Face blindness segment on 60 Minutes

CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a segment about face blindness last night, and I figured I’d share some thoughts about it.

If I could add captions to the movie, that would be fun, but I don’t know how to do that.  So I’ll try writing a running commentary according to the time index of the video.

Part 1:

0:10  It’s been a while since I watched this program.  Goodness, they are being dramatic, with correspondent Lesley Stahl giving her introduction from an endless black void with a creepy picture hovering behind her!

0:45  As you might expect, the report mostly focuses on some of the most extreme examples of face blindness, because… well, that’s more dramatic!  My own face blindness is not as severe as most of the examples they will talk about in this segment.  (Also, while face blindness is often a trait of autism/Asperger’s, many faceblind people are not autistic.)

I have never had trouble recognizing my close family members or myself in a mirror.  And I was able to recognize my high school classmates right away at our reunion. But I’ve spent years with those people where I saw them on a daily basis and spent time getting to know them.  I start to have trouble with people I only see from time to time.

1:20  This is something I’ve always wondered about 60 Minutes.  Do they make sure that the stopwatch is always at the right minute and second based on when the commercial breaks come, or do they fudge things a bit?  It looks like the watch is running about 20 seconds fast here, but I think that’s because they cut the “Tonight on 60 minutes…” part out of the video.  What?  Oh, face blindness. Sorry.

2:00  I have at least some facial recognition ability, because I can recognize most of these celebrities.  And the ones I have trouble with are possibly due to unfamiliarity with the celebrity rather than face blindness.  But this is easier than real life facial recognition, because 1) I already know it’s a celebrity, and 2) the faces don’t move or start to wonder why I’m staring at them.

2:22  This camera shot is a more accurate representation of the task in real life.  All those faces going by– how can I pick out the ones I’ve seen before?  Do other people’s brains really do that automatically?  If so, that’s amazing!

3:20  There’s no “Aha!” moment for me when the faces go from upside-down to rightside-up.  It’s just the same image flipped.  Most people don’t have to turn their heads to read words that are printed upside-down, do they?  It’s the same for me with faces– if I don’t know them upside-down, I won’t know them rightside-up.  But flipping the image seems to cause instant recognition for Lesley Stahl.

4:00  Those poor people… I feel terrible for me too.  (Just kidding.)  : )

4:45  When you don’t automatically recognize faces, you use context to help you keep track of people.  If I understand what Dr. Novotny is describing, she can become familiar with a person as her current patient, but when they step outside into a crowd of people, their context is completely changed.  Now they are just one of many people visiting the hospital.  She might remember that the patient was a young woman with medium brown hair, but now there might be three other people in the room who fit that description, and if she makes an assumption, it could be wrong.

5:08  This is a nightmare scenario for me.  I would have to ask for the coworker’s e-mail address or try to text them, because even if he tells me his name, I will probably not recognize him in a different context.

Whenever I arrange to meet someone, I am usually not looking for a face I recognize.  I am looking for someone who fits the general description of the person I am meeting (age, gender, skin color, hair color, hair style, etc.) and who appears to be looking for me (by making eye contact or smiling when they see me).  Until I am sure who they are, I hedge by pretending to recognize them in a way that is hopefully also plausible as simple friendliness if they turn out to be someone I don’t know.

6:00  This exact thing happened to me with a friend who changed her hairstyle between school quarters.  She no longer had her hair in a ponytail, and that was enough to make me unsure that she was the same person until she greeted me by name!

I don’t experience quite as much dissonance as Jacob Hodes appears to, though.  If I saw a person change their hairstyle in front of me, they wouldn’t “disappear.”  I know they’re the same person because they haven’t gone anywhere.

8:00  The interview with artist Chuck Close is probably my favorite part of the segment.  I think he does a good job of explaining the thought processes a faceblind person uses to identify people, and showing how you can still be good at recognizing people by paying attention to details.  I think I also recognized the picture of Leno by the chin and of Tiger Woods by the lips.  I thought Tom Cruise was Doug Flutie, though.

Until I read about face blindness, I thought this was how everyone recognized faces.

