Face blindness
What if you cannot recognize people by face? Even in your family, you need time to figure out who they are by ways other than face, such as voice, smell, gait et al. This is a disease named Prosopagnosia, which is a neuological disorder.
Neuroscience has expanded so broadly that its nerves reach every domain of life, like mathmatics, robots, novels, movies. There is a new movie recently talking about this disease introduced on the journal, Science. "In Vivid Detail " discribed a man falling in love with a pretty girl and comeing to understand the woman’s face by sketching it in a grid and appreciating it as an abstract pattern. This’s a romantic and artistic way to cure disease, which is usually full of imagination and misunderstanding against scientific view; however it might also give out some clues to medicine and industry.
There are many ways to know the world, and each way could be interesting, entertaining and helpful, though they are not always agreeing with each other.
Cite from Science 2007,447,263
[Film: An unfamiliar face Emma Marris1 ARTS REVIEWED: Film - In Vivid Detail directed by Dara Bratt presented by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at the Tribeca Film Festival, New York, in spring 2007. Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition often referred to as ‘face blindness’. Individuals with this condition cannot recognize other people by their faces, which look about as uniform to them as two stones do to everyone else. It is a disorder with rich cinematic implications, as film stars often have beautiful or glamorous faces, and films rely on the audience’s ability to identify characters by their faces. In the short film In Vivid Detail, a man falls in love with a conventionally pretty woman, and she reciprocates, only to feel snubbed when he apparently ignores her when she has put her hair up and changed her shoes. He explains his condition, and she must decide whether she can date a man who can’t really ’see’ her face. In the end, he makes a special effort to show that he can comprehend her face, albeit in a different way to most people. The man’s disorder is revealed in subtle ways before he explains it. Talking about two chocolate-shop owners, he tells his new love "Those guys are brothers," when it is obvious to the viewer that they are identical twins. And the film almost overdoes it with scenes that reveal his excellent eyesight and attention to detail in other areas. Student film-maker Dara Bratt spoke with scientists and prosopagnosia patients to do her research, but she admits that she is not sure whether the final conceit, in which the man comes to understand the woman’s face by sketching it in a grid and appreciating it as an abstract pattern, would work for people with the condition. Bratt says she chose a conventional beauty to play the woman so the character would be more startled and upset when the man fails to respond to her pretty face. But this casting choice also puts the audience in the same precarious position of potentially failing to recognize her when she changes her accessories and hairstyle — she could be just another generically pretty blonde. The man’s inability to ’see’ faces might have been more poignant if the woman’s face had more character. Short films are often used as calling cards in the industry, screened at festivals to introduce a film-maker’s work. In Vivid Detail was premiered in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Bratt says she hopes to do more work on neurological topics, and is already working on feature-length ideas.]
