dhalim:

My first gif! I spent way more time on this than I probably should have. Anywho, I put this together from a Brain Games episode on National Geographics (Episode name is called “Patterns” for those of you who are interested).

I want your feed back- when could you tell who this was the first time you saw the gif? Was it the 2nd text “Did you get it yet?”, or was it not until the 3rd or last text that you could tell? Please be honest.

My prediction- those with Prosopagnosia figure it out faster than those who are neurotypical (NTs). Why is this? Because we are used to piecing it together with less information, where NTs require more facial information before they know. Perhaps we just found the evolutionary advantage to prosopagnosia?

I suspected it might be Abraham Lincoln when I could only see around the edge, but the more they revealed, the less sure I got, until by the end I was convinced it wasn’t him. You tagged the post “Abraham Lincoln”, so I guess I should’ve gone with my first thought.

I note that when I took one of those online facial recognition quizzes, I had a similar experience with Barack Obama: my first thought was that it was him, but then I thought “no, that can’t be him, he isn’t that old” and failed the question (like I did every other question on that quiz). I’d forgotten how much politics ages you. (Though in Lincoln’s case, the “no, that can’t be him” was because this face looks too wide to be him.)

(Who says there has to be an evolutionary advantage? All a trait really has to do to stick around is not get you killed too often.)

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Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #reply via reblog

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