“Head trauma?” he said. “Daddy knock you around a little bit?”
“What?” I said. He was coming at my head with his hands and flashlight. I put up my palms. I said loud and clear: “In the grocery store, I have gone up to the wrong man, thinking it was my husband.” I paused. Yntema looked at his pen, his flashlight. I leaned back. He closed the gap between us.
“It’s not like you went up to a fat black man thinking that was your husband.”
I wanted to call for help. I wanted to get out of that room.
He said, “There’s sexual abuse. Right? Am I right? I’m right. Daddy getting a little drunk? Can’t keep his hands to himself?” He was hard as a wire.
He said, “Close your eyes.” He said: “What were the four words?”
To rule out a brain tumor, I had to lie perfectly still in a tiny tube in the basement of the hospital at nine at night. Dave said he would be glad to come with me. When we got there, I couldn’t go in the tube. I shivered in the cold, low-ceilinged room in my yoga pants and sock feet, a thin white T-shirt. The giant machine loomed.
“I can’t do it,” I told the girl behind the glass.
She stared at me like I was a fish in a tank.
I looked at the long tray on which I was supposed to lie, and the tiny tube into which I’d be inserted. For an hour. Not moving. I didn’t see how I’d come out alive. I asked her if my husband could come in. I got out of the machine completely and Dave hugged me in the hallway. He was already taking off his necklace. His crucifix. His wedding ring. The ring he wore on his other ring finger, the ring that he said married him to the boys. The tray holding our jewelry was a tiny, tiny version of the tray I had to lie on.
My toes stuck out of the end of the tube and poured sweat. Dave held one foot in his bare hands. The machine roared. And pulsed. I felt like it was giving me a brain tumor. Then it got louder. Jet engines pulsed; the tube vibrated. An MRI makes you feel like you are being ground, like glass, into pulverized bits. I had to take a break. I had to take another break. I wept. Dave held my foot and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you are doing great.”
After the scan, out in the car in the hospital parking lot, Dave held me and I jabbered on and on. He didn’t say anything. He was warm and good and quiet and whole. The next day, I returned The Michigan Divorce Book to the library and I threw away the forms I’d photocopied.
The brain scan results came out fine, completely normal.
I was, to say the least, an incredibly difficult person to not-live with. I hounded the boys, I obsessed about my family, I spent hundreds of hours on research. I was alone in my own little world. Sometimes I didn’t even ask Dave how his day was going. The details of the discussions we had in those dark, cold, horrible late-winter months don’t belong here. He had more reasons to divorce me than I him, but he did not want us to break up. When I suggested couples counseling, Dave said if that was what I wanted, of course. He’d give it four sessions with a neutral party. He wouldn’t see “Svengali,” as he called Helder. He presented me with a dozen candidates in three towns. But in the end it was I who wouldn’t go. Dave was the only person on the planet who knew me, who knew my whole story, but the person I was wasn’t the person I wanted to be anymore.
In March, I filed for divorce and got a case number.
Getting a divorce was like buying a handgun: it was a potentially dangerous thing to do. There was a waiting period. During the waiting period, I received a letter from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland. It was from Carol Rowan, chief of public inquiries in the Office of Communications and Public Liaison. The letter opened, “I am sorry to learn that you may have prosopagnosia and can certainly understand your desire to obtain an accurate diagnosis and any available treatment.” Rowan suggested writing to Antonio Damasio and included his address at the University of Iowa. I’d never heard back from him; he was no doubt besieged with mail from weird brains. Rowan went on to say that her search of the Internet identified the Harvard Vision Sciences Laboratory and the Harvard University Prosopagnosia Research Center as a good place for prosopagnosics wishing to be part of research studies. In closing, she wrote, “You mentioned your mother has schizophrenia; you may wish to contact the National Institute of Mental Health for their materials on this topic.” She provided their address, website, and phone number.
In retrospect, it seems odd that I hadn’t found the Harvard site on my own. In all the months since I’d first discovered prosopagnosia, I’d Googled movie reviews, recipes, festivals, myself, David Junior and Jacob, skin conditions, dog care information, maps, travel, and words I wanted to know. I’d Googled Reivers and parapraxis and the names of authors as I prepared lecture notes. But for face blindness, once I’d discovered the hard-core research databases, PubMed and PsycLIT, I stuck with them. Obscure scientific articles were safe. Google seemed like wolves, the whole naked world. I still kept prosopagnosia far off to the side of my regular life, a secret.
Immediately after reading Carol’s letter, I drove down to my office and logged on to the Internet. I went to www.faceblind.org, the Harvard site. There was a “Contact Us” form. I explained that I was coming to Boston in a few months, in late April, to meet with my textbook publisher. Was there a study I could be part of? Could I meet with the directors of the research lab? Had anybody looked for a link between prosopagnosia and schizophrenia?
Brad Duchaine, head of the Harvard lab, wrote back right away. Yes, he said. We’d love to meet with you. There were two studies I could be part of.
