Have you ever seen someone in public and you swear you know them from somewhere, you just can’t pick where? Are they an old school friend? The guy who delivers bread to your local cafe? You feel like you know them but it would probably be weird if you started a conversation. Well, that’s a glimpse into the life of a small percentage of the population who recognise with freakish accuracy every face they’ve ever seen. People with this extraordinary gift can find themselves in awkward social interactions due to their detailed memories of people they’ve actually never met. Yes, it can look a tad stalker-ish...
Yenny Seo is one of these unique people (not a stalker). From a young age, she demonstrated an uncanny ability to remember faces - strangers on the street she had seen weeks ago, extras in movies, every person in her university lectures and people in photos on her social media feed. She even caught a serial shoplifter by recognising his face on CCTV.
In 2017, Seo got curious about her skills and stumbled upon the University of New South Wales (UNSW) face test online quiz. Her exceptional performance put her in the top 0.05 per cent of all participants, confirming she was a Super Recogniser. That’s right. Yenny officially has superpowers. And she’s not alone either.
Suha Zaimoglu, another super recogniser posted an ad online looking for a roommate. She met a potential renter and immediately recognised them from a TV commercial she had seen… seven years before. Lauren Winslow, aged 42, still remembers the details of the faces of every single person in her preschool class. Sadly they don’t remember her.
The concept of super recognition is still a relatively new area of study, primarily gaining attention in 2009 when a group of researchers led by Harvard based Psychologist, Richard Russell, started looking into it. Studies led by David White at the Face Research Lab at UNSW show that just 1-2% of the population can memorise and recall unfamiliar faces after just the briefest glimpse. And apparently, it’s not something you can learn. You gotta be born with it.
If you could choose a superpower, most people would lean towards being able to fly, teleport or have super strength - the classic superhero stuff. What’s recognising faces useful for? Well, fighting crime obviously.
In 2007, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville started a special unit in London Metro Police. When Neville asked his officers to scour CCTV footage of unidentified criminals, it became apparent that some cops had epic facial recognition skills. A University of Greenwich psychologist tested 20 of these super cops using the Glasgow face matching test.. and some were freakishly good.
Like PC Gary Collins who trawled through tens of thousands of CCTV footage and identified 180 suspects involved in the 2011 London Riots. One guy had a bandana over his mouth and nose and a beanie pulled low over his forehead but Collins recognised him as a criminal he’d seen several years earlier. He turned out to be one of the most high-profile suspects who had thrown petrol bombs at police and set cars on fire. The man was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.
Between 2012 and 2017, Police Officer Andy Pope identified 1,000 criminal suspects, often by matching CCTV footage to mugshots in the police database. Pretty soon, word of the Super-Recogniser Unit’s success began to spread, and they ended up advising law enforcement groups in Germany, India, Australia and the United States. Queensland police even started their own super-recognisers unit, helping to crack 1,000 cases according to headlines in 2023.
On the flip side, there is a cohort of people who can’t recognise faces at all. Acquired Prosopagnosia has been noted by medical folks since the 19th century, observing that some people lost the ability to recognise faces after trauma to the brain. Then in the 1970s, the scientific community found a congenital version of Prosopagnosia which affects nearly 2 per cent of people who have never experienced head injuries and have perfect vision. These people are “face-blind” and have great difficulty recognising faces, sometimes even their own in the mirror! Stephen Fry, Jane Goodall and our buddy Alan Alda are all part of this crew.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly adept at identifying and analysing faces, will our supercops be out of a job? Maybe they could outsource their superpowers to a face-blind person to help them navigate their social life, and freak a few strangers out in the process.
SOURCES:
‘I’d keep it on the down low’: the secret life of a super-recogniser | Science | The Guardian
Could super recognisers be the latest weapon in the war on terror? 2016 David James Robertson
DJ Robertson et. al. February 2016 Face Recognition by Metropolitan Police Super-Recognisers PLOS ONE 11(2):e0150036 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0150036
What is it like to remember all the faces you’ve ever seen? | Psyche Ideas
QPS Super Recogniser Network helps crack 1,000 cases - Queensland Police News
It is widely believed that humans are rather good at recognising faces
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[00:00:00] Rod: When Yenny Seo surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, for example, and saying, we walked past that person like three weeks ago on the street. Oh. And her mother would go, huh. When they'd watch movies together, she would often recognize extras just in the background and go, they're in that movie three months ago with the blah, blah, blah. And her mother would go, huh. That's interesting. Her mother assumed she just had a particularly observant daughter, as you would. And Yenny herself figured there was nothing unusual about it either. She would see someone out about, and she'd flick through the vast catalog of faces she kept in her head and she'd try and place where she'd seen them before.
[00:00:37] So it's like, Oh, that person looks familiar in her noggin. She says, it's always been quite fun for me, especially as a child, I remember just really enjoying looking at different faces. Then she grew up and started using social media. So Yenny looks like she's probably the mid twenties so she's of the generation. She said, look, I would I'd start a new class in uni or I'd meet people through social gatherings and I would remember them. What kinds of photos I'd seen them in. Like, never met them before.
[00:01:07] Will: Never met them before, and suddenly say, oh, I remember I saw you were at a party once with a friend of friend.
[00:01:12] Rod: Did you have a yacht with a Boar's Head strapped in the front. Oh my God. And they're like, so she's already very familiar with 'em in her head, she's like, I'd know stuff about you. And so she'd say, oh you are that person's sibling. Or You used to date so and so, et cetera. This, of course, would creep people out pretty quickly because she's, for them, they hadn't just met.
