Have you ever had trouble recognizing a famous person or thought you knew someone when you didn’t?
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00:00According to a psychological study from 2012, most of us can recognize the face of someone
00:07we know in under a half second, but not everyone.
00:10Some people have a condition known as developmental prosopagnosia, where they either can't recognize
00:15familiar faces as quickly, or the faces of strangers look remarkably familiar.
00:19It was long believed to be a relatively rare occurrence, but now a new Harvard study suggests
00:23it might be more common than previously thought.
00:26Looking at 3,100 participants in the U.S., researchers found that not only does face
00:30blindness affect some 3% of people, but the condition isn't as simple as you have it or
00:34you don't.
00:35It's likely more of a spectrum, with the researchers writing, quote, First, the majority of researchers
00:39have used overly strict diagnostic criteria, and many individuals with significant face
00:44recognition problems in daily life have been wrongly told they do not have prosopagnosia.
00:48If this experiment's results are extrapolated to the entire U.S. population, that means
00:52around 10 million Americans have difficulty with recognizing faces, not a small number,
00:57and other researchers seem to agree.
00:59A 2022 study also suggested relaxing the criteria for the diagnosis of face blindness, suggesting
01:04that identifying more people with this difficulty could lead to better cognitive training and
01:09treatments.