On the website, a face-blind professor in Sweden, Cecilia Burman, had posted a tutorial on the condition. First she showed a stone, close up. Easy to recognize: it’s a stone. Then she showed six stones, each quite different. She gave the stones human names. Then she showed a rock-strewn beach. A stone wall. A cobblestone street. Now could we find Joey or Margaret? She showed six rocks out in a field, stranded. This was exactly what it was like to be face-blind. It was one of the happiest moments in my entire life, seeing those images of rocks on grass, rocks by other rocks. I e-mailed Cecilia and told her how useful her visual explanations were. She wrote back and told me about the face-blind support groups and a book by a gay man who compared coming out as face-blind to coming out as gay.
The prosopagnosics on the list serve were strange and funny and fascinating. Most of them said they had been born with the condition, and a surprising number saw it in their children. There was a militant contingency who adored their face blindness: they called people without prosopagnosia “neurotypicals,” or “NTs,” as though we were the ones you’d want to be, and other people were not only boringly predictable but also a little flat, walking around recognizing everyone, taking the brain for granted.
In my world, and in my mother’s world, things could always be more than one thing. My whole life, I’d been primed to look beneath the surface, to trust my feel of a thing. Maybe the face-blind militants were right. Who was to say what was an ability and what was a disability? Who defined “normal”?
But like schizophrenia, which could similarly cause a person to see slant, face blindness had devastating side effects. I was only comfortable in ambivalence. I didn’t trust my decisions. I wasn’t married, I wasn’t divorced. I did and didn’t have children. I was always looking at new houses, new jobs, new cities, new places to be new. Prosopagnosia was not a mental illness. But just like schizophrenia, it kept its host constantly guessing, always on the run.
I asked the online face-blind support group: How many of you have told the people you work with about your condition?
Dozens of people wrote back, with advice ranging from “Don’t do it!” to “Do it yesterday, your life will be so much easier.” Tell only a few people. Tell your boss. Tell anyone but your boss. One man said he’d just that morning written a letter to George Bush to ask for accommodation for all of us, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. “People must wear name tags in the workplace,”
he argued. A man in London said he had been fired after he told his office. “Maybe there were other performance issues,” a woman posted. A face-blind woman in California said that after a year of struggling with the decision, she had come out, but afterward no one introduced themselves, and she feared people now considered her unstable.
One wise woman wrote me privately. She said telling people was a process. It took about five different explanations—five times, she’d found, for people to understand what it was, what it meant, and why you knew them sometimes and not at others.
I e-mailed her back right away. Do you have a script? I asked her. And what do you say to the people who do not believe you?
As little as possible, she said.
I asked her if she’d heard of a connection between prosopagnosia and paranoid schizophrenia.
No, she said. She had not.
Eight
Boston was a city turned inside out, taken apart at the seams. In the backseat of a cab, Brad Duchaine and I stitched under the Big Dig, which was much bigger and diggier than seemed possible. The dank tunnel walls didn’t seem like the kind that would hold. The air smelled of clay and fish and fuel and salt.
Brad Duchaine, renowned neuroscientist, wore Chuck Taylors, frayed jeans, and a tan T-shirt with a monkey on it. All of Brad was perfectly frayed and faded—his backpack, his hair, his watchband—except his super-sharp eyes. I thought he’d be older. I thought he’d be in a suit. I felt like I was on a date.
Brad was explaining his research. “We think we are looking at a syndrome,” he said. Many prosopagnosics who appeared to have the disorder from birth also reported problems hearing, driving, and recognizing cars, just as I did. He thought prosopagnosia was the key to finding out some very interesting stuff about how the brain processes objects. “We think we’ve got a pathway into understanding something about consciousness itself. Until very recently, we thought of the brain as one seamless intelligence, because that’s exactly how it feels to be in a brain. But now we see that there are separate processes, different groups of computational machines working simultaneously.” What was so groundbreaking was the understanding that these systems didn’t interact with each other or have awareness of each other. “Did they give you the Benton and tell you you were fine with faces?”
“Yes,” I said. I told him how easy it had been to tell the photographs apart on the face test I’d taken in Grand Rapids, at a second neurologist’s office: I’d just used the hairstyles to differentiate the men.
Most of Brad’s other subjects had had the same experience. Multiple neurologists, flawed testing protocols, misdiagnosis. Most of his subjects had easily passed the Benton Visual Retention Test, which had been in place since the 1970s, and Brad had just published a paper on what was wrong with it: it wasn’t really measuring face recognition, since the hair and ears and other details gave additional information.
Brad asked me if anyone in my family had prosopagnosia.
“They wouldn’t know,” I said. I took a deep breath. Here was my opening. He was going to be looking inside my brain; I felt like he was going to know everything anyway, like he could already read my thoughts. “To figure this out takes a lot of self-awareness, and an interest in one’s own interior experience. My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. She wouldn’t be able to discern face blindness in herself or in another person.” My words took up all the room in the wide backseat. This was the first time I’d said anything like this out loud, to anyone other than Dave and Helder. I had the feeling I would be struck down or dissolve. I held on to the door handle with one hand. But the cab kept crawling forward, and Brad’s face didn’t move.
I took another step. “I’m sure face blindness is related. That’s what I really want to find out about. Did her brain give me this, because of the schizophrenia somehow? Or did my experience with her, as a child, somehow provoke the face blindness? Do you know of any potential connections?”