[00:01:30] So she started to pull that back and she'd maybe go through this in her head, but she'd say, eh, nice to meet you. But in her head, she's like, I know.
[00:01:36] Will: Learn not to creep people out.
[00:01:37] Rod: Yeah. She pulled it back. So at uni, she had a part time job. She worked in a shop, a clothing store, and the shop had CCTV, closed circuit television, you know, security stuff.
[00:01:47] And it caught an image of a serial shoplifter. The images were grainy and very hard to see as a lot of CCTV is. I mean, we're led to believe that it's very clear and precise and you just yell and answer your computer and it makes it clear.
[00:01:58] But she looked at it and she instantly recognized the person. And the next time they walked into the store, she says, the security card, that's the one. And so they grabbed the person got arrested, et cetera.
[00:02:09] Will: Everyone gets executed. Cool.
[00:02:11] Rod: Well, they deserved it. And the serial shop lifter, not just once, like at least eight times. So she started to get curious about this because other people went, huh, how did you do this? So in 2017, she's rummaging around on the intertube and she found the university of new South Wales face test online quiz. So she gave it a crack.
[00:02:32] Will: Is this a face? Is this a face?
[00:02:34] Rod: Face or toaster? Face or pile of dirt? And she got it right every time. So apparently at least in 2022, she was in the top 0. 05 percent of all people who took this face recognition comparison test. So it turns out Yenny is a super recognizer.
[00:02:54] Will: Welcome to the wholesome show.
[00:02:57] Rod: The podcast in which two academics, that's us, grab a few beers. That's those knock off early, dive down the rabbit hole. That's what we do.
[00:03:06] Will: I'm Will Grant.
[00:03:07] Rod: I'm the other guy. Okay. I'm Rod lambert's. So Yenny was unusual. Acquired prosopagnosia.
[00:03:16] Will: Oh, that's a term. You nerded it up.
[00:03:18] Rod: Yeah. Prosopagnosia, which comes from Greek and stuff. Basically, since the 19th century, roughly, people noticed this. People would have brain traumas and they'd lose the ability to recognize faces. So something would hit them or whatever.
[00:03:32] Will: So they could, that's pile of dirt. It might be a face, might be a pile of dirt.
[00:03:36] Rod: Well, no, it's more like, I know it's a face, but I don't know if I've seen it.
[00:03:39] Will: As in, can't recognize who the person is.
[00:03:41] Rod: Yeah. You're like, I'd look at you, turn around, look back and go, have I seen that face before? I don't know. I don't know. In the 1970s, there was a congenital version discovered.
[00:03:49] It affects quite a few people, like as many as maybe 2 percent of the population. So people have never had a head injury. They don't have any problems with their eyesight. But they cannot recognize faces, so
[00:04:02] Will: just can't keep them in there. They recognize people like they have
[00:04:06] Rod: because of other characteristics, like they look at how they walk or their smell or clothing style, whatever.
[00:04:10] Will: But all faces blend into one.
[00:04:13] Rod: Apparently, sometimes even their own, they'll look in the mirror and go like, I assume it's me because I'm the one looking in the mirror. But It's not particularly distinctive for some reason. They can't tease it out.
[00:04:22] Will: Strange to only spot in the seventies. I know, you know, colorblindness or something like that, you may not know the difference. And so I imagine the same with people, these people, they don't know what it's like to spot faces.
[00:04:35] Rod: You don't know what you don't know
[00:04:35] Will: but just a weird one too.
[00:04:37] Rod: You also become super adaptable. People who have what are in a sense disabilities who don't, I don't have them diagnosed and I realized, they come up with, you know, ways. And so do these folk. And, I mean, we we met one. Yes. We hung out with one. Alan Alda, famous man. Hawkeye from M. A. S. H. for those of you who are old enough to know.
[00:04:54] Will: Is he on the record about talking about it?
[00:04:56] Rod: Absolutely. Yeah. No, no question. He couldn't recognize faces and he'd talk about his strategies for how he'd recognize voices or way people walked or their particular characteristics, weird hats, different colored hair, whatever.
[00:05:07] So this face blindness as it's called is quite common. Oliver Sacks was classic for it. The guy who talked about brain stuff. So Sacks, what'd he do is like, if you wanted to remember his old, his best friends, he couldn't tell their faces, but he remembered their features. So one of his buddies had heavy eyebrows, thick spectacles.
[00:05:24] Will: Oh, so he's like, I remember him because of those things. Not remembering in a visceral way.
[00:05:30] Rod: Yeah. That's like, I don't know the face, but I recognize the glasses and the eyebrows. That's Eric. Well, my other buddy what's his name? Jonathan. He's tall. He's gangly. He's got a mop of red hair. That's my buddy, Jonathan.
[00:05:40] Will: So you can only have one of each type of friend though.
[00:05:42] Rod: Yeah. Imagine two with red hair and who is tall. Yeah. He'd be fucked. And apparently he said to New Yorker magazine years later when he was looking at old photographs a decade after school or longer, didn't recognize anyone.
[00:05:53] He's looking like, I don't remember. 10 years ago, there you go. That was Janelle, but like literally he's like, there's a bunch of strangers. So people who've been shit at recognizing faces or have had problems with it congenitally as well. We've known about this for years. But the mainstream awareness of people like Yenny.
[00:06:11] Will: So they're at the opposite end.
