Dr. Klein offers us chairs behind one of the black curtains, so it’s as if we’re enclosed in a small room. She boots up her laptop and says, “I understand you need to be home by late afternoon?” She’s wearing an actual watch, and she checks it now: 9:54 a.m.
“There’s a bit of a curfew situation.” I smile at Libby and she smiles at me. She’s still wearing the bow over her left ear, but her smile reminds me of the one my mom wore during Dad’s chemo appointments. Like she’s determined to make the most of things for the sake of him/me, when she knows how hopeless it really is.
“I’m going to run you through a series of tests.” Dr. Klein sits down and starts clicking away at the keyboard.
Libby says to me, “I’m actually going to wait outside. I saw a Starbucks nearby. Just text me when you’re done.” She takes my phone and types her number in. When she hands it back, I feel this weird panic.
She hesitates over my shoulder. “Unless … I mean, I can stay …” But I can tell that she doesn’t want to stay, and I wonder if maybe it’s the whole doctor/brain setting that’s bugging her.
“Nah, I’m good.”
I watch her go, hair swinging.
Dr. Klein says, “Does anyone in your family have prosopagnosia?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“Face blindness is often genetic, but there are three categories of prosopagnosia: acquired, developmental, and congenital. It can also be a symptom of other disorders, such as autism. Did you ever experience a fall or a childhood illness of the brain?”
“I fell off the roof when I was six.”
“Did you hit your head?”
“Could something like that cause face blindness?”
“Yes. It’s not as common as developmental prosopagnosia, but it’s possible.”
“I banged it pretty hard. I had to have stitches.” Instinctively, I reach for the thin raised line along my scalp.
She types away, and as she does, it hits me: This woman is going to dig around in your brain. You can’t hide from her.
She wants to know what kind of tests were done after I fell, and then she wants to know if I was able to recognize faces before the age of six.
The honest answer is I don’t know. Yeah, I had every test imaginable to see what damage had been done to my brain. But did I know people by their faces back then? I’m not sure.
She says, “Certainly your parents would have noticed a difference if you suddenly had trouble recognizing everyone.”
“I think I’ve always been good at compensating and covering up. I mean, even back then. Maybe I could recognize people before, but I was so young …”
“Did your parents notice behavioral changes?”
“My mom said they expected me to become this cautious kid, but I got louder. She says that’s when she started going gray.”
I give her a smile, but she’s busy typing. I sit there looking around, telling myself to man up, son, stop feeling nervous. In a minute, she folds her hands in her lap and begins talking. “I’m not sure how much research you’ve done, Jack, but one of the earliest documented cases of prosopagnosia dates from 1883 … Lewis Carroll was rumored to be prosopagnosic. The next time you read Alice in Wonderland, you might see the clues … I’m sure you’re familiar with identifiers. As you know, hairstyle and clothing can change on a daily basis. We’ve met a lady who identifies people by their wedding rings because this is an identifier that rarely changes …”
She’s about to see everything you’re hiding.
Suddenly, I feel naked. I actually have to look down at myself to make sure I’m still wearing clothes.
The first test is famous faces. This is similar to one I took online—photos of celebrities with their hair and ears removed. Dr. Klein says, “Okay, Jack. The clock isn’t ticking here, so feel free to take as much time as you need.”
She turns the laptop around so that I can use it. A face appears on the screen. It’s just an oval with eyes, a nose, a mouth. If I look at it long enough, it doesn’t look like a face at all, but a planet pocked by craters and shadows. One by one, I type in the names, but to be honest I’m making shit up.
When I finish, we go right into the next test. Dr. Klein says, “The system that processes reading emotions on a face is separate from the system that reads features. Can you typically tell if a person is angry or sad or happy?”
“Almost always. I can’t recognize faces, but I can read them.”
“That’s because there is a visual processing system that exists only for face recognition, and specifically only human faces. Your dog or your cat is actually identified by your brain as an object. The configural processor is what allows people to see the face as a whole and not just its individual parts.”
This test is about identifying emotions. I want to think I nail every one of the answers, but I actually don’t have a clue.
Next is a series of upside-down faces. I’m supposed to match them to the right-side-up faces, but I can’t. I know I can’t.
The more defeated I feel, though, the more energized Dr. Klein appears. She leans over the laptop. “Humans who have no problem recognizing faces are very bad at identifying upside-down ones because once you turn that image upside down, you can no longer use the configural processing strategy to recognize that face. So you start using a feature-by-feature strategy instead, which is how we identify objects. It’s comparable to how you are with regular faces because the human processor only works with upright images. Unlike monkeys, who are adept at recognizing other monkeys, no matter the orientation.”