10:00  I can echo what these people are saying.  The idea that most people have a mechanism that instantly and automatically “labels” faces for them seems as weird and unexpected to me as face blindness appears to be to Lesley Stahl.  Half the people I know say they are bad with faces, so I just figured I fit into the same category.  Maybe I do, and it’s a spectrum like autism rather than a sharp divide between “normal” and “not normal” the way the segment makes it appear.

11:05  Thanks, Ms. Stahl.  What a cheery thought!  (sarcasm)

12:00  I haven’t had the experience of not recognizing my own face, but I don’t really need to recognize it very often.  I mean, when I look in a mirror, the person in the mirror is going to be me, right?  Other people stay on my side of the mirror.

Moe by Michael Firman (click to visit webcomic)

September 8: On to Germany

On Friday evening, we returned to the train station and set off on an overnight trip to Berlin.  This was the first time I had ever been on a train that had sleeping cars.  Our path took us through Belgium, so I guess you could add that to the list of countries I have been to, but I don’t think it really counts, since I was on the train and probably asleep at the time.

As with the other cities, we started our time in Berlin with a guided tour.  We stopped at the Reichstag Parliament Building, which was famously damaged in a fire in 1933 that the Nazis used as an excuse to suspend civil liberties in order to go after their opponents.  We saw the Brandnburg Gate, and we saw the site of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963. (“I am a Berliner!”)  In honor of the speech, a few of my classmates then bought jelly doughnuts, also called “Berliners,” from a street vendor, and we shared them.

(A commonly told story is that JFK’s speechwriters used the German article improperly, and as a result, the President ended up stating that he was a jelly doughnut rather than a citizen of Berlin.  I have since read that is not true and they in fact got the statement correct.  Still, the jelly doughnuts were good!)

We could also see a small remaining part of the Berlin wall, every square inch of it covered with colorful graffiti.  I remembered the world atlas from my childhood, with the separate countries of West and East Germany, mirrored on a smaller scale by the city of Berlin.  I had seen the tearing down of the wall on the news, and I was impressed at the importance– this meant the maps would all have to be changed!  (Yes, I admit that I was a bit obsessed with maps.)

Berlin was full of history as the other cities had been, but there was a difference.  Whereas London and Paris were dominated by centuries-old buildings, the center of Berlin had more modern skyscrapers, a little more like an American city in some ways.  Our tour guide told us that this was because so much was destroyed during World War II.

We saw a very moving memorial in the public square where the Nazis had burned thousands of books written by Jewish authors, or that were deemed contrary to Nazi ideology.  The memorial is a plate of clear plastic set in the cobblestone ground, easy to miss unless you stop and look down.  Through the window in the ground, you can see rows of white bookshelves, all empty.  Our guide pointed out that, in the early part of the 20th century, Germany produced many Nobel Prize winners, great scholars, and scientists.  Many of them were suppressed, killed, or driven away because of the Nazis (some to America)– it is impossible to calculate how much was lost.  Then there is the memorial’s engraving, a quote by poet Heinrich Heine (loose translation): “Where they burn books, they will one day also burn people.”

The overall sense I got from the tour was of a city and country determined not to forget the lessons of its history, but also not to dwell on them.  Other countries, like my own, can very easily fool themselves into thinking “Well, something that bad could never happen here,” ignoring the many bad things that greed or the desire for power brings about in every country in the world.  The memorials in Germany are a reminder that it can, and did happen.  But at the same time, Berlin did not strike me as a depressing place.  On the contrary, there were lots of new building projects going on and a healthy sense of city and national pride.

Germany is a beautiful country, and there is even some country inside the city!  At one point we were riding the bus through Berlin, when suddenly we entered a dense forest.  I figured that we must have left the city, but our tour guide told us that we were still within it.  There is a huge forest inside the city limits of Berlin– pretty neat!  We would get to see more of the German countryside later on, as we were set to visit a couple of other cities.

Reunion

I drive from Danville to Bloomsburg, along the same path the school bus took me for twelve years. The trees crowd in beside the road, and it feels so quiet– I’m amazed at how little traffic there seems to be. I guess I’ve gotten used to Cincinnati. But this definitely still feels like home.

I’m going to the park for my 13-year class reunion. Why 13 years? Because we’d never had a reunion before, and we wanted to have one. I worry a little that I won’t recognize some of my classmates. That could be embarrassing.