[00:06:13] Rod: Yeah, who are super recognisers, way more recent. And she's not the only one out there, of course. There are others. So there's a few examples. I'm not going to go through all of them, but here's one. Suha Zaimoglu , you know the one. She posted an ad online looking for a roommate.
[00:06:29] She met the potential for this position and immediately went you're in that TV commercial. which had aired seven years earlier and they'd been in it for like three seconds.
[00:06:38] Will: Okay, that's pretty remarkable
[00:06:41] Rod: another one Lauren Winslow 42 this is relevant because She remembers the details of the faces of every person in her preschool class. So she'd see them years later and go, Hey, Johnny. And Johnny would go, who the fuck are you?
[00:06:57] Will: Seriously? Your preschool class. I would, I, yeah, would struggle to they're all pretty short. I remember that. They all had faces, all of the kids in my preschool. Beyond that, I got nothing,
[00:07:10] Rod: but this ability this super recognizer thing didn't really get much attention until 2009. Really recently for us, maybe not for people who are 19. That sounds like a long time ago, but for us, that's recent.
[00:07:21] Will: For science, I think.
[00:07:22] Rod: I mean us means science. That's a shorthand. So, a group of researchers led by a Harvard guy Richard Russell, psychologist. They started looking into this whole thing, these super recognizers.
[00:07:33] They tested four people who apparently had superior face recognition. So for example, a 26 year old female student, she said, look, it doesn't matter how many years have passed. If I've seen your face before, I've got it.
[00:07:45] Will: In the vault.
[00:07:47] Rod: So I'll get into the deets about what's going on here, but basically Russell's team tested people against control groups on tasks that involve recognizing faces, famous people, unfamiliar faces, whatever. And the test group performed way above average. So Russell, this psychologist at Harvard coined the term super recognizes.
[00:08:05] Will: So do they have to know the name as well? Or they can say, I know that person from a thing.
[00:08:09] Rod: Well, I'll get to the detail is the way they test it at first, you're going to go, that doesn't sound that hard, but then it turns out it is. So, he tested these people and look they were much better at both recognizing faces and perceiving details of faces than people who weren't. And they basically as good at recognizing and understanding and memoring faces as the people, the prosopagnosics are terrible at it. So they were really the opposite end of the spectrum as the people who are face blind.
[00:08:37] So we go to UNSW, University of New South Wales, guy called Dave White. He leads the face research lab. He started examining people with brain injuries in the early 20 teens. And he said he found tremendous variation in the ability to recognize faces. And at the upper end, these super recognizers, 1 or 2 percent of the population, which is, small. So what do you do with this gift?
[00:09:01] Will: Solve crimes.
[00:09:03] Rod: Absolutely. Showbiz
[00:09:04] Will: you hinted it with showbiz. Okay. Yeah. But you hinted it with that person that solved a serial shoplifting. I mean, that's gotta be the most useful place. Or you could be a great politician, you know, just, you know, remembering people from before it helps.
[00:09:17] Rod: No, it does help actually. I do agree. London Metro police. They started a special unit. 2007. So they had a little unit to pull together photographs of unidentified criminals from CCTV.
[00:09:29] And they were called the caught on Canberra mob. And they wanted to know if people could, you know, work out who they were. And he said, it very quickly became apparent that some people in some offices were much better than others. So for example, if they got a hundred names and possible candidates, some of the officers would say, Here's 10 or 15, I put in 10 or 15 potential bad guys. Most other offices are like maybe one out of a hundred. So some were like multiple times better.
[00:09:55] Will: So computers can't do this?
[00:09:58] Rod: Well, we're going to get to that because this is a good question. Cause a lot of this stuff is happening early 2000 into 2010s.
[00:10:04] Will: I would have thought that, you know, spotting people from CCTV is a thing that computers should be good at.
[00:10:09] Rod: They should be. Oh, they're getting better. But they're not perfect. And these people still have jobs. He basically assumed, this is DCI Neville, he assumed that, Basically these police who are good at identifying just remembered criminals better than we know these guys, but then he realized Some of the best people are doing this could pick a suspect They'd never met merely after seeing a flash of one photograph of them. Just like yep. That's that guy.
[00:10:33] Will: Yeah. Wow
[00:10:34] Rod: There's a dude at the Uni of Greenwich He tested 20 of these mega cops and most were better than average, but some were freakishly good. Like there was a guy Constable Gary, London Riots in 2011. Do you remember them? Because I don't. I'm sure they had them. They were horrible. London riots. So, a bunch of the officers, they went through thousands of hours, tens of thousands of hours of CCTV footage. They identified 609 suspects. Looting, arson, naughty things. Collins himself, 180 of them. He just off the charts he could see him, see them. That's that guy.
[00:11:05] Will: So where is he getting like his memory of like, he goes out on the beat and he's sort of just seeing people around.
[00:11:10] Rod: Just sees it.
[00:11:10] Will: Just stores it all in the vault.
[00:11:12] Rod: And he even picked the guy the main guy who was really naughty. He'd thrown petrol bombs, he'd set cars on fire, et cetera. His face was covered with a bandana. He had a beanie pulled over his noggin.
[00:11:22] Will: So what, we just got like a slit of eyes or something?
[00:11:23] Rod: Collins is like, that's the dude.
[00:11:24] Will: Oh man that's some, that's good.
[00:11:26] Rod: And it was the dude. Six years in prison. Naughty, naughty rioter. Another guy, a few years later, 2017, another copper, Andy Pope. He identified a thousand criminals in five years just from looking at CCTV and going, I remember that guy from Walking the Beat and blah blah blah. He'd just tell who they were.
