You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

  The article was about stroke victims who were perfectly normal in all ways except for one: they could no longer recognize even close friends and family members by face. The disorder was called face blindness. It was extraordinarily rare. Fewer than a hundred cases had been reported in all of history. I read the article, full text, on screen. I did a search for all of that author’s work. I typed in face recognition, prosopagnosia, face blindness. For the first time, I left the word schizophrenia out of the search. And I found dozens of articles.

  Prosopagnosia comes from prosopon, Greek for “face,” and agnosia, as in agnostic, “doubt.” I was, without a doubt, a face doubter. The condition was caused by a blow to the head, a stroke, a trauma. Sufferers recognized people, just never by the internal features of the face. They used voice, gait, jewelry, and context. Common sense. They compensated. Many could function well. Others became withdrawn, housebound, even suicidal.

  I kept studying articles I’d retrieved from the library, trying to understand what face blindness was, how it worked, and most important, how it was related to my mother’s condition. It had to be related somehow. My theory went like this: The schizophrenic brain was essentially created by massive wiring problems that resulted in a person’s interpreting reality in ways that seem bizarre to us but made perfect sense to him. Face blindness was similar. A wiring mishap created all these misperceptions on a much, much milder scale. I was certain face blindness would be common in the offspring of schizophrenics. I didn’t have mental illness. But face blindness was my mother’s legacy, the shadow of her biology. It was how I was related to her. I knew this in my bones.

  When I began my search, like most people, I hadn’t understood the basic differences between vision and perception. I believed I saw what I saw, heard what I heard. I believed in direct input theory: an object was in the world, and when we looked at it, the image appeared directly in our head, as if on a television set.

  As I read, I learned the brain didn’t use direct input. Perception and vision aren’t the same thing at all. Vision itself is simple, like a camera: it captures images. Vision parts—lenses, retinas, irises—are simple parts, so simple that some aspects of vision can be improved with straightforward medical intervention to repair or enhance them. Vision merely captures images. Vision doesn’t happen in the brain. It happens before information gets to the brain. But we don’t see or hear until the brain takes over. That’s perception. Perception is what our brains do with those raw “seen” images. Perception is what scientists call “the black box.” Study perception, and you step into the mysteries of consciousness and knowing itself. Perception really doesn’t have a lot to do with vision. In fact, most of the wires that connect the brain to the retina hook up to memory functions.

  Perceiving is a sophisticated dance of remembering: it’s not an eye thing but a memory thing. When we “see” something, we don’t necessarily identify it anew. Mostly, memory “fills in” the image. Old impressions give meaning to what we see; we never start from scratch. The famous example used to teach this concept is that of a dog running behind a picket fence. You don’t ever see the whole dog, but your brain remembers what dogs look like and how objects are divided and obscured behind fences. Perception is knowing that at the end of the fence, a whole dog will emerge. While you are seeing a sliced dog, you perceive a whole dog is back there. You remember how fences work, how dogs work. Perception overrides vision: you see what you know, not the other way around.

  If I truly had prosopagnosia, my vision for faces would be perfectly fine. And I knew I had perfect vision, 20/20; I didn’t even need reading glasses. When I looked at a face, or anything else, I didn’t see a blurry image or anything weird. I just saw a face. But perception dictated and dominated vision. Something was wrong with how my memory archived faces, it seemed, if it archived them at all. I could see faces. I couldn’t remember them at all, ever, not even for a second. That’s why I couldn’t easily tell people apart.

  I wondered when I had gotten it. Did I have it my whole life? It was so hard to tell. The articles stressed head injury as the cause. One night I made a list of the blows to my head: Wayne’s rough wrestling, my father’s drunken swinging, the time he clocked me with an iron skillet. It was hard to escape childhood without scars. Car accidents. My most serious car accident had caused a severe concussion and memory loss, and left scars along my cheekbones, above my lip. But I had had problems recognizing people long before that. Maybe something had happened to my head that I didn’t remember, would never know about.

