Recognition!

January 22nd, 2022| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Yenny Seo is special. She is one of the few who fall into the category of “super-recognizers.”

As a child, this gal often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Gosh, while watching a movie, she could even recognize those extras in it who had also appeared fleetingly in other movies.

Ms. Seo:

It’s always been quite fun for me. Especially as a child. I remember just really enjoying looking at different faces.”

She loved to “thumb” through the vast catalogue of faces registered in her brain to “recognize” and place the random person on the street or in the bus.

Once, while working at a part-time job at a clothing store when she was in college, Seo had cause to show her skill. Staff were shown grainy, hard-to-decipher CCTV footage of a habitual shoplifter; the next time this person entered the shop, Seo instantly recognised the individual, and alerted security.

I still didn’t think it was anything special, because I just had so many instances like that happen.”

A super-recognizer. One of just 1–2% of the population.

Dr. David White, investigator at the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales became interested in the field while studying a rare condition, prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, usually after a brain injury. In the course of his work, he realized there was tremendous variation in facial recognition ability. At the very upper end of the performance scale were these super-recognizers. He suspects genetics plays a role in this: twins have similar abilities; and the number of neurons in the face-recognition areas of the brain are higher in super-recognizers.

Dr. White and his colleagues designed a publicly available online screening tool to try to unearth the world’s best super-recognisers. Yenny Seo, then in her mid-20s, gave it a try and her score was through the roof: in the top 50 of more than 100,000 who done the test. (You can give it a shot here. I did. No, I am not one.)

White invited her to come to Sydney for more testing.

Face masks in the pandemic era have given Ms. Seo a fun challenge. But most of the time she can still recognize a person, even if he/she is wearing a mask.

It’s not that I’m creepy, but my brain is just wired that way.”

Over the past decade, security and law enforcement agencies around the world have begun recruiting people with superior facial recognition capabilities. London’s Metropolitan Police has a special team that examines CCTV footage from crime scenes. Queensland, Australia, police has super-recognizers in its ranks. And a number of private agencies have also sprung up, offering the services of super-recognizers. (Seo, though, has no interest in crime-fighting.)

But there is another Super-Recognizer, God himself, who unlike Ms. Seo and the rest of the 1–2%, also knows his people by name!

But now, thus says the LORD, your Creator, O Jacob,
And He who formed you, O Israel,
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are Mine!”
Isaiah 43:1

And these people of God also bear the Super-Recognizer’s name:

“Everyone who is called by My name,
And whom I have created for My glory,
Whom I have formed, even whom I have made.”
Isaiah 43:7

Why?

“So you are My witnesses,” declares Yahweh,
“And I am God!”
Isaiah 43:12

So that we, in turn, may recognize God and proclaim him to one and all.

SOURCE:
The Guardian