How to be recognised

“Where do I know you from?”....  

Recognition is a funny old thing...  There is a growing body of knowledge about how the brain recognises human faces.  Much of this comes from studying the small proportion of people who suffer from face blindness - the inability to recognise faces (or even, at times, to recognise something as a face).

Facial recognition happens in the right temporal lobe of the brain, in an area known as the "fusiform face area”.  Interestingly, the majority of our pattern recognition - where we make sense of the visual clues that our eyes receive - occurs in the left side of the brain.  

From birth, we are hard-wired to recognise and respond to faces.  Babies have been shown to recognise their own mother’s face in the 12-36 hours of life, and show a preference for looking at faces rather than other stimuli as soon as they are born.  (They even prefer looking at faces with open rather than closed eyes, and at happy rather than scared faces.)

Other learning about facial recognition comes from our attempts to develop computer software that is able to reliably recognise individual faces; like the scary stuff that you may have seen imagined on TV series like Spooks.  How do you teach a computer the rules?  Could you describe someone so accurately that another person would be able to pick them out in the street?  Try it....!

Recently, I have become increasingly aware that people often think that they recognise me.  I currently live in a small city, and am involved in lots of things, so its possible that a lot of people see me out-and-about...  But this is a phenomenon that I’ve encountered for most of my life.  And it happens everywhere I go.  “Don’t I know you?”, “I swear we’ve met”.  

In the past I would worry about my memory.  Perhaps I have met them, and I’ve forgotten.  But I now know that whilst my recollection of names is slow, my facial recognition skills are very good. And so I’ve learned to respond with a slightly embarrassed reply - “Lot’s of people say that.  I seem to just have one of those faces...”

And indeed, a quick google suggests that there are people to whom this happens a lot.  And others who rarely or never experience it.  So what would one of those faces be like?  

I don’t think there is anything physically remarkable about my face (apart from in the eyes of loving ones of course).  Indeed, when I look at inanimate pictures of me, I sometimes struggle to see what I think of as the essence of myself.  So I think this must be about something other than what I look like.

So what else might be going on?  

Recognition has a number of meanings for us, including acknowledgement, acceptance, appreciation, consciousness, perception, realisation, identifying and noticing.  In its literal sense, re-cognition means “again, (the act or process of) knowing”.

And so it carries a sense of coming back to a knowledge that we’ve had before; of remembering or spotting something, as if we’ve glanced at a familiar image.  And sometimes that familiar or admired thing might be as if we'd glimpsed in a mirror and seen a reflection of ourselves.

Although he was speaking sardonically, the American editorialist Ambrose Bierce was spot on when he described admiration as “our (polite) recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves”.

So perhaps we are most likely to see something familiar, to get a sense of recognition, when someone triggers a resonance; or speaks to something in ourselves.  And my guess is that, the more we show up, the more of ourselves that we bring into interactions both with strangers and with intimates, the more opportunity we will offer for this connection and recognition.  It’s almost like a deja vu feeling.  A situation or conversation triggers some sort of memory - a thought, a sense of connection - and our brain tells us that must be because we’ve seen it, or been there, before.

And like many thoughts and ideas, whether or not my reading of this situation is literally true, it has a kernel of truth for me so long as it makes some kind of sense; so long as it might be useful; so long as it supports me in being more of who I want to be.

And perhaps that’s enough.

Do tell me about your experience of recognising and being recognised, and whether there is a kernel of truth here for you too.