  I didn’t believe a blow to the head had caused my recognition problem, I believed I’d been born with it. But there was no way to know; things had been so chaotic in the household. I’d been overexposed to stressful weirdness and underexposed to friendships, neighbors, television, movies. I hadn’t really noticed anything was wrong until I was in high school, when I went to the same school, finally, for a couple years in a row. That’s when I realized: I really don’t know these people. I thought this was a sign of mental illness.

  Now I believed face blindness was a distant cousin of schizophrenia; it was how I was related to my mother. Face blindness didn’t tip me over into mental illness. But it could have. I believed that a similar neurobiology must underlie both conditions. My mother had had to come up with bizarre, elaborate theories to explain her experience of her own mind. I’d had to do the same thing. But while she believed she was very, very sane and everyone else was crazy, I was certain I was mentally ill. In fact, she was and I wasn’t. We both were perfectly wrong, and perfect for each other.

  I found more and more articles; none of them mentioned schizophrenia. The disorder wasn’t a mental illness at all.

  In the early research, the extremely rare cases of face blindness were always traced to a stroke, or a blow to the head. But recently, scientists had discovered congenital or developmental cases. Face blindness was much more complex—and perhaps even more common—than originally thought. Scientists weren’t sure what the exact problem was in these developmental cases, where a person just seemed to have face blindness from birth, but it was becoming more clear that the mechanism that allows one human to know another by face is sophisticated, involving many steps. Faces, it turns out, are processed in a special way, not like any other object humans come across.

  But prosopagnosics read faces as they read any object—car, house, gun, horse—by looking at the parts. Tiny individual distinctions are lost. For face-blind people, a given human face looks more or less like all other human faces. They aren’t able to organize fine distinctions in mouths, noses, cheekbones, eyes. The special processor, the face processor, isn’t installed. Face-blind people perceive faces using the standard object processor.

  Late one night, I wrote to the authors of several of the articles, and I e-mailed two famous scientists who’d written about face blindness and perception: Antonio Damasio and Steven Pinker. I asked my burning questions: How might face recognition relate to paranoid schizophrenia? There had to be a connection between the two disorders. Are there any research studies I could be part of? Sending these e-mails, I felt myself part of the world, connected by a thread.

  Our house-hunting dwindled. But one Saturday afternoon Dave and I were driving around town when we came upon a For Sale sign. I picked up the little flyer. It was out of our price range. I tried the doorknob. It opened. Dave said, “Don’t go in.”

  The house had a tiny slice of lake view, though it wasn’t really lake anymore, more marshy sluice. I took off my shoes and headed up the stairs, spidering up the stringy beige carpet. This was a great house. I could feel it.

  Dave stood in the doorway. “Don’t go up there,” he warned. I turned on the stairs. He looked so thin down there in my living room. He was staring at the ceiling, frowning. He would never live in this great house with me. I knew. It was too fancy. It was too much.

  Upstairs, I grazed through the bedrooms, arranging furniture, making the boys’ rooms perfect, in spite
of the low ceilings and chemical smells. I imagined them growing older, out of these rooms, into the basement. I expanded my writing studio. The slice of sluice lined up with my desk chair. The boys had friends over and I brought up popcorn, Cokes, fabulous snacks. I fast-forwarded. The boys grew up and moved out to live on their own. The room became a nursery. My babies, my babies, I could still have babies. I nursed at the window, looking for the tiny tongue of lake. This wasn’t the season for it.

  Downstairs, Dave had rapped on the walls. He was thinking: hollow, cheap. He was thinking: $180 a square foot. He was thinking: housing bubble. Against his taps, my home sounded like a coffin. He hated the black appliances. He hated having neighbors. He was right. The house was overpriced. We shouldn’t spend so much. It was, after all, looking more and more like it was going to be all my money. Dave was having issues with his credit, the bankruptcy history behind him.