But as they arrive one by one, I know them instantly without a doubt! This so rarely happens to me anymore even with people I know well. It really feels nice.

Eight of us were able to make it out of a class of 26. I’d say that’s pretty good, considering how many of us have spread out all over the country and how many are busy with family and job obligations.

I get to meet their spouses and children, and I do my best to remember their names, but it will take me a while. I’m thankful that I’ve had the chance to learn some of them from Facebook.

We talk while the children play on the playground– there are so many stories to tell. I stand in between two conversations, listening to both and smiling. My friends are so very much the same people I knew from school. They’ve been to some amazing places and lived through some tough times, but God has preserved what is good in each of them.

I don’t think I have a lot to add myself. My experience is still mostly as a student. I’m still trying to find a career, still hoping to start a relationship with someone.

I probably seem a lot like I did when we were all in high school. I lagged behind socially then– at a middle school or elementary level– and as a result, I didn’t interact much with my peers. Now, I’m probably up to a college or high school level socially, but I don’t always feel fully a part of the adult world.

When someone asks me what I’m doing currently, I stammer and pause for a bit as I try to answer. A nasty part of me is telling me “You don’t belong here. You don’t have anything to talk about,” but I know that’s not true. We go out for drinks, but I haven’t developed a taste for beer or wine, so I order soda. I hope they don’t think I’m looking down on them by not sharing a drink– it’s such a symbol of friendship.

Before I came to the reunion, I was worried a little about negative thoughts like these, but they are no match for the joy I feel. I sit and listen to all the stories as my friends share– about meeting their husbands and wives, about funny or sad things at work, about pregnancy and childbirth and picking names for children and the unpredictability of two-year-olds. I imagine that my parents had conversations like this about me when I was little. I hear how God has blessed each family and prepared them for the things He brings into their lives. Everyone’s story is different, but also the same.

I realize that I have grown in thirteen years. When I was a senior in high school, I was afraid to drive a car. Today I made two trips by myself, and I enjoyed them. Even though social interaction is tiring, I am seeking it rather than avoiding it– planning my weekend around it and learning how to get enough rest in between so that I can be fully present and part of the conversation.

I wonder if my classmates know what a blessing they have been to my life– both those who are there and those who could not come.

At times, others find it hard to believe that I have Asperger’s just from observing me. I think some of this may be due to personality– my strong desire to avoid confrontation has likely kept me from clashing with others.

But there was another big difference in my life, the people around me. In so many of the stories I read online about people with Asperger’s, their years in school are not remembered fondly. Stories of bullying seem almost universal, and in a lot of cases, the best advice people can offer is “Wait until you graduate; it will get better.” I read about people who still deal with the effects of bullying decades later.

I wonder if my classmates know that they are proof that it doesn’t have to be that way– that kindness can have just as much of a positive impact on a life. None of us knew about Asperger’s, but anyone could see that I was different in some ways, lagging behind in others. But I wasn’t given grief for it. I was just given friendliness, time, and a safe place to grow.

I hope they know.

Little professor

I’ve been wanting to continue posting about what I was like growing up, hopefully to help people understand Asperger’s syndrome better.  But I’ve been a little nervous about writing this part, because it feels a bit like bragging.  It’s honestly not my purpose to boast, though, and I hope it will make sense once you’ve read the rest.

Hans Asperger described the children he studied during the 1940s as “little professors,” because they tended to study a specific interest in great detail, and then repeat the facts they had learned to anyone who would listen.  They would use formal language as if they were delivering a lecture, an effect that can seem comical coming from a young child.

I definitely had the “little professor” trait.  I learned to read when I was quite young– I honestly can’t remember not being able to.  My favorite sort of books to read were reference books that used pictures and symbols to communicate information along with words.  I would spend hours reading these books over and over again.

What sorts of things captured my interest?

