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Just want to point out that there could be a wide range of ability to recognize faces and it's probably realy hard to find a good measure of that. If someone shows you a picture of your wife (to take an example from one comment) and a picture of eg another woman with the same hair color, skin tone, whatever, would you be able to distinguish them? I'll bet you would unless you suffer from prosopagnosia, the loss of the ability to recognize faces that we know can occur after damage to a certain part of visual cortex. Then try to describe how you can tell the pictures apart. Not as easy. Artists (like the one in the article) spend all day thinking about faces (ok, not all artists, but many of them). They probably feel more confident in their ability to recognize faces and in their ability to describe them--because they discuss faces for portraits, with clients, etc. As a skeptical neuroscientist, I'm thinking you should hold off on diagnosing yourself with this condition until we come up with better evidence for it.


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