I, personally, was educated. I’d always wondered how people in countries where everyone has more-or-less the same kind of nose, were able to tell each other apart.
What countries don’t have “more-or-less the same kind of nose”? Serious question.
Hair and eye colour? Skin tone? Height? Wright and body type. Hairstyle and facial hair if any? Moles, scars, tattoos, piercings?
People’s faces are still significantly different enough so as to be quickly distinguishable.
I will admit that I was born and raised in a small town in Maine in the 1950s, where even the Chinese restaurant staff was white, and never met a non-white until I was 14, and that I consequently have more difficulty telling non-whites apart than whites—but how should it be otherwise? The human brain and sensorium are monstrous complicated, and harder to understand than Unified Field Theory. (I just saw on Facebook the claim that only tetrachromats see the world as it “really” is.)
I noticed long ago that when identifying people, one of main things I look at is their nose. Around here (Aus), what with close to half the population fairly recent migrants, we’ve got Irish, Aquiline, Roman, Aboriginal, Greek & all noses.
They can be long and straight, or short and straight, or turned up at the end, frnnkly flat, hooked, broad at the top, middle, or end or etc.
When I visit China, even places like Singapore, I find much less nose variaty.
When you get into tribal areas of Italy or Greece, most people still have the same nose. As one of my friends remarked to me “When I visited my parents village, everybody looked like me”.
I already understood that people could recognise each other, but (apart from that they recognised foreigners like me by our clothing) I’d neve pinned down what kind of things they looked for.
There’s another possibility that I didn’t see mentioned:
Maybe it’s not that I can easily recognize people of my racial group, but that I can easily recognize the people that I grew up with. In other words, if someone is part of a small minority, he will grow up seeing many examples of the majority group, and not so many of his own group. This will give him a great deal of exposure to the variety of the features of that group, and less experience with the features of his own group.
Does this sound like a reasonable possibility?
That’s what I thought was the current thinking – that our brain builds a “standard face” from the faces we see as infants, and then we recognize and remember people by how they differ from that generic face. Do people who grow up in a more diverse environment should have an easier time of recognizing people of all races?
Personally, I’ve realized that hair is crucial to me recognizing somebody. I don’t recognize people if they change their hair color or style. In fact, I spent five years through junior high and high school wondering who the two girls I always saw hanging out together were. Eventually I started dating one of them and found out they were identical twin sisters, but I’d never realized it because one had a shorter haircut.
I am Asian. I had this experience a while ago where, after having lived in the United States for a long time, I returned to Asia, and for some time after my airplane landed, I could not easily distinguish Asian faces apart from each other. It took some time to get used to telling Asians apart from each other again.
So I do think this phenomenon/theory is true.
Try out one of the online face-blindness tests. You might have some degree of this joyous condition.
It’s bad enough for me that if I saw my wife out of context (e.g. showing up in the crowd at a conference far from home), I wouldn’t be able to recognize her. I might say “that woman reminds me of my wife” but that would be it.
And then there was Jack Black in Shallow Hal, speaking of Manatees. Heh…:eek: