You know the feeling. Someone waves at you in the grocery store, smiling like an old friend, and you have absolutely no idea who they are. For most of us, faces blur together fast. But for a small group of people, faces seem to stick almost forever.
The short answer is that some people are born with an unusually strong ability to recognize faces. Researchers from Harvard and University College London coined a name for them in 2009: super recognizers. They can memorize and recall thousands of faces, often after seeing them just once, and genetics appears to be the main reason.
A Gift You Mostly Inherit
For a long time, people assumed nearly everyone had about the same face-recognition skill and that anyone could be trained to be a super recognizer. That idea turned out to be wrong. Face recognition skill is highly heritable, and genetics play the dominant role in how much it varies from person to person.
The catch is that scientists don't yet know which genes are involved. The brain science is still poorly understood, too, though it may be related to a region called the fusiform face area, a patch of the brain that responds strongly when we look at faces.
How Rare Are They?
One estimate suggests that 1 to 2 percent of people are super recognizers, able to remember around 80 percent of the faces they've seen, compared with about 20 percent for most people. Those numbers are disputed, though, so treat them as a rough guide.
Interestingly, not every super recognizer has a better memory for faces. Some are instead exceptional at comparing two face photos side by side and deciding whether they show the same person. In some situations, super recognizers can even match faces better than computer recognition systems.
Detectives With a Special Talent
That skill has real-world uses. In May 2015, London's Metropolitan Police officially formed a team of people with this heightened ability and put them to work identifying faces caught on security cameras. The skill is also recognized in the British intelligence community.
In 2018, it was reported that the Metropolitan Police had used two super recognizers to help identify suspects in the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal. They searched through up to 5,000 hours of footage from Salisbury and airports across the country. German police have also turned to super recognizers, including after a 2020 riot in Stuttgart.
The Flip Side: Face Blindness
At the other end of the scale is prosopagnosia, often called face blindness. People with it have trouble recognizing familiar faces, sometimes even their own, while the rest of their vision and thinking works normally. A developmental form of it is estimated to affect about 2 to 2.5 percent of people.
The famous neurologist and author Oliver Sacks had face blindness himself, though he didn't realize it for much of his life. People with the condition often rely on other clues, like a familiar voice or one distinctive feature, such as a square jaw.
So if you're the type who forgets a name but never a face, or the opposite, you're simply somewhere on a wide human spectrum. And if you happen to be at the very top of it, there may be a police department somewhere that would love to meet you.