• Road maps.  A long while ago, I posted a funny story about how one year I said my favorite Christmas gift was a Philadelphia road map.  I was fascinated by the symbols used on maps for different types of roads and the names of the roads themselves.  I could watch for the road names on signs when I was riding in the car and figure out where all of the places we visited were.  At home, I would spread the map out on the floor and use highlighters to trace paths on it.  When my youngest brother Andrew was born, I told my grandparents how to get to the hospital when I went with them to visit my Mom for the first time.  I was four years old.
• The states in the U.S.A. and the countries of the world.  I had an old atlas in my room that I turned through until the pages were falling out. I liked how each country was marked by a change in color and had its own flag.  Finding all of the countries on each map was like a game, especially in the case of tiny ones like Liechtenstein.  Before long, I could draw a map of state or country borders from memory.
•  The bones and organs of the body.  Another of my favorite books was a human anatomy book; it was like a map of the inside of the body.  I liked learning all of the strange names for bones– vertebrae, phalanges, scapula, femur– and I could feel where they were inside me.  I read about the path that food takes through the body after you eat it.  I learned about the circulatory system (heart and blood vessels) and respiratory system (lungs).  I liked how I could ask my Dad, the doctor, any question, and he would know the answer to it.
• Astronomy.  I loved learning facts about the planets.  Each one has its own day (Jupiter’s is 10 hours; Venus’s is 243 days) and its own year (Mercury’s is 88 days; Pluto’s is almost 250 years).  On some planets, I would weigh just a couple of pounds; on others, I would weigh a ton.  Then there were the constellations– 88 of them, just as many as there are keys on a piano.  I had a wonderful book by children’s author H.A. Rey that taught me how to recognize the brightest constellations in the sky, but I wanted to learn about all of them, even the ones without any bright stars, like Lacerta the lizard and Camelopardalis the giraffe.
• Math.  Before I was old enough to start school, I did math workbooks for fun.  Really!  I enjoyed books that taught arithmetic by lining up rows of circles or squares so I could see what 9 + 5 or 3 x 10 looked like.  I would spend hours drawing squares so I could see what a hundred looked like– then a thousand.  (It didn’t occur to me until just now that I seem to have been a very visual learner.  Strange, because I’m actually diagnosed as having a non-verbal learning disability.  Are diagrams and maps considered verbal or non-verbal information?)

I’ve been thinking about why children with Asperger’s display the “little professor” behavior.  Some of the writing I’ve seen on the subject argues that these children are merely “parroting” information they’ve heard or read and don’t really understand the complicated subjects they are talking about.

Brothers

Jonas and I sitting on the back of a giant turtle. Jonas is two years old in this picture, and I'm almost four.

When I was 20 months old, my younger brother Jonas was born.  In a lot of ways, we’re similar.  People in my family tend to be quiet and introverted.  We both like to study things in great detail.

But in other ways, our personalities have always been different.  After my tumultuous first few months, Jonas seemed like the happiest baby ever; he was a lot calmer than I had been.

This continued to hold true as we both grew.  One day when I was three or four, Jonas and I were in a room with a door that had a mirror fastened to it (not very securely, as it turned out).  Jonas grabbed the mirror, and it fell off the door, shattering with a loud crash!  Mom came running to find Jonas standing nonchalantly by the door with a cut on his finger from the mirror, and me crying and shouting hysterically.

“How many times have I told you not to do that?” I yelled at my brother again and again.  The answer to that question was zero– I had never mentioned it before– but it was something I had heard people say when they were angry, and I was mad at Jonas for making such a loud noise and a big mess!  It took longer to console me than it did to bandage Jonas’s hand.

Most of the time, though, I think Jonas and I got along very well.  It was a lot more fun playing and learning when I had someone to share the experiences with.

Jonas grew faster than I did– it was very common for people to ask my parents if we were twins.  I heard “No, they’re 20 months apart” so many times that I still often think of the age difference between us in months rather than years.

As we grew, Jonas tended to be more adventuresome and willing to try new things than I was.  He was usually the first to try an unfamiliar kind of food or a new activity.  In some ways, I suppose, he has been like a big brother to me, though he has never looked down on me as if I were a little brother.  Looking back now, I think there are a lot of experiences I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to enjoy if Jonas hadn’t been there to get me to try them.

Mother’s Day

Four days old.

I was born in Pittsburgh in May 1980, when the Steelers and Pirates were both defending champions.  My parents were younger then than I am now.  I asked my Dad once if he was nervous about becoming a parent for the first time, and he said, “Not really.”

You see, my father was a pediatrician, and my mother was a nurse, both of them very smart, caring people who had taken care of many children.  They always knew what to do when my brothers and I would get hurt or sick.

My mother has told me that I cried a lot.  All babies cry a lot, of course– what else is there to do?, but I cried a lot even for a baby.  Apparently, I was often uncomfortable.  My skin was easily irritated.  In general, I was overly sensitive– a description that would fit me all my life.

My mom would hold me for hours, trying to get me to stop crying.  At times, she was in tears, wondering how, with all of her training and experience as a nurse, she could seemingly calm any baby but this one.

I have no idea if my restlessness as an infant had any connection to Asperger’s (a term that hadn’t even been coined yet).  I did find it interesting to read of a similar experience in Daniel Tammet’s autobiography, Born on a Blue Day.  Tammet is autistic and experiences vivid synesthesia (perceiving things like words, numbers, and days as having colors and shapes).

When he was a baby, Daniel cried at all hours of the day, and his parents would calm him by making a sort of hammock out of a blanket and swinging it back and forth, each of them holding one end.  It does make sense to me that a baby with autism might experience the world with more sensitivity and take a longer time to adjust to that than a non-autistic baby, but I don’t have any real evidence to back that up.  I would imagine that experiences vary quite a bit depending on the individual.

But whatever the case, I am so thankful for my mother’s patient love.  Before I was even aware, I was loved unconditionally by my parents.  I think that my parents have been the most powerful testimony in my life about the love of God.  It’s because of that reflection that I have a concept of what God’s love is in a world that usually doesn’t reflect it clearly.  It’s why I can have hope even in the most painful or distressing times that all along, I have been resting in the arms of my heavenly Father.

An Asperger’s life story

I’m working on Flash homework right now, so I don’t have as much time as I’d like to comment, but I came across a fascinating site yesterday.  It’s an autobiographical account by a 35-year-old woman with Asperger’s syndrome about her experiences as a young child, going to school, growing up, and looking for a place in the world:

My Asperger’s Syndrome Story

Like me, she grew up before anyone knew about Asperger’s, which in her case led to a lot of misunderstandings and hardships when her behavior just didn’t seem to make sense to those around her.  Some parts of her story are very sad, but I think she tells it very well.  There’s a lot in it to think about, as it relates to both children and adults with autism.

I’ve been wanting to describe a little more about my own experiences growing up (a process I’m not done with yet!).  Reading this account again makes me thankful for parents, teachers, and classmates who were willing to let me do my own thing or overlook my weirdness at times; I was spared a lot of unnecessary hardships because of the kindness of others.

I hope I can post more soon!

20/20 story: Carly Fleischmann

Since I quoted Carly Fleischmann in my post yesterday, I wanted to share the video I saw about her online.  She also blogs and posts on Twitter.

One of the things I thought was interesting about the video was that writing was not an easy process for Carly, even though she had plenty to say.  The first time she tried writing, she threw up after it was done.  It took months for her to write again after the first time she tried it.  The video shows how excruciatingly slow it can be even now for her to get the words out.  Honestly, I wasn’t expecting that, but it makes perfect sense.

If this had been a movie script instead of a real-life story, I’d imagine it would show someone who had never been able to communicate in words before being incredibly relieved and suddenly writing great volumes of words.  But this isn’t a movie script.

Writing isn’t easy, and I think it can be even tougher if you’re accustomed to your thoughts going a lot faster than you can write.  I can identify with the experience of being stuck in front of a blank screen for hours, or erasing and rewriting the same sentence again and again, and I don’t experience the painful physical sensations that Carly writes about.  One of the most interesting things to me about the video is how it shows her perseverance.

I hope and pray that the video will help people to understand autistics a little better; I think it has done so for me.  Another thought that occurs to me is that I also hope parents of autistic children don’t expect them to be exactly like Carly.  There’s only one person like her in the world, just like there’s only one person like me, and only one person like your child.  Everyone has their own personality, strengths, and weaknesses.

Video games for the weekend

When I was a kid, I lived just outside a small Pennsylvania borough called Danville.  (I just realized that I can’t officially call it a “town,” because nearby Bloomsburg always claimed to be “the only town in Pennsylvania.”)  It was a great place to live!