[00:11:45] Will: He's not just Making shit up. Or pinning things on people and just going yeah. You know, there were stories about cops 50 years ago, just going, well, it'll look like someone like this. You'll do.
[00:11:55] Rod: You mean like black and wearing a beanie?
[00:11:57] Will: Yeah. Something like that. You'll do.
[00:11:59] Rod: No, I wanted to make it seem like that's what's going to happen, but no. And this is not 50 years ago. This is 2012
[00:12:05] Will: when times are perfect.
[00:12:07] Rod: They were definitely better. 2018, another one of these super recognizers picked out who the poisoner was. Remember those two Russian agents?
[00:12:14] Will: This is a Cludo plot.
[00:12:15] Rod: Yeah, it is. It is. Two Russian agents.
[00:12:17] Will: Was the rent the wrench in the library?
[00:12:18] Rod: No, this is something like, what is it, a poison umbrella at Stonehenge or something like this. The Novichok poisonings. Two Russian double agents. So the father and the daughter were poisoned, this copper went, there they are, I can see it, I know who it is boom, and so they became really popular this super recognises people went fucking amazing, we're going to get them in, so they did advice to German police India, Australia, United States, all over the place, they started going around super recognising people.
[00:12:45] And in the 2010s, Queensland police started their own, your mob. So there's a headline from last year, March last year, Queensland PS police service, super recognizer network cracks a thousand cases just from last year, or it came up to that. And there's a bunch of private agencies. Oh no, we are. We have super recognizers too.
[00:13:03] Will: Are you serious? Yeah. Okay. Private eye with super recognizers
[00:13:06] Rod: and here's a difficult one to find, super recognizes international. com
[00:13:11] Will: Look fair enough. I mean if you have it, I feel like you've got to pass a test though. Can't just claim it
[00:13:18] Rod: Look, I looked at their website and their services and like I couldn't find in a quick search anything that said Here are our certified super recognisers, they may have them. They just didn't make it obvious, which I think is surprising. So there's a thing called the Glasgow face matching test, the GFMT.
[00:13:34] Will: Is that like the Bristol stool chart?
[00:13:36] Rod: Yep. Only more facey, less stooly. Participants are shown pairs of faces and asked to determine whether they show the same person or two different people. This is what I was saying earlier, sounds so simple.
[00:13:47] Will: So two faces, is this the same person? So like, are they obviously not exactly the same photo, but it's like what slightly different. Give me a look. All right.
[00:13:56] Rod: He's looking at two pairs here for those of you on the ear balls.
[00:13:59] Will: So we've got a woman with a sort of a short Bob haircut just down below her ears. It's dark hair. One expression is a little bit surprised. One is a little bit sullen. And one sort of slightly different tilt of the head. It could be the same person, but I don't think it is because I think the, thickness of the eyebrows is quite different and the openness of the eyes, that means that
[00:14:20] Rod: no one human could have both of those emotions.
[00:14:22] Will: No, there's a few things there that suggest different.
[00:14:25] Rod: And the second picture?
[00:14:26] Will: This is your shaven head guy in both, but I think they've got different hairlines. They look similar. And there's elements like the nose looks very similar, but they've got different hairlines. They're all different. There are four different people. Two different, one person. This is all one person. This is all one person.
[00:14:44] Rod: So the top, the women are the same. The men are not. So straight away, this is pretty straightforward. And the picture's not terrible.
[00:14:50] Will: Are you saying I'm out of Super Recognizers Club?
[00:14:52] Rod: Instantly. You're going to have to go back to your day job. But like, it's, Straight away though, you look at it when I was told when I read it, it's like, Oh, that, that is the same woman. I'm like, well, it's obvious now that I know it is, but it wasn't before. So when I first read about this test, I'm like, so these two phases are the same person or a different person. I'm like, child's play. Turns out it's not.
[00:15:12] Will: Yeah. Fair enough. It's not that easy.
[00:15:15] Rod: So when you actually test people for it, if they're unfamiliar faces, not familiar faces, not people, you know, they're just whoever it might be on your CCTV footage. So for the average person, your error rate's about up to 20%, 15, 20%.
[00:15:28] Will: Particularly also, you know, as you said before, CCTV, grainy and they're not looking directly at the camera. It's always tangential.
[00:15:34] Rod: But these are, to be clear, I'm going to show you a grainy one in a moment, but that's that's clear photos, 15 to 20 percent error rate. And they found in previous research that even people like passport officers are no better than the standard person, staring at your photos, staring at the person standing in front of them. They're like, It's probably you.
[00:15:53] Will: Are you serious? I thought the photo on your passport is pretty represent. I mean, I know we have different hair and whatnot, but yeah.
[00:16:01] Rod: And the people who do it all day, every day and wanting to kill themselves, probably wanting to protect their borders. I'm sure they can get a bit bored. They're no better than anyone else, which is not a slight on them. It's the reality of how we work. But so super recognizes with unfamiliar faces, including a group of police trainees. So the average error rate, non super recognizers, same as us, 19%. For super recognizers, most of them 4 percent or less, and one got a hundred percent.
[00:16:33] So they just can look at it and go, it's definitely not. It's definitely not that. Another experiment, they used celebrity photos, but they kind of pixelated them to look more like a CCTV. So don't squint because that's cheating, but there you go.
[00:16:45] Will: Why is squinting gonna work better? Obviously there's some princes right there.
