Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, was formally recognized in 1947 by German neurologist, Joachim Bodamer, though reports of the condition date to the nineteenth century. More recently however, neurologists have begun to view the condition as a spectrum, arguing that if those with total face blindness are on one end, there is also an extreme condition of super recognition. The notion of super recognition has captured the public imagination following a 2016 article in The New Yorker magazine that explored the use of super recognizers to track down criminals using England’s CCTV system. While a number of scholars have begun to examine the history of prosopagnosia, led by the work of Oliver Sacks, rather less attention has been paid to the implications of face blindness in terms of developing other recognition and perception mechanisms. This presentation builds on the provocation of Jenny Edkins to reframe prosopagnosia within the context of disability studies as a different kind of super recognition that trains people to pick up on voice, gait, and expression. I explore the history of prosopagnosia and its diagnostic procedures to examine the ways in which face blind people makes sense of others through alternative cues. Through this work, I propose a humanistic model for the study of the brain and facial recognition; by studying people with face blindness and superrecognition and how they relate to others, we can learn more about the brain itself.