  We went to the Blue Moon and I ate expensive soup and he had two beers. He held my head in his lap all the way home. “We’re good, we’re good,” he kept saying. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I had the strong feeling it wasn’t okay. I had nurtured the idea of a real family for so long that I wanted everything to fit just right. The dinners felt crucial. This house felt imperative. Why didn’t we feel like a family in spite of these things? Why didn’t we feel right?

  Days passed, then weeks. I didn’t hear back from any of my queries to the scientists or the government’s Rare Neurological Disorders offices. I hunted on PsycLIT, finding related articles almost every night. My list of key words grew as I harvested the new vocabulary from each new article: face perception, self-perception, face processing, lateral dominance. I found information on mothers and faces. Nine-minute-old babies showed a strong preference for looking at faces and facelike patterns, compared with eggs, blocks, or random patterns. Given a smiley face on a circle and a circle in a random pattern with those same lines, those same two dots, babies would always prefer to stare at the smiley face. A few days after birth, a baby knew its mother’s face from other faces and, soon, strange faces from familiar ones. There was a developmental dip: adolescents got much worse at recognizing people, then they improved again. Babies born with cataracts, who couldn’t undergo the intricate operation to correct their vision until they were six to eight months old, all grew up to be face blind. Similarly, people blinded in childhood who had rare, risky corneal transplants as adults found that when they got sight, they lacked, among other things, the ability to determine who a person is by face. The basic face recognition system is installed before birth, it seemed, but during these crucial six months, it has to be employed, tested, used, in order to become the sophisticated working system most people require.

  I also learned that schizophrenics had trouble making eye contact. Normal mothers typically stared into their babies’ faces for hours and hours, transfixed. This was how the baby learned, in part, to read faces. My mother always avoided direct eye contact. Could her behavior, rather than her genes, have been the cause of my condition?

  I thought of Dave’s theories: portals, tampering. Faces were a window. Maybe, as with paintings and portals, too much came through them. Maybe my mother had to avert her eyes from my gaze. Maybe my face recognition software never got used during the crucial window. Or maybe she had dropped me on my head accidentally and, boom, the face light went out. I waited anxiously for the scientists to write me back. I wanted them to tell me: There are more people like you. Come to our lab, I wanted them to say. We will fix this. It won’t hurt one bit. I wanted diagnosis. I wanted certainty.

  One night, Dave and I were sitting at my kitchen table, drinking wine and listening to Hank Williams. He asked me to close my eyes and describe my mother’s face. I couldn’t. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have a face; I just couldn’t conjure any visual images. I saw her from the side, her shoulders, the outline of her body, her thin bones, her way of hunkering into herself. “I can see her,” I told Dave. “But I can’t see her face. It’s like it’s there but just out of reach. Nothing looks missing, it’s not foggy, it’s just that I can’t get any specific details. It’s really hard to explain. It’s like the idea of her face. Like if you tried to picture the Grand Canyon, you have an idea what it looks like, but what you picture probably isn’t the actual landscape.

  “Can you picture your mom’s face?” I said. “What do you see, exactly?”

  “I can see her face now. I can see her face when I was a kid. Just like she’s there.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Try yourself.”

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t imagine my face. I could feel myself looking out of it, but when it came to looking at myself, I drew a blank.

  I tried him. I looked at Dave’s face and then I closed my eyes. I couldn’t see his glasses or his facial hair. With my eyes still closed, I brushed my hand along his jaw, his nose. I thought this would cause something to light up, switch on. Nothing. “I know you have a goatee, because we have talked about it. But if I weren’t feeling it right now, I’m not sure if I would be able to accurately say if you had a beard or not. I have no idea if you have a mustache or not,” I said. I rubbed my fingers under his nose. “Oh,” I said. “You do.”

  And then—with summer ending and school approaching—we found our house. A gray split-level on Elm Street. We loved it equally; it wasn’t too expensive. It was just a couple blocks over from the house I lived in, and up the street from Dave’s apartment. It was practically in our own backyard. The elms, save for two, were long gone from disease, but the street had been replanted with locusts and sycamores and maples.

