Are YOU a ‘super recognizer’? You should be able to identify these upside-down celebrity faces if you’re part of the 0.1%
Can you pick out the Starbucks barista who served you in a crowded crowd at a concert two weeks ago?
If so, you could be one of the 0.1 to 1 percent of people known as “super recognizers,” whose brains have an astonishing ability to remember faces.
For these people, a quick glance is enough to identify an incognito celebrity or remember a complete stranger, even years later.
Some can also identify or match faces they’ve once seen, even if they’re turned upside down, pixelated, or viewed from a different angle.
A pandemic-era research even found that super recognizers could identify a masked person based on their eyes alone.
Although the research is still new, experts suspect that super-recognizers have spikes in brain activity when they recognize a face that tells their brains that this is an important piece of visual information.
Instead of that data being discarded by the brain in favor of something else in the coming days, weeks, and months, these people’s brains hang on to it.
Dr. Richard Russell, professor of psychology at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, said in 2021: “Society operates under the assumption that everyone is roughly the same at recognizing faces, and that everyone sees the world the same way. “That’s just not true.”
If you think you’re a super recognizer, see if you can spot the upside-down celebrity photos below.
Do you recognize this actress or this billionaire? If you can do that, you might be a super recognizer
Dr. Russell was part of a team of researchers who coined the term “super recognizer” in 2009 in a study of four Americans who claimed to have “exceptional” memories when it comes to faces.
They were able to identify photos of celebrities from before they were famous, and photos from different angles and pixels.
Dr. Meike Ramon, an assistant professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, told the WashingtonPost that super recognizers have a “unique ability to infer a three-dimensional representation of a face even when they see only one 2D image of the person.”
Dr. Ramon’s research shows that super recognizers are also particularly attracted to faces.
See if you guessed correctly: actress Angelina Jolie is on the left, while Elon Musk is on the right
In one 2022 studyshe and her colleagues found that even when super recognizers were shown random photos of everyday life (for example, someone using a computer), they spent most of their time looking at faces.
Their eyes were also immediately drawn to faces, regardless of where the face was in the photo.
Dr. Ramon said, “It appears that faces are extremely salient to super-recognizers for reasons we still don’t know.”
She noticed that their brains also seem to respond differently to images within a second of seeing them.
What about this political influencer and star athlete? Less than one percent of the population can recognize them upside down
A Study from 2024 carried out by the laboratory of Dr. Ramon looked at the brain activity of 16 super-recognisers and 17 controls while participants looked at pictures of plants, animals, faces and other scenes.
In just 65 milliseconds of an image appearing, which is faster than the blink of an eye, their brains immediately responded differently than those of the control group.
At the other end of the super-recognizer spectrum are people with prosopagnosia, better known as face blindness.
The two to three in every hundred Americans with this condition have difficulty recognizing even the most familiar faces, including their own, and noticing emotions or a person’s age or gender.
Most people develop face blindness from neurological conditions such as dementia, brain tumors and seizures, as these can cause brain lesions that destroy cells responsible for processing visual information.
However, some people may be born with it due to genetic mutations.
Meanwhile, the second set of upside-down photos were Ivanka Trump and Tom Brady
Experts noted that while super recognizers have exceptional memories, their abilities are not perfect.
Dr. David White, lead researcher at the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told the Washington Post that super-recognizers, like regular people, find it more difficult to distinguish faces of people with a different ethnicity than their own. .
However, one study from his team showed that when super recognizers made mistakes, they maintained greater confidence than other professionals who have to study faces, such as police officers.
If you’re trying to improve your facial memory, Dr. White that you should focus on features such as scars, ears, freckles and blemishes.
His team also developed one online test to determine if you are a super recognizer.
It comes after a study earlier this year revealed the terrifying condition known as ‘demon face syndrome’.
Only one in a thousand people is a super recognizer and can pick out these two actors within a second
Medically known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), only about 75 cases have ever been documented of the syndrome, in which a person perceives unusual, often grotesque distortions when staring at a human face.
But a rare person with the condition, a 58-year-old man who contacted neuropsychologists at Dartmouth, has the unique ability to see faces normally on paper and on screens, despite having seen more creepy ‘demon faces’ in his real life .
This split allowed him and the researchers to reliably illustrate for the first time what faces might look like to someone living with the terrifying vision of PMO.
Actors Timothee Chalamet and Sydney Sweeney were the last duo to turn. How well did you do?
“Most articles on PMO are short case reports on individual cases,” Dartmouth professor Brad Duchaine told DailyMail.com, “written by the neurologists who happened to encounter them in their clinical practice.”
“Our report is especially interesting,” he said, “because … we can be confident that the distortions of his visualizations accurately reflect what he experiences.”
A rare individual with a variant of ‘demon face syndrome’ has the unique ability to see faces normally on paper and on screens, despite having seen more creepy ‘demon faces’ in his real life.
The gap allowed researchers for the first time to properly illustrate what faces look like to a person living with the demon-tinted glasses of prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).