Why Jane Goodall got lost in the woods

I've just finished reading Oliver Sacks' The Mind's Eye, and have gathered some interesting information from it.  Sacks is well known for his ability to make neurology and neuropsychology "accessible" to the general public.  This book focuses on disorders of visual perception.

Sacks himself has a condition called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness."  It's a difficulty or inability to recognize or distinguish human faces.  That type of agnosia can be congenital or acquired, and can be mild or severe.  Sacks has the severe form; he can meet a patient or friend in his office, then encounter the same person fifteen minutes later in the hallway and not recognize them.

Jane Goodall also has a certain degree of prosopagnosia.  Her problems extend to recognizing chimpanzees as well as people - thus, she says, she is often unable to distinguish individual chimps by their faces... "I have huge problems with people with 'average' faces.... I have to search for a mole or something.  I find it very embarrassing!  I can be all day with someone and not know them the next day."

She adds that she, too, has difficulties in recognizing places:  "I just don't know where I am until I am very familiar with the route.  I have to turn and look at landmarks so I can find my way back.  This was a problem in the forest, and I often got lost."

Disorders of face perception can be traced to specific loci in the brain, and understanding the disorder helps understand why Caucasians may consider all Oriental faces the same (and vice versa).  Sometimes a person can retain the "familiarity" of a person or place, but lose the identification of it - thus resulting in a "deja vu" experience.  The opposite is the Capgras syndrome, where the face is recognized, but the association and emotional connections are lost, and the person perceives the other person as an imposter or alien.

Finally, there can be "hyperfunction" of the locus, resulting in "superrecognition" - the ability never to forget a face.

There are other interesting sections of the book, notably on depth perception and stereoscopy, which I'll try to touch on re Islamic art in a separate post.  I've not listed the book in my recommended books list, not because it's too dense, but rather because it's a bit too wordy and could have been edited much more tightly.  But it's a nice read for those interested in human biology, and especially if anyone has (or has friends/family with) difficulties in remembering faces and people, this is a valuable resource for understanding the condition.