  It had a finished basement for the boys, with a workshop for Dave, a newer furnace, an upstairs bedroom for my office. A giant garage for all Dave’s antiques and projects, the skis, the bikes, Junior’s hovercraft project and tae kwon do boards, the cement blocks that had piled up in Dave’s living room. It had a fireplace, a creek in the backyard. A Sub-Zero fridge. I envisioned dinner parties, pizza night, the boys standing in the kitchen with the fridge door open, draining the jug of SunnyD. There were cork floors in the cozy dining room. I envisioned dancing.

  Dave and I looked through the house a second time; it was the farthest we’d ever gone with a house. This was it. All the houses and months and doubt and not knowing, solved. We told the real estate agent we wanted the house. I wrote him a check for one thousand dollars. Earnest money. After he left, Dave and I walked up Elm Street, tramping over the packed snow, grooved crusty by the plow’s tractor tires. This would be our cute, clean, plowed street. This would be our sun. These would be our neighbors. A handsome, prosperous man shoveled his walk in perfect even stripes, scraping it to the bone; his sidewalk gleamed like a wet tongue. A golden retriever barked once—Hello!—from atop the snow pile. Two little white-blond boys in black parkas whacked each other with sticks. It looked exactly right: houses and neighbors and order like in a dream, a child’s drawing of a street in winter, one you’d hang on the fridge.

  Dave said softly, in his gentle easy way, “The man coming toward us, you know him. He works in your department. The rock-hound guy. We saw him . . . at the geology show? . . . The one at the civic center?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Rick Jones?” Rick was craggy, more friendly-seeming. I felt I would know if we were passing someone who worked in my department. Even after all those articles, my brain signal was loud and clear: I had never seen this person. He was a stranger.

  “Yeah, honey, it is. You want to say hello.”

  As he passed us, the man said, “Hi, Heather, Dave.”

  Dave squeezed my hand.

  How was I going to spend the rest of my life not knowing who people were? I was sick of relying on Dave. I was tired, angry, sick of doing my best to pretend I knew. “How do you do that?” I lunged up and kissed him on the cheek and we stopped walking and hugged. In the middle of the sidewalk on Elm Street, in winter, on that dead-quiet afternoo
n, we were hugging, I was hanging on to him, and he was holding me. It didn’t feel like dancing. It felt like tipping over.

  Five

  My mother said fine, I could live with her while Fred went to Germany. But, she emphasized, there would be rent, and it was temporary. I had to be out when I graduated high school. On the day of. If not before. This was twenty months away.

  Well, college, I said.

  You aren’t really college material, she said. Not anymore. “The fun ride is over. You want to act like an adult? You can take on the responsibilities. No rights without responsibility! That’s what I have always stressed with you children. Always.” Her voice grew loud when she made these speeches, loud and cheerfully dogged, just as it did when she talked about the evils of communism, or the trap of credit cards, or the shameful mediocrity of products made in places like Thailand, the Philippines, or, worst of all, Taiwan.

  After one of these tirades, I asked her point-blank: “So, why did you even have kids?”

  And she slapped me, across the cheek with the back of her hand, dripping wet from soapy dishwater, hard, so hard my teeth felt loose and bruised. I bit my tongue. My mouth tasted like blood, but there was no blood. I wished there were blood. She had used her whole arm, and moved so fast—it was such a direct, quick, unhistrionic thing for my mother to do—that it had taken me absolutely by surprise. And then she’d walked out of the room, almost like a dancer.

  I carried on for hours, slumped on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, wailing so she could hear me, so I could hear myself. But I was impressed. I wanted her to know she’d been effective, that she’d gotten to me. And at the bottom of my despair was a cold calm stone: I’d deserved that slap. And inside that calm, cool knowing, a deeper knowing: this mother I had was not a person who’d really wanted children.