me. "It's my photographic memory," he confirmed, and went on to tell us he was a police. There was little chance of anyone being seen by him and forgotten. I was completely floored.

"We have met before," he answered, and reminded me that his wife had been one of my patients too, back in 1997. By late afternoon, I asked him quietly the name of his wife. The name didn't ring a bell.

She died in the same year, I was told, but the family appreciated my taking care of her. I went to the computer and run through the list of patients bearing the same name. It didn't take me long to find the record of my patient's wife.

Over the next fifteen seconds or so I kept my eyes closed, and tried to retrieve the face of his wife. I couldn't. Her face had been erased. I went on to recall details of her illness. Then I started to notice that I had professional memory of her condition in forsenic detail. I have no idea what my patient looked like after fifteen years, but I remember most of her medical problems, as detailed as the finding of purple Howell-Jolly bodies in her blood.