[00:16:50] Rod: Yeah, so what are we looking at?
[00:16:51] Will: Prince Harold.
[00:16:52] Rod: We're looking at two pairs. Okay, so look at the left two pair Is that both Harry or is that neither Harry or is it?
[00:16:57] Will: No, I know one at one of them's harry the other is just some guy.
[00:17:00] Rod: Some guy. And next the other two pairs?
[00:17:02] Will: That's Harry and they're both Harry. Yeah
[00:17:07] Rod: so you nailed that one. You nailed that one.
[00:17:09] Will: Who's the some guy? It's like it's that Ed Sheeran
[00:17:13] Rod: Yes, Ed Sheeran with a haircut and no guitar But apparently with this one, super recognises 7 errors, 7%, standard control grip, 27 percent fuck that up. And these are famous faces. So, yeah, I mean, obviously we'll be able to get the links in the show notes and Alex will probably drop this into the actual video, but you can see the difference. As soon as this gets clear and unpixelated, it's much more apparent.
[00:17:35] Will: But why does it help if you squint?
[00:17:38] Rod: Pixelation usually does. It's like getting distance. It starts to clarify.
[00:17:42] Will: Someone should do the science on that.
[00:17:44] Rod: They really have. So also some of the first research on super recognizers use these before they were famous shots of people, you know, they go, who's the child of the celebrity, the child version of the celebrity.
[00:17:57] Will: Oh, they can do that. They can go back in time too.
[00:17:59] Rod: Yeah. And they're also shit hot at that. They're like, that person is clearly that person, you know, I mean, like I'd be useless at this. You look at baby photo of me and go that's that guy. No question. Everyone who's seen a baby photo means going, well, that's clearly isn't it?
[00:18:12] Will: I've got to say, you know, you know, you get on the the iPhone does this, I'm sure other phones do as well, but you know, having the Picks images of people and it says, you know, this is person X, whatever but it goes back into like baby photos. And it's like, I get, you can see from a 10 year old to an eight year old. I think that's pretty close. But to go back into literally three weeks old. Something like that. And it's like, wow, you can still see the shape of the face coming together.
[00:18:35] Rod: They're also very good at remembering faces over a long period of time. So even with a lot of aging, they still go, that's definitely that person, which sometimes is obvious, but sometimes it's not. And they're also really good at partial faces, like, like this woman earlier, like with a mask over her eyebrows, covered her, they're still like, that's him, that's the guy, just your ankles, an elbow, they're really good at it.
[00:18:56] They're also very good. The final thing is if they see a lineup of faces and they go, okay, like a lineup in a police lineup, I've seen none of those faces. They're very good at going, no, none of those people. So not like humming and harming.
[00:19:06] Will: So they don't doubt themselves.
[00:19:07] Rod: Yeah, definitely not that person or the person we're talking about is not there. So they're particularly good at that, which saves resources and time, et cetera, as well. Yeah. You just go, no, none of you, fuck off. How do they do it?
[00:19:17] Will: They just do it. It goes in the brain bit, and the brain bit processes it, and out pops an answer.
[00:19:21] Rod: That's exactly what it says here.
[00:19:22] Will: There you go. That's the science.
[00:19:23] Rod: So the underlying reason they can do this is not super clear. In the brain. The black box theory of all psychological function. The field's very new, apparently at least in 2022, there were maybe 20 papers written.
[00:19:36] Meet reasons for why we might do it. So, genetics and biology and shit. There seems to be a genetic component. Twins tend to be, if they're good it. If they're bad at it, they're bad at it. Also something to do with the thickness of the cortex.
[00:19:49] Will: Twins are often raised together though. Like I know that there are twins that are not always raised together, but
[00:19:54] Rod: well, a spoiler alert is it doesn't seem like you can train yourself to be one. So it does seem to matter. You can't become a super recognizer by doing brain ups, but there are technique differences. So there's a researcher, a woman called Anna Bobak, and she says, look, Most people, when they're looking at people's faces, they look around the eyes. Standard people stare at the eyes a lot.
[00:20:15] Will: They just do cheekbones or something.
[00:20:17] Rod: It's romantic.
[00:20:17] Will: Jowls. They look at the jowls.
[00:20:19] Rod: They do. Nothing but the chin point. But super recognisable folks around the centre and the nose. According to her, it's not that the nose is more important, she says, but more people, they look more at the whole face.
[00:20:31] And our Aussie bloke at UNSW says, look, he used eye tracking technology. He said they spread their gaze more around the face. So they're probably painting a more elaborate picture of faces automatically. It's not a trained thing. It seems they just kind of do that. And this is unusual. There's no sexism here, no apparent difference between people with boy stuff and people with lady stuff. Yeah, apparently not so far.
[00:20:55] Will: No, I would have thought many of these things might be one just associated in one direction.
[00:20:59] Rod: Honestly, if you'd asked me, I would have said probably women are better. Cause dudes don't seem to give a shit, or are biologically wired not to, like, I don't care if I recognize you, you know, are you threat, or are you buddy, or are you know, prey, or predator, like, being brutal and old school about it, but apparently no, no sex differences. So there are issues, there are race effects, you know, people who they are, either of your own race, so to speak, or people around you, who you are surrounded by, they're better at recognizing people they're familiar with.
[00:21:27] Will: Okay. So, so familiar types of face from the local environment versus recognizing from different countries.