It seems we are all shaped by the times and places we remember while growing up, to the point that some of them become almost synonymous with childhood.  One of the things that was like that for me was a store in downtown Danville called McWilliams.

Mill Street in downtown Danville. If you walk a few blocks down the road, McWilliams will be on your left.

McWilliams was an eclectic combination of different things that seems a bit odd now.  At ground level, part of it was a drug store, while the rest of it was more of a bookstore (but a very small one).  But the best part was downstairs in the basement– the movie and video game rental section.  The walls were lined with empty videotape and game boxes, and if you brought one to the counter upstairs, they would give you the movie or game (along with instruction book) in a clear plastic container. I think the cost of a rental went from $0.99 to $1.99 during the time I lived in Danville.

The best occasions came at the end of a semester or year in school.  If you brought your report card and had good grades (I think it had to be B’s or better), you could rent a game for free.  My brothers and I would each pick out a game, and we’d have a fun weekend trying to beat them.

That’s how I first discovered a great many of the NES games on my list of favorites.  When I got older and started collecting games for myself, I was surprised to discover that at least one of the games they had was actually quite rare, and it had been a neat privilege to be able to play it whenever I wanted.

That sort of memory is very time- and place-specific.  I’m not all that old yet, but my memories of renting games at McWilliams already belong to another generation.  As far as I know, small stores eventually got out of the video and game rental business because of chains like Blockbuster– and then those stores went bankrupt because of all of the other options people have for seeing movies thanks to the Internet.  (McWilliams is still there, by the way, but I’d be surprised if it still rents movies and games.)

It’s not worse the way it is now; it’s just different, and it somehow makes my memories of trips to McWilliams more special to realize that it couldn’t happen that way today.  At the time, though, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world.

I don’t know if this sort of memory ends up being boring to share; it might be if your experiences aren’t similar.  What memories of childhood are uniquely part of you because of where you lived?

Changes

Hello again!  I decided to try out a different blog theme for this page.  All of the content is the same still.  What do you think?  I like the colors in this one, but the old one had a less complex background and may have been easier to read.

In general, people usually don’t like changes that aren’t necessary, but sometimes people on the autistic spectrum can be bothered by changes that others barely notice.  A couple of months ago, I read a blog entry posted by a mother whose little girl is on the autistic spectrum.  It was about a time she found her daughter struggling to hold back tears, telling herself “Sometimes things change, and that’s okay” in a method she had practiced to calm herself down.  The cause for her distress was that the TV show she was watching had changed its opening sequence for a new season.  She had been expecting the familiar opening that had been there every time, and something different was suddenly in its place.

I found that post very moving, because I can remember going through some of the same things as a young child.  One time, I was watching an episode of Sesame Street that somehow involved a marching band visiting the show.  I can barely remember the episode itself, but I do remember that as the credits rolled, they had the marching band perform the theme instead of using the piano and harmonica recording that had appeared every other time.  I was caught totally unprepared and burst into tears!  On a half-conscious level, I was familiar with each note and time interval in the song, and not only was the band using totally different instruments to play it, but they weren’t hitting all of the notes exactly right!  I just wanted to get away from it.

I had a similar reaction if I was listening to a song and the record or tape speed got messed up and the sound got distorted.  I always found it very disturbing to hear something familiar distorted into a grotesque form, with the essence of the original still there, just… twisted.

I am thankful that, as I have grown up, I have become less sensitive to that sort of sensory input.  I’m not entirely sure what has helped me besides experience, but I suspect that my love of science fiction may have helped me in this area.  Science fiction often uses a distorted or unfamiliar point of view to show readers or viewers something about human nature.  It can use a creature from another world as a mirror for ourselves, or it can show the consequences of our ideas by removing all limitations and showing what kind of future might result.  I’ve come to appreciate how storytellers use the weird and unsettling at times to tell a story of great importance and beauty.

Like anyone, I still worry about unwelcome changes in my life, of course.  But I still have the same thing to cling to as I did when I was a child– God never changes, and he has promised me that I belong to him.  Despite all the things in life that can scare or worry me, God is over them all, and he will not break his promises.

“I the LORD do not change. So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.”

– Malachi 3:6

Hmm– I think I’ll keep this background for a while.  It seems to be helping me to start writing again.