She turns the laptop around so that I can use it. A face appears on the screen. It’s just an oval with eyes, a nose, a mouth. If I look at it long enough, it doesn’t look like a face at all, but a planet pocked by craters and shadows. One by one, I type in the names, but to be honest I’m making shit up.
When I finish, we go right into the next test. Dr. Klein says, “The system that processes reading emotions on a face is separate from the system that reads features. Can you typically tell if a person is angry or sad or happy?”
“Almost always. I can’t recognize faces, but I can read them.”
“That’s because there is a visual processing system that exists only for face recognition, and specifically only human faces. Your dog or your cat is actually identified by your brain as an object. The configural processor is what allows people to see the face as a whole and not just its individual parts.”
This test is about identifying emotions. I want to think I nail every one of the answers, but I actually don’t have a clue.
Next is a series of upside-down faces. I’m supposed to match them to the right-side-up faces, but I can’t. I know I can’t.
The more defeated I feel, though, the more energized Dr. Klein appears. She leans over the laptop. “Humans who have no problem recognizing faces are very bad at identifying upside-down ones because once you turn that image upside down, you can no longer use the configural processing strategy to recognize that face. So you start using a feature-by-feature strategy instead, which is how we identify objects. It’s comparable to how you are with regular faces because the human processor only works with upright images. Unlike monkeys, who are adept at recognizing other monkeys, no matter the orientation.”
The thing I take from this is Even monkeys recognize each other.
“Now we’re going to test your ability with object recognition. This way, we can know it’s strictly a face recognition problem and that it doesn’t extend to objects.”
I sit there matching houses, cars, guns, landscapes, animals, and suddenly I’m thinking, What if I get these mixed up too, all these things I’ve never had trouble identifying? What if I only thought I recognized a cat, a dog, a house, a car, but I find out I don’t know them any better than faces? I sit back for a minute and close my eyes, mostly because I want to get away—from this computer, this lab, this campus, my own head.
Dr. Klein says, “I want you to remember that everyone gets some right and some wrong. It’s how the test was designed.”
Which doesn’t make me feel any better. But I open my eyes. I go on.
I feel even worse with the next one, the Bald Women test, which is photo after photo of regular, non-celebrity females with the hair and ears missing once again. I’m supposed to hit a button if I see one that looks different, but they all look the same to me so I don’t even bother trying—I just hit Same over and over.
The last test reminds me of an eye exam. I lean on the chin rest and press my forehead against this contraption that looks like a mask. Dr. Klein wants me to study the computer screen, where there’s a small camera pointed at my pupils. This, according to her, will record my method of processing a face.
“Normal perceivers go for the internal features of the face and use a triangular sequence that moves between the eyes, the nose, and the mouth. Prosopagnosics, on the other hand, start with the external features, such as the ears and the hair. They usually avoid the eye region.”
This sounds about right. And then I wonder what Libby is doing and where she is.
I’m standing in the Department of Brain Sciences, Cognitive Neurology, at Indiana University, Bloomington, where there are answers all around me. I was young when my mom died and when my dad and I talked to the doctors about testing. I let my dad decide whether I should do it or not. But I’m here now, and I can ask to talk to one of these white-coated doctors or scientists. My mom died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and I need to know if I’m going to die that way too.
I’m pacing up and down the hall. If I’m tested, they’ll either find out I have aneurysms in my brain or I don’t. They will either be able to pin them off and try to control them or not.
But here’s the thing—even if there aren’t any aneurysms in there, these facts won’t change: I will still be someone who watches; I will still be someone who is prepared and on the lookout, because at any moment the earth could stop spinning. I’ve lived through the worst thing that can ever happen to me, and I know firsthand what the world can do.
A man in a white coat passes by and nods at me. I nod back.
I think, He could have answers.
I watch him walk away.
I think, If my mom was here, what would she say?
My phone buzzes and I almost don’t check it, but it could be Jack.
It’s a text from Jayvee.
Libby + absent from school = questioning Atticus? I had one other thought. I realized that as bad as it is not to know, the not knowing is something too. You can still do something with that.
And then she adds:
As much as a person can while a person’s still in high school in Indiana.
I wait for Dr. Klein to run the results. I tell myself it’s okay. It’s no big deal. I mean, it’s not as if you don’t already know that you suck at recognizing people. But listen, you do all right. You get by. You’re good at figuring out identifiers, and you’ve done it all on your own without any guidance or help.
I am giving myself the pep talk of my life when Dr. Klein returns. She sits down across from me and says, “You’re definitely prosopagnosic. Prosopagnosia is on a continuum. You can be mildly bad or you can be profoundly face-blind. You are profoundly face-blind. In fact, you’re one of the most severe cases I’ve ever seen.”
So it’s official.
I expect to feel worse or maybe even better now that it’s confirmed.
“What happens now? Is there a cure?”
I haven’t come across one in any of my research, but that doesn’t mean Dr. Amber Klein, brain specialist, won’t know of one.
Her smile is upside down and apologetic. “We’re certainly making great strides in our research, but no. There’s no cure. We’re experimenting with ways to teach people how to better manage their face blindness. We’ve been doing some repetitive training with faces. Research subjects will train for an hour a week. There are ten levels of difficulty. A teenage boy, a little younger than you, has been working with us for five months, and his eye movement strategies have become more normal …”
“Is he recognizing faces?”
“No, but we’re hoping increased training will begin to help him in his everyday life.”
She’s starting to lose me, and she can tell this. She turns around to reach for something, and when she turns back, it’s as if she’s a whole new person. The slate’s been wiped clean, so to speak.
The thing she reached for is a model of the human brain. She points to it as she talks. “Toward the back of your brain, over your right ear—just here—there is a specific area that’s responsible for identifying faces—”
“Fusiform gyrus twelve.” I reach up and run my fingers across the scar again, over my right ear.
“We could do an MRI, and this would provide us with more information. Many prosopagnosics also have trouble recognizing cars and places. They often have topographical agnosia, which means they lose their way easily and don’t recognize their houses or places of work. They can have trouble with their hearing. We think prosopagnosia is the key to discovering how the brain processes objects in general. For so long, we’ve thought of the brain as one entity, but we’re learning now about all these separate machines, if you will, that are a part of its makeup, and the fact that these machines don’t interact with each other, that they aren’t even aware of each other.”
“Basically the face-processing area of my brain is either missing, defective, or unplugged? But if I do the MRI, there’s still no cure.”
“Yes.”
There’s nothing more she can do for me and I know that and she knows that.
She says, “I suggest telling people, at least your family. Let them know you have this. It will make things easier on you in the long run.”
I pick up the phone and text Libby.
I’m done.