If you are like me, you know this feeling Maybe you are at a party or you are walking down the street And suddenly, out of a sea of passing faces One of them lights up, looking right at you This person starts waving, says hello This person is glad to see you And you, you have no idea who you are looking at This is Hidden Brain, I am Shankar Pathanathan Today on the show, we are talking about faces Recognizing faces is a crucial skill It is so crucial that there are regions of the brain devoted to facial recognition But although your mind is amazing at identifying your boyfriend or your child in a crowd There are important limits to this ability Some of us, like me, are extremely bad at it Some of us, are terrific On today's show, we look at some people who are on opposite ends of the spectrum And talk about how our ability to recognize faces has broad implications in our lives We'll start with someone who's job requires her to be quick with faces She's a cop My name's Alison Young and I'm a police officer I'm much more than a police in London She started out several years ago working on response teams in East London These are the cops who mostly just respond to 911 calls Then, about three and a half years into that job She and a bunch of her fellow officers were invited to take a series of tests at a university You get given like three or four different faces And you have to memorize those faces Then a new screen appears with other faces These ones are obscured in some way or heavily pixelated One of the faces you saw earlier might now show up wearing a beard So you have to try and work out which one of the faces is the face that you've seen before And it's that kind of thing The test, of course, was measuring how good officers were at recognizing faces A while later, Alison received her results She came in second out of all the officers And they asked me to come down to Scotland Yard Scotland Yard, of course, is the headquarters for London Police When she got there, she was told she was being added to a new unit they were forming It was called the Super Recognizer Unit Yes, that's the name that they've given Do you feel like a super recognizer? I don't know Well, I guess so But I don't think I'd necessarily say that a lot Because it's just the word super, isn't it? It just sounds a bit super I don't know Just the notion of the word super kind of brings out as if we're some sort of superhero Or something like that Whereas that isn't the case Here's how the Super Recognizer Unit works This pool of cops with above-average abilities to recognize faces Sit in front of computers They have faces of criminal suspects shown to them And they try, in essence, to play a matching game Well, there's a catalog of criminals, essentially, that are wanted by police And what they decided to develop was a thing called snapping Which meant that we may not know who that person is But if I look at this face Number one photo on this chart And then I continue to go through further and further and further Through different photos Can I find him in any other photos that he wanted for? Which then means that we've got him for one offence of, I don't know, theft We find him for another offence of their offence to do with theft And you end up accruing this one person for around 25 to 30 different kinds Now, computers are getting better at this kind of task And maybe one day, algorithms will come to replace human beings In making these kinds of matches for police But for now, Scotland Yard decided to put its faith in humans like Alison That's because there are some things that humans can do that computers can't Last year, for example, the Transit Police came to Scotland Yard for help A 21-year-old woman and two girls, aged 15 and 16 Complained that a man had inappropriately touched them while riding the bus Transit Police pulled security footage taken from the various buses From the pictures and the witness accounts It appeared his modus operandi was to get on the bus with the newspaper He would sit next to the young woman And then attempt to fondle her under cover of the newspaper And they were overtly young in respect that some of them were in school uniformed The security footage was grainy The Transit Police didn't have an ID on the man And because he struck at different times on different buses They didn't know how to track him down And they basically said to us, we need to find this man It's young girls, it's predatory, etc.
So, myself and my colleague, Secretary Sergeant Elliot Porritt Did some investigation They studied the security videos And eventually, they figured out which station the man tended to frequent After a lot of investigation We discovered that he had quite a specific route of generally being around Camden Town Which is an area in North West London Camden Town is a busy neighbourhood It's heavily populated With lots of shops and tourists and people always milling about It's perfect, in other words, for someone to blend into the background Alison and Elliot Porritt knew what they had to do So, we made our way to Camden Town From Scotland Yard On a Wednesday I can't remember the exact date, but I know it was a Wednesday This was supposed to be just a scouting mission To get a sense of the Camden Town bus station Alison and her partner decided to look through old security footage in the CCTV room So, we went to the CCTV bit Which was just behind a clear perspective glass Where people buy their tickets So, it's right by the entrance foray to the station Detective Porritt began hocking with the transit security Alison was looking through the glass And the commuters milling about the station I just glanced up And through the crowd I just saw him I saw him walk in, pick up a newspaper And leave Or go to leave And at which point I, I mean I screamed Because I don't know why I did it I just screamed I don't know, I can't quite work out why But I just made quite a loud noise And just said to Sergeant Porritt He's outside They both stopped what they were doing And rushed to catch up with the man Because we had to go all the way back round Back round to the foyer So, by the time we got into the main foyer Where he was, we couldn't see him anymore They ran out of the station to see if he'd left They looked left Couldn't see him They looked right Alison caught a quick glimpse of a man Disappearing around the corner This fraction of a second was all she needed To recognise her target The cops started running toward the corner And as we turned We looked just behind the wall He was there The officers approached the man As soon as we got up to him I'd been face to face with him The pair of us, like myself The Texas Sergeant Porritt We were 100 million percent certain That this was the exact same gentleman In all the photos So he was taking handcuffs immediately And explained to him what he was being arrested for Etc And it was extremely noticeable That he was very nervous His mouth just went completely dry And he just wasn't able to speak The man was recently sentenced to prison And is suspended from using London's public transit After his release Alison Young no longer works On the super recogniser unit She's gone on to other detective work But she says the time she spent On this unusual unit Was the first she ever realised She had an above applicability The thing is, she's still not sure Where this scale comes from Who do? I think my mum was just like Oh, you got that from me What if there's ever from my mother My mum is very, very, very good with faces Very good We'll be walking Just doing some shopping And she'll see someone And go and speak to them And she'll have known them from primary school And she'll remember them And my mum's, what's she now, 61? And she went to primary school Like seven or eight with them And she'll remember them So do you think this is genetic? Or do you think this is learned?
