Holding Up the Universe(47)

“Did your parents notice behavioral changes?”

“My mom said they expected me to become this cautious kid, but I got louder. She says that’s when she started going gray.”

I give her a smile, but she’s busy typing. I sit there looking around, telling myself to man up, son, stop feeling nervous. In a minute, she folds her hands in her lap and begins talking. “I’m not sure how much research you’ve done, Jack, but one of the earliest documented cases of prosopagnosia dates from 1883 … Lewis Carroll was rumored to be prosopagnosic. The next time you read Alice in Wonderland, you might see the clues … I’m sure you’re familiar with identifiers. As you know, hairstyle and clothing can change on a daily basis. We’ve met a lady who identifies people by their wedding rings because this is an identifier that rarely changes …”

She’s about to see everything you’re hiding.

Suddenly, I feel naked. I actually have to look down at myself to make sure I’m still wearing clothes.

The first test is famous faces. This is similar to one I took online—photos of celebrities with their hair and ears removed. Dr. Klein says, “Okay, Jack. The clock isn’t ticking here, so feel free to take as much time as you need.”

She turns the laptop around so that I can use it. A face appears on the screen. It’s just an oval with eyes, a nose, a mouth. If I look at it long enough, it doesn’t look like a face at all, but a planet pocked by craters and shadows. One by one, I type in the names, but to be honest I’m making shit up.

When I finish, we go right into the next test. Dr. Klein says, “The system that processes reading emotions on a face is separate from the system that reads features. Can you typically tell if a person is angry or sad or happy?”

“Almost always. I can’t recognize faces, but I can read them.”

“That’s because there is a visual processing system that exists only for face recognition, and specifically only human faces. Your dog or your cat is actually identified by your brain as an object. The configural processor is what allows people to see the face as a whole and not just its individual parts.”

This test is about identifying emotions. I want to think I nail every one of the answers, but I actually don’t have a clue.

Next is a series of upside-down faces. I’m supposed to match them to the right-side-up faces, but I can’t. I know I can’t.

The more defeated I feel, though, the more energized Dr. Klein appears. She leans over the laptop. “Humans who have no problem recognizing faces are very bad at identifying upside-down ones because once you turn that image upside down, you can no longer use the configural processing strategy to recognize that face. So you start using a feature-by-feature strategy instead, which is how we identify objects. It’s comparable to how you are with regular faces because the human processor only works with upright images. Unlike monkeys, who are adept at recognizing other monkeys, no matter the orientation.”

The thing I take from this is Even monkeys recognize each other.

“Now we’re going to test your ability with object recognition. This way, we can know it’s strictly a face recognition problem and that it doesn’t extend to objects.”

I sit there matching houses, cars, guns, landscapes, animals, and suddenly I’m thinking, What if I get these mixed up too, all these things I’ve never had trouble identifying? What if I only thought I recognized a cat, a dog, a house, a car, but I find out I don’t know them any better than faces? I sit back for a minute and close my eyes, mostly because I want to get away—from this computer, this lab, this campus, my own head.

Dr. Klein says, “I want you to remember that everyone gets some right and some wrong. It’s how the test was designed.”

Which doesn’t make me feel any better. But I open my eyes. I go on.

I feel even worse with the next one, the Bald Women test, which is photo after photo of regular, non-celebrity females with the hair and ears missing once again. I’m supposed to hit a button if I see one that looks different, but they all look the same to me so I don’t even bother trying—I just hit Same over and over.

The last test reminds me of an eye exam. I lean on the chin rest and press my forehead against this contraption that looks like a mask. Dr. Klein wants me to study the computer screen, where there’s a small camera pointed at my pupils. This, according to her, will record my method of processing a face.

“Normal perceivers go for the internal features of the face and use a triangular sequence that moves between the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. Prosopagnosics, on the other hand, start with the external features, such as the ears and the hair. They usually avoid the eye region.”

This sounds about right. And then I wonder what Libby is doing and where she is.





I’m standing in the Department of Brain Sciences, Cognitive Neurology, at Indiana University, Bloomington, where there are answers all around me. I was young when my mom died and when my dad and I talked to the doctors about testing. I let my dad decide whether I should do it or not. But I’m here now, and I can ask to talk to one of these white-coated doctors or scientists. My mom died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and I need to know if I’m going to die that way too.

I’m pacing up and down the hall. If I’m tested, they’ll either find out I have aneurysms in my brain or I don’t. They will either be able to pin them off and try to control them or not.