[00:21:33] Rod: So like super recognizer in our town would probably not be as good with African American faces because there aren't a lot in their daily lives. That's seems to be a thing. They're also, as I put it here, cocky much studies compared highly trained forensic examiners with super recognizers, not necessarily the same people at all. Super recognizes super confident in their decisions even in, they do say the rare cases they're wrong, they're pretty fucking sure they're right.
[00:22:00] Whereas forensic guys, they're told, look, you probably messed up and they go, yeah, fair call. I can mess up. So the super recognizer get a little bit too sure of themselves, but this has implications. So like the label itself, the notion of calling someone a super recognizer itself may be an issue in court and our UNSW man again White, says look, when super recognizers are wrong and they might be, they can fuck up, they're just better at it than us normal folks. But if a jury, for example, hears this person is a super recognizer, they're like, well, they've, they're obviously, they're super.
[00:22:31] Will: It's a superpower. Oh my God. Of course.
[00:22:33] Rod: Yeah, it's a problem like that is a problem.
[00:22:35] Will: Like dNA evidence that for a long time has been held as not just gold standard, but ironclad, impossible to be wrong. But there are many elements of the DNA collection process or the measurement and the tracking everything that would
[00:22:50] Rod: Well it's straight misunderstanding. The bottom line with DNA I think one of my favorites is just because this suggests that person's DNA matches the person at the crime scene. People will, if they're not paying attention, interpret that as likelihood of guilt. Not whether they're more or less likely to be the same as the DNA at the crime scene. And this I don't think is necessarily that different.
[00:23:08] But really more often, studies have found super recognizers don't necessarily have better memories, hierarchy, or anything. Also, lab tests, when they're shown a face, Super recognisers are very good at recognising whether they've seen them before, but you're asking about context or the signage.
[00:23:22] Will: Oh, no, nothing. Definitely seen it. Definitely.
[00:23:24] Rod: Where? Before. In or outside? Like, so there's no context.
[00:23:30] Will: Not so useful. Like, it's like
[00:23:32] Rod: Yes. That is the same face as that face. Where did you see it before?
[00:23:39] Will: I feel like if you're trying to find a criminal, you might need to associate somewhere and go, okay, yeah, now I've got a name or they went to this school.
[00:23:46] Rod: I feel like it wouldn't hurt. But it's, I mean, look, the upside of this is it's saying, let's be reasonable. Let's put parameters around their abilities. They're useful to a point, but yeah. And again, it's a super thing. It's got to be fun though.
[00:23:58] Will: You're raising that like maybe it's not, I mean, it's nice to forget things as well. You know, and to be forgotten, maybe not everyone needs to be remembered from preschool.
[00:24:08] Rod: No, they don't. So there's one guy from London, he's a super recognizer and he said, look, He talked to a guy at a trade show who he thought he knew and the dude apparently was a bit awkward about that and it turns out he didn't know him, he just seen him on a Facebook page. So it's like, man, I haven't seen you since the blah, blah. I was like, I don't know you buddy. Yeah. Okay.
[00:24:25] Will: Oh, whatever. You made a new friend.
[00:24:26] Rod: Another one said, look, it's a really awkward situation socially when I recognize someone, but they don't know or remember me. For example, they're at a petrol station. They go like, Hey, I know you, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they actually didn't know them at all. So you got to learn how to, I think, pull back.
[00:24:43] You got to pull back. And there's a woman who said, look, she can recognize hundreds of people who are in a large lecture classes at her university. Hundreds of them. She just sit in the university, who they were, where they sat, the whole thing. And so, she'll be sitting around having a chat and she might, at least at first, she'd talk to people and she'd say This led to strange encounters because all these faces looked so familiar to me.
[00:25:03] And then when I spoke to people in the class, they didn't know me. And I told them where they sat, when, and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Like, who the fuck are you, stalker?
[00:25:10] Will: Stop being so weird. And she's like, no, I do it about everyone. Yeah, it's not weird. It's fine.
[00:25:15] Rod: you're not special. But so you can imagine, unless you learn how to control or hide your powers, people would be like, you don't fucking know me. And I can imagine you'd get confused. Because I mean, I started looking at this, I was looking at memory in general, and then I came on this thing, and it made me think of Westworld, the what do they call them? Hosts. And one of the problems, spoiler alert.
[00:25:33] Will: These are the robots that look like humans.
[00:25:35] Rod: And the first season in particular demonstrated in a sense that the host had perfect memory, And it made past and present blur. She couldn't quite at times distinguish when is something happening if you remember all of it.
[00:25:47] Will: Yeah, with perfect precision.
[00:25:48] Rod: Yeah, remembering everything could be really quite traumatic, and not just because you remember icky things, but like
[00:25:54] Will: Oh no. We're designed to forget. We're much better off if we forget
[00:25:56] Rod: a hundred percent. We're designed to forget
[00:25:57] Will: And you know, relationships are better when people forget the things that aren't helpful to
[00:26:02] Rod: you didn't empty the dishwasher. I agree. Like, it's better sometimes you kind of go
[00:26:06] Will: well, isn't that thing, you know, the happiest people are the people that not quite forgetting, but are able to be somewhat delusional about themselves.
[00:26:13] Rod: I wouldn't know, but I've heard in others . So what about the future? Like, where do we go with this?
[00:26:18] Will: Super it up.
[00:26:19] Rod: Well, can you train for it? No, it appears you need to have it no matter what and they've tried and no, you don't get better. Are there jobs? Not a lot. Not really.
[00:26:30] Will: So just in the police?