There was a long, pregnant pause.
“No,” Brad said. “Turn, stop—here,” he said to the driver. “No,” he said to me. “That wouldn’t be related at all. We think face blindness is genetic.”
He sprang out of the cab and paid the driver.
I followed him. What did genetic mean? Genes. Wasn’t schizophrenia genetic too? I felt like a kindergartner, struggling with something as basic as colors. But I didn’t ask any more questions. I followed Brad across the plaza, past the light post, through the revolving door into William James Hall, where the Harvard psychology department is located, past the armed guard, and to the elevators.
In the elevator, Brad pushed the button for seven and said to remind him to get us lunch; he would forget.
Then he said: “Up we go.”
The walls of the vision science lab were painted black, and so was the ceiling. Black drapes swept across the room, creating numerous cubicles. It was like being on stage in a surrealist black-box theater: no audience, all curtains. I loved it.
The thick curtains smelled dusty, and Brad pulled them around us like skirts, making a little room. He turned on a bright lamp. I sat in the folding chair while Brad booted up his laptop, complained about its slowness. I wanted to go slowly. I wanted to remember everything. I wanted to ask him, again, about my mother.
“Do you think I have it?” I asked.
“We’ll soon see, but what you’ve said so far fits with what prosopagnosics are saying about their experience.”
“What’s the cure?” I asked. “Is it surgery or more like rehabilitation?”
“No cure,” he said. “Here’s the first test. These are famous faces, with the hair removed. This is the sample, so you can practice how the test works.” He nodded to the screen. “Is this face familiar?”
I said, “Yes.” I sat there, staring at the screen. “No cure? There’s no cure?” I had come all the way to Boston and there’s no cure? I was right, and Helder was wrong; but I was surprised at how bereft I felt, hearing these words. I had been hoping for a cure all along.
Brad said, “There’s one guy in California who claims he may be having a little luck with retraining, but most research shows that attempts to learn face recognition have resulted in worse identification skills, actually.”
“No cure?” I said. “At all?”
“When you’re ready,” he said. He nodded again at the laptop. “This test isn’t timed,” he said. “Take as much time as you need. Type out who it is. Don’t worry about spelling.”
A face flashed on the screen—just the face; the ears and hair had been cropped out.
“Jim Carrey?” I said as I typed. I was off to a good start.
“That’s me,” he said. “I just put that in there for fun. That was the sample.”
“Do you look like Jim Carrey?” I said.
He said he did.
Many, many faces flashed by. They were new, unfamiliar faces; my reaction, time and again, was that I had never seen them before. I correctly identified three faces: Nicolas Cage (those eyebrows), Julia Roberts (those teeth), and Martin Luther King, Jr.—he was the only black man they ever used in these tests. When I was finished, Brad read the names of the others and asked me if I knew who each of them was, so he could determine if the test was testing known faces. Brad Pitt, George Bush, Mel Gibson, Jennifer Aniston, Tony Blair, Winston Churchill. Robert Downey, Jr. Condoleezza Rice. The whole sexy crew. Yes, I said. I have seen these images in my life. I should know them. But I can’t recognize these people. He smiled. I smiled. I was really, really happy to be failing.
The next test was a breeze: identifying emotions on faces. I knew who was happy, I knew who was sad, afraid, disgusted, and surprised. Brad explained what I already knew from Andrew Young’s Face and Mind. The system that processed reading emotions on a person’s face was completely separate from the system that read the features and correlated face to identity. Face-blind people can tell if a person is sad or happy, but they can’t tell, by face, who that person is, if they’re familiar or
unfamiliar.There existed a visual processing system just for face recognition, separate from identifying facial beauty, emotion on faces. Brad and his research partner, Galit Yovel, were studying one very specific aspect of face processing: Does face detection (knowing that a particular object is a face) come before or after face identification (knowing whose face it is), or are these two processes concurrent?
Brad showed me upside-down faces and asked me to match them to their owners. I couldn’t. Interestingly, “normal” humans are also very bad at identifying upside-down faces. They perform, with upside-down faces, as face-blind people do with all faces. The human face processor only works with upright images of faces. Monkeys, on the other hand, are adept at recognizing individual monkeys, regardless of orientation.
The next test Brad gave me was designed to establish that my object recognition was normal, so we could declare that I had a face problem, not a problem recognizing objects in general. “You’ll see pictures of guns. If you’ve seen the gun before, hit the red button.” I matched the guns. I did the same for images of houses, landscapes, cars. No one does extremely well on the guns, Brad said, except gun collectors. (I didn’t even want to think about face-blind gun collectors.)
The next test was titled Bald Women. It featured faces of ordinary humans, but as with the celebrities, with the hair and ears cut away. I couldn’t match them. They all looked the same. Once in a while, as with Nicholas Cage, a pair of eyebrows jumped out, and I hit the white button: Different.
Brad ran my results and came back with a printout. “Yup,” he said, smiling. “You’re pretty bad at faces. One of the worst, actually. I’ve tested only one person who is worse than you.”
I beamed. I was face-blind. Harvard-certified.
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