No, I don't think it's learned I don't think you could teach someone I don't think you could teach someone To be able to just do it at all Coming up, how common is Alison's skill? Are you a super recogniser? Can you learn to be one? That and more from a scientist who studies How we identify faces This is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam So the other week I was at the airport And just like everyone else I showed my driver's licence to get past security And it occurred to me that I was operating on an assumption That I think is widely shared I assumed the TSA officer was pretty good At matching my face with the photo on my driver's licence So I asked Mike Burton He's a professor of psychology at the University of York In the United Kingdom If that assumption was true It's not Although it is a very common assumption Most of us think we're pretty good at recognising faces But when you actually test people out Particularly in the situation Where someone who doesn't know you Is checking a photo against you It turns out people are really bad at this Interestingly, even professionals are really bad at it So we did some work with passport officers last year Where we showed that even passport officers Find this a very difficult task And are often inaccurate When I showed my ID at the airport last week Mike I handed over the ID And I noticed that the officer looked at the ID first And then looked at my face second And I assume there must be some trick to this That actually you're able to make a better connection If you don't actually look at the person's face That you start with the ID and then look at the face Is there any truth to that?
No, there's all kinds of techniques that the people Who do this professionally use And what's interesting is They all believe themselves to be performing quite well But when you test them Just like anybody else They're actually not very accurate at this It's a little terrifying what you're telling me Because you're saying that This thing that we're relying on To keep ourselves safe To run security systems at airports and other places That this is a fundamentally bad system? That is exactly what I'm telling you I think that what's sort of interesting Is that we have come to rely on this But I think we've come to rely on it For an interesting reason We are fantastic at recognising faces Those faces of people we know We can recognise our family and friends Across a huge range of conditions You know, at distances In bad lights, all kinds But we falsely assume That this means we're quite good at faces in general And in fact we're not Mike can say all this with some degree of confidence Because he ran a study to test for it So we set up this little experiment Where we ask people to match pairs of faces They just have to say Are these two faces the same person or not? Mike and his colleagues ran this experiment In both the United Kingdom and in Australia In both countries They selected some faces That were likely to be well known locally But unlikely to be known globally Yes, we use what we call B-list celebrities So we check it out beforehand But we use people who are known very well By the local population These are people like news readers Local sports people And they tend to be very well known By the local community But not by people internationally What we find then Is that when the UK people Are matching UK celebrities They're really good at it And they're really poor At matching the Australian celebrities The people that they don't know When you look at the Australian students Looking at these photos You find exactly the opposite pattern They're great at matching Australian celebrities And poor at matching UK celebrities So at this point we know That there's nothing in the faces themselves That make them easy or hard to match It's just in the perceptions of the viewers So far so good We know that people are better At matching familiar faces But what we then ask is How well do you think other people will do On these faces when we give them the same task? And what you find is That the UK viewers think Other people will find the UK faces easier The Australian viewers think Other people will find the Australian photos easier That can't both be true It must be that they are falsely generalising Their own knowledge to other people You make a very interesting point in the paper And I was struck by it Which is that in some ways This might be part of a general phenomenon in cognition Where we do not fully understand How difficult a task is for someone else to do And especially when we are good at something It's very very difficult for us to anticipate How much harder it could be for somebody else To do the very same task That's right It comes up in a number of areas of psychology Even something simple like general knowledge If you happen to Have read some books about Napoleon And be knowledgeable about Napoleon You falsely generalise that And assume that other people Know more about Napoleon Than they actually do Of course we all have our own different areas Of specialist knowledge And people turn out to be rather poor At understanding that And being able to generalise it I'm wondering how good you are At facial recognition?