[00:26:31] Rod: just, but they don't really advertise either. It tends to be like, you're already a cop and you appear to be good at it. So people aren't lining up.
[00:26:38] Will: So they don't need it that much. Okay. Fair enough.
[00:26:40] Rod: Not really. And your question, which is a very reasonable one to ask. And it's interesting with this because these stories, some of them are only five or six years old. But we're already going, yeah, what about computers? And so it's the most common question asked. There are 3d representations of faces or algorithms that can process it. But a lot of arguments are, well, we still need people to put nuance and context around it. I reckon not long from now, we might not.
[00:27:06] Honestly, I don't know if it's that much of a big deal anymore, sadly. But look, one of the questions I had, which is why did it take so long for scientists to notice the ability? I mean, that's interesting about science. How come this century?
[00:27:19] Will: And particularly that police would have absolutely found this super useful.
[00:27:22] Rod: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. For centuries. Yeah. One source was saying, well, look oh, it's our buddy White from UNSW again. He says, I think intuitively people believe that the way they see the world is the same as everyone else, which is true. And scientists are the same. So they're like, why would you assume this gift or this power or this ability existed? You don't have it. Why would you even look for it? I think that's fair.
[00:27:42] Will: Yeah, no, I accept that. I accept that. But you could notice the fact that some people seem to recognize a lot more people.
[00:27:49] Rod: But you know, Yenny from the beginning, she didn't realize and her mother just said, Oh, what an observant daughter I have. Not like, Oh my God. And did she become a gun for hire? Like, did she get out there and become super recognizer? No, at least in 22, she is apparently happy with her job as a technician at a pathology lab. But she's just happy that she realized her ability is not freakish. Other people have it. I'm just wired that way. And because she realized quite early, if you use it too much indiscriminately, it can seem creepy. She backed off that early, but she's glad that it's not because she's creepy. So yeah, super recognizes. It sounds so awesome. It sounds like Tom Cruise, future crimes, all that kind of shit, but it's just not.
[00:28:31] Will: Superpowers. Not what they cracked up to be.
[00:28:33] Rod: What would your superpower be? I can really tell if I've seen a face before.
[00:28:38] Will: It's not an unuseful one, but yeah, I get it.
[00:28:40] Rod: I'd choose other ones. Got any mail back?
[00:28:42] Will: Yeah. You know, a couple of days ago we talked again about forgetting things. Putting them down the memory hole. Listener and friend of the pod, CJ Josh reckons that the Spanish flu, maybe something going on there is that it may have killed more women than men. Because of, you know, the men were off fighting the fight and that was back at home. So maybe there was an effect there.
[00:29:02] Rod: There were less men to kill.
[00:29:04] Will: I don't know. I don't know.
[00:29:06] Rod: Got any new things you're thinking about?
[00:29:07] Will: Oh yeah. Okay. Okay. The first one I was just thinking about, I was hearing about this the other day. It's called it's a form of landscaping.
[00:29:13] Rod: Manscaping?
[00:29:14] Will: No, it's not manscaping. It's Well, it's landscaping so things look pretty, but also to turn your place into a fortress.
[00:29:21] Rod: Target hardening landscaping. I like it.
[00:29:24] Will: So basically it looks like a bunch of bushes But actually It's not quite a concrete gun emplacement, but it's a concrete emplacement that is designed in some way to You know, so if your terrorists want to try and ram a building or something like that they get caught in the bushes and their car flips over.
[00:29:40] Yeah, but it's a version of landscaping that has a far more, you know, threat in it.
[00:29:45] Rod: Yeah, landscaping on military roids.
[00:29:47] Will: Yeah. Yeah. So I was intrigued by that and I'm looking for examples now.
[00:29:50] Rod: I like that as a you know, recently qualified professional horticulturalist, cause I did do a 17 hour course.
[00:29:55] Will: Did you do the target hardening?
[00:29:57] Rod: Yes we did. And your pests and predators and parasites and how can you repel people in Humvees with missile launchers but just with plants.
[00:30:05] Will: I was enjoying that. What else you got?
[00:30:07] Rod: Well, I've been curious about this one. It's pretty big, but I just, Symmetry. Now, like we know symmetry has something to do with attractiveness. Like we often, you know, people who are more symmetrical, apparently more attractive. I disagree.
[00:30:18] Will: Like squares and things like that.
[00:30:19] Rod: Yes. I love a dodecahedronal face on my lady companion. But also like, chemically and functionally biology, you know, like you have your left versus right facing chemicals and stuff like symmetry at base levels of nature, it's just weird to me that symmetry matters so much or has such an effect. I don't know what the question is other than what the fuck symmetry?
[00:30:37] Will: Oh my God. A flip in the chirality. That's the symmetry of two different molecules. You know, so chirality was actually what caused thalidomide
[00:30:45] Rod: to be left versus right.
[00:30:47] Will: Yeah, it was a compound. I don't know which direction was fine in one side, but flip it around. Catastrophic
[00:30:51] Rod: simple as that. Flip it and boom, everything explodes.
[00:30:55] Will: But yeah, there's some sort of theory out there that to tell you if you're in a different multiverse is you could spot the symmetry somehow. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Something like that.
[00:31:02] Rod: Yes. Or the plus side, which is excellent.
[00:31:06] Will: Okay. I get another one. I don't think you're on truth social, but not that long ago donald Trump crowed about winning the open and at his own golf tournament, the Trump international golf tournament he won the two big trophies.
[00:31:19] And yeah, whatever. It's his own trophy. So, you know, I don't know what's going on there, but what I was interested in is the number of people who have played Trump in golf who are very good golfers and they know he cheats, but they always let him cheat. And the weird thing is so many of these famous pro golfers who would normally be invested in having a proper game of golf.
[00:31:41] They play with Trump and they know he's going to cheat and he cheats brazenly right in front of them. And they're like, ah, and so why do all these people let it?
[00:31:49] Rod: What's the point?
[00:31:50] Will: for him? Oh, I think there's two points. But like, as an example, like he would literally like he's teeing off and and the other golfers watching and Trump takes a swing, completely misses.
[00:32:01] Like there was no, there's no sounds, no anything. And swing and a miss. And Trump walks off like he's hit it onto the green. Like he just goes, cool. There's no ball. And strides off to another ball and his assistant will pick it up and he'll just drop another ball on the green and go that's what I did.
[00:32:18] Rod: How fucked up do you have to be that is desirable? Like honestly
[00:32:22] Will: so I reckon there's two components. One, one is Trump loves to test people to see how loyal they will be.
[00:32:29] Rod: That I get, for that, I give him points.
[00:32:32] Will: I'm going to do this right in front of you and see if you'll say anything. Yep. A hundred percent. And on the other side
[00:32:38] Rod: look at this. I'm going to miss this ball. I'm going to pretend I didn't. My cad is going to pick it up and I'm going to drop it right next to the hole and you can get fucked.
[00:32:45] Will: It is literally emperor's new clothes. Like it's like, I am 100 percent nude here, but if you call me on it
[00:32:51] Rod: use my ding dong like that aspect of it, I actually applaud. It's like, fuck it. Let's find out.
[00:32:55] Will: So that's on that side, but why do people let him get away with it? And I think it's something to do with everyone wants their own story of Trump cheating in front of them, but it's still a weird thing to everyone to let him.
[00:33:07] Rod: I got one more. So reality TV. Here's my question. It's inspired by a particularly excellent example. Is any of it real? Would we want it to be? Like, how much would you actually want reality TV to be real?
[00:33:23] Will: What do you mean by real?
[00:33:25] Rod: Like actually no kind of tweaking, like is that a documentary? Is that just boring as shit? Like here's a guy who sorts envelopes. We're just going to show you that boom reality TV. Like I'm kind of intrigued by
[00:33:36] Will: what is your definition of real here?
[00:33:38] Rod: Well, that's something we'd have to get into. like I mean one one argument is are they're not actors But other than that manipulated tweaked, whatever, but it's just like I'm intrigued by it because I know people who are obsessed with it
[00:33:50] Will: It's like chemistry. We know that in the normal world, the chemicals are not isolated from each other and they're all interacting all over the place but when we get to the lab, we're like, okay, I just want to have these two molecules.
[00:33:59] Rod: So you fake the environment
[00:34:00] Will: you fake the environment. you make a glass jar you get rid of everything else. And that's what you're doing kind of in, in reality TV. It's like the chemistry version.
[00:34:07] Rod: Well, I agree. And I'm curious about that. What would be good? What would be bad? Why is it work? And honestly, I just have to say is cause I was looking up some stuff about it. Born in the wild. 2015. Have you heard of this one?
[00:34:18] Will: No, I don't think so.
[00:34:20] Rod: It really made me happy. This documents couples who want to have a more natural birthing experience by delivering a baby in the great outdoors unassisted by modern medicine. They're literally pictures of women screaming and wailing by a river with no one else other than I assume camera crew and produces
[00:34:42] Will: strange to go, all right, I want this to be as natural as possible. I can understand the instinct there, but also with camera crew, you know,
[00:34:50] Rod: but in the wilderness, not a home birth. We're not talking water birth or I don't want the epidural. I want to do it in a forest, butt naked, nothing medical around me. That's a reality TV show, which apparently caused some controversy in 2015.
[00:35:05] Will: Oh my God, of course it did. Where was that?
[00:35:07] Rod: America. I know you're shocked, right? But there's so much going on in the reality TV space and I don't even know, again, what's the question? We know none of it's 100 percent just filming and nothing more. We know there's editing involved, even that alone makes a difference, but I'm just curious about how real do we really want it to be? How real do we believe it to be? And if it was really real and unedited, it'd probably be fucking boring too. Like what's meh? So I don't know. Reality TV. Stuff around it.
[00:35:34] Will: I got one last one. I feel like this is a topic that I want to know more about. I see people talking about it, but I don't know if they're talking about it in the ways that I think about it. The news crisis.
[00:35:44] Rod: Too much of it.
[00:35:45] Will: No, people have turned off the news. Like they're like, no one wants to watch the news anymore. And I feel like I want to know what's going on there. Cause I feel like I have turned off the news a fair bit recently.
[00:35:55] Rod: What news do you turn on?
[00:35:57] Will: Well, I don't know. I don't know. I'm reading the news less than I was a year ago. And I think there's a lot of people that are in that camp. And I know there's a lot of journalists who are like, Oh, they're not reading us as much. And they say, this is a bad thing for Society for democracy, all that kind of stuff.
[00:36:11] And I don't know, I kind of care, but I kind of want to know what's actually happening here. What's going on. Are people just changing what they're looking at? Is it Facebook's fault? Is it something else? Listen, if you've got anything you want us to dive down into a rabbit hole of send it in. Chuck in the comments, send us an email at cheers@wholesomeshow.com