I'm poor On the tests I'm just a little below average And has doing these tests and studying this Has it sort of changed the way you trust yourself Or your ability to recognise faces? Well I do now know how poor I am I certainly would try not to rely on my own ability to do it But I think that nobody really knew Until the last few years Just how bad we all are with unfamiliar faces And it's just becoming clear now Our chronic inability to recognise faces Coupled with our chronic overconfidence In our ability to recognise faces Has big consequences One place that's especially true Is in the criminal justice system Where eyewitness identifications Are often central to police investigations But this issue also shows up in lots of other settings With lower stakes Recognising colleagues at an office party Or a fellow parent at a school meeting Julie Dorschlar from Washington D.C. Has had this problem for a long time I've had a lot of uncomfortable situations Forgetting people And have been accused of being a snob Or racist Or I mean everything If Alison Young, the cop we heard from earlier Was a super recognizer You might call Julie Face blind Her whole life she's been terrible with faces When I was in college You know you're on a campus You meet a lot of people all the time And there were people I met for a few minutes at a party Or something A meeting I don't know And I'd be on a small campus walking And I'd walk past them Didn't think anything on it Just smile and keep going And they were offended I've heard over time people were offended I got this little reputation of being this snobby person Because I didn't greet everybody that I met Or how are you doing? And I normally would if I knew them Or I thought I knew them Julie Struggles followed her As she left college and entered the working world I worked for an architecture firm in Philadelphia And we had to go to a meeting And I swore after going into the meeting And coming back and going back into the meeting room I talked to this guy as if I knew him He happened to be African American And I was talking to him He's like I'm not that man I said oh I'm sorry I could have sworn And he's like oh okay So it became that And it's not people of just color or different ethnicity What do you do about it?
I apologize profusely And usually the people just walk away from me So I just feel embarrassed Research suggests by the way That people are worse at recognizing faces Of people from unfamiliar groups Many Americans are worse at recognizing The face of someone from a different race Than a face of someone from their own race Now what makes Julie's dilemma especially acute Is her husband When I look at somebody I never forget their face If I spend about 30 seconds looking at somebody I will remember their face for years and years and years Marty Dorschlag, Julie's husband Is a super recognizer For years Julie's been keenly aware Of her husband's super power One time they were in Las Vegas Sitting down for dinner at the restaurant Marty glanced up at the waiter He's like oh you waited on me in Columbus, Ohio And X year the guy just froze And then he's like oh yeah I don't know how you put it together To get your name to the restaurant To the time to the place And it was probably 15 years before And he said yeah you're right And so he does a lot of servers And it's people in the restaurant industry travel And he remembers them because they're servers You see their face Marty's had lots of encounters like this Like at the Dallas airport He spotted a man he sat behind At a University of Michigan football game Three years earlier Now you might think that with this gift Marty could at least be Julie's crutch But it doesn't always work out like that If we're in a place I'll always Sometimes I whisper in the back of the ear That's Jim you know who works at so and so Well sometimes he doesn't catch me in time I think we were at one of your friend's apartments A guy came in and I went up and hugged him And said oh it's so good to see you again And Marty's friend leaned over and said Why is Julie hugging the caterer? So yeah I remember that too I saw it coming too I saw Julie approaching the guy And I said to my friend I said watch she's going to think that's your roommate Because they looked sort of I mean they had the same color hair I think Or something and they were the same size And I said to him here comes watch And sure enough she did it But I touched him I hugged him So that goes into another You have to be careful Julie's cringe-worthy ordeals hit close to home Recently I was watching a play The lead actor looked familiar I stared at his face for the better part of 90 minutes But it took me until after the play was over To realize that was a colleague of mine from NPR. I'd be absolutely terrible as a TSA agent. And it got me wondering, are there any solutions here?
Julie's picked a simple one. I don't approach people with as much joie de vivre. I don't touch them until I'm sure they want to be touched or that I know them. And also, I sort of create this verbal cue for them to tell me why I know them.
So if I shake their hand, I'll say, oh, right, do I know you from somewhere? And they're like, if they say, I don't think so. I said, OK, you just looked a little familiar. I'd rather err on that side than not knowing them.
And if they finish the sentence, I said, yes, that's right. Good to see you again. But I don't use again until I know that they've filled in the blank. For many thousands of years, humans lived in small nomadic groups.
Everyone probably knew everyone else. People didn't have the information overload we have today. You and I can come into contact with hundreds, thousands of people in a single day. Our minds simply haven't evolved at the same speed as our societies.
There are going to be outliers among us, people with extraordinary skill at recognizing faces. Some of them may end up as security officers or gregarious socialites or politicians. The rest of us are going to keep smiling awkwardly at office parties at people we're supposed to know. It's what happens when you stumble around in the 21st century with a mind that was designed in the Stone Age.
This week's show was produced by Chris Vendorov and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Our team includes Raina Cohen, Barth Shaw, Laura Querell, Thomas Liu, and Angus Chen. Our unsung hero this week is Alexander Diaz, who troubleshoots technical problems whenever they arise and has the most unflappable, kind disposition in the face of whatever crisis we throw his way.
Producers at NPR have taken to calling him Batman because he's constantly, silently, secretly, saving the day. Thanks, Batman. If you liked today's episode, please take a second to share it with a friend. We're always looking for new people to discover our show.
I'm Shankar Vedantam, and this is NPR. I'm Shankar Vedantam.