built for the road ahead. >> pelley: for the first time in three decades, the united states has no way of its own to launch astronauts into space. it's the end of one era and the beginning of another, this one not led by nasa, but by private capital with far-out ideas. when critics say, "you can't do this," your answer to them is? >> we've done it. >> stahl: most of us take for

granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. but imagine for a second what life would be like if you couldn't... >> no idea. >> i don't have a clue. >> stahl: ...couldn't recognize yourself in a mirror. >> this is the problem i had been having... >> stahl: faces. >> yeah, faces. >> stahl: that's what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious neurological condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia. does anybody know who that is? it's someone in your family. it's your daughter. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm morley safer. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm byron pitts. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes."

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>> pelley: in the history of space flight, only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the earth: the united states, russia, china, and elon musk. mr. musk is a wealthy internet entrepreneur who has vowed to revolutionize space exploration by bringing down the astronomical costs. and that can't happen fast enough for nasa, which retired

the shuttle last summer and now has to pay its old rival, russia, to fly american astronauts into space. musk is one of the contenders vying for a nasa contract to build america's next manned spacecraft, a contest he believes he has the right stuff to win. when the final shuttle mission ended last july, for the first time in three decades, the united states had no way to launch astronauts into space. it was the end of one era, and the beginning of another. instead of nasa designing the next manned spacecraft, the white house decided that private industry should design, build, and fly it, opening space to commercial development. one of the companies vying for

that contract is spacex. elon musk is the founder and c.e.o. is what we are experiencing at this moment in time the turning point in man's reach for space, going from governments to private companies like yours? >> elon musk: i think we're at the dawn of a new era, and it's... i think it's going to be very exciting. what we're hoping to do with spacex is to push the envelope and provide a reason for people to be excited and inspired to be human. >> pelley: musk is 40 years old, a naturalized american citizen, and reportedly worth nearly $2 billion. he isn't your typical corporate c.e.o. as a teenager, he wrote computer games in his native south africa, before immigrating to the u.s., and to silicon valley, where he was one of the most successful internet entrepreneurs, the co-founder of paypal. >> ladies and gentlemen, mr. elon musk. ( applause )

>> pelley: despite a chorus of skeptics, musk built a car company called tesla that turns out 5,000 high-end all-electric cars a year. another musk company sells solar power systems. but his lifelong passion is space. and when ebay bought paypal in 2002, musk started looking for ways to launch his new fortune into orbit. >> musk: i went to russia to look at buying a refurbished icbm, which is a very trippy experience. it was very bizarre. yeah, when i tell people that, they have to, like, "what?!" ( laughs ) >> pelley: musk made three trips to russia, trying to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile called the dnieper. his plan was bizarre-- put a greenhouse on the rocket, land it on mars, and beam back the pictures. >> musk: it would get people really excited, and that would recharge human space

exploration. that... that was my original idea. >> pelley: you just wanted to get people interested in space again? >> musk: yes. yes. >> pelley: capture the imagination. >> musk: yes. that was... that was the idea. >> pelley: turns out the dnieper was so expensive, his idea never flew, so musk decided that the only way to get an affordable rocket was to build it himself, and he started spacex. >> musk: the odds of me coming into the rocket business not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything... i mean, i would have to be insane if i thought the odds are in my favor. >> pelley: why even begin? >> musk: when something is important enough, you do it, even if the odds are not in your favor. >> pelley: how much of your personal fortune have you poured into this? >> musk: $100 million. >> pelley: and $100 million into something that you did not believe would work at the beginning. >> musk: yes. >> pelley: musk truly believes that low-cost space exploration is essential to the survival of mankind. >> musk: i think it's important that humanity become a multi- planet species. i think most people would agree that a future where we are a space-faring civilization is

inspiring and exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event. that's really why i started spacex. >> pelley: spacex is housed in a sprawling factory near los angeles, where fuselages for boeing 747s used to be built. from its beginning ten years ago, its goal has been revolutionary change in rocket and spacecraft manufacturing. now, tell me what's that big piece right up there? >> musk: that's the second stage of a falcon nine rocket. >> pelley: instead of multiple companies building parts all across the country, spacex builds most of its rockets and spacecraft in-house, based on musk's belief that it's more efficient and lowers costs. 1,400 engineers and skilled technicians work here, building engines, rockets, space capsules, creating mostly from scratch the thousands of components that are the guts of a rocket.

>> musk: so what that means is, raw metal comes in and then we build the engines, the airframe, the electronics. and we integrate all of that together, and that's all done, more or less, under one roof. >> pelley: metal comes in one end of this factory, spaceships come out the other. >> musk: yes. >> pelley: final assembly takes place at the cape canaveral launch pad. >> musk: if the margin is there and we don't have margin to the fourth power, then it's fine. >> pelley: musk has college degrees in business and physics, but spacex is his first venture in aerospace. he bills himself as chief designer and chief technology officer. how did you get the expertise to be the chief technology officer of a rocket ship company? >> musk: well, i do have a physics background. that's helpful as a foundation. and then, i read a lot of books and talked to a lot of... a lot of smart people. >> pelley: you're self-taught? >> musk: yeah. well... well, i... self-taught, yes, meaning i didn't... i don't have an aerospace degree. >> pelley: so, how did you go

about acquiring the knowledge? >> musk: i read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people, and have a great team. >> pelley: his team is a mixture: there are newcomers-- mostly 30-something engineers, some of them straight out of college-- and then there are the skilled technicians and aerospace veterans. former nasa astronaut garrett reisman spent three months aboard the space station and flew on one of the final shuttle missions. he was brought in to help oversee the company's manned space work. you know, i'm curious-- you have so much background in engineering, you could have easily gotten a job at boeing or at lockheed, but you came here. >> garrett reisman: if you had a chance to go back in time and work with howard hughes when he was creating twa, if you had a chance to be there at that moment when it was the dawn of a brand new era, would... wouldn't you want to do that? i mean, that's... that's why i'm here. >> pelley: and that's why most of the engineers we met are here-- building spaceships is the chance of a lifetime.

if you reach the point of having a successful manned flight, what will you have proven? >> we're not doing it to prove anything. ( laughs ) you know, we know it can be done. i think we're just trying to do it a little bit differently, a little bit faster, and to push the... push the fence a little bit farther out. >> and then we can all go... i mean, i want to go into space. i assume most people here do as well. ( laughter ) >> pelley: how many want to ride? ( laughter ) okay. everybody wants to go. >> caroline wants... >> caroline conley: i'm... i'm not so sure. ( laughter ) >> four, three, two, one... >> pelley: four years after starting, spacex rolled out its first rocket, an unmanned booster called the falcon one. >> falcon has cleared the tower. >> pelley: but the first three test flights failed to reach orbit. >> we are hearing from the launch control center that there has been an anomaly on the vehicle. >> pelley: when you had that third failure in a row, did you think, "i need to pack this in"? >> musk: never. >> pelley: why not?

>> musk: i don't ever give up. i mean, i'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. >> pelley: it turned out that the third failure was caused by a two-second glitch in the timing. eight weeks later, musk bet the company on another flight. >> we have lift-off. ( cheers and applause ) >> pelley: and this time around, everything worked. >> perfect. >> musk: if that fourth launch hadn't worked, that would have been it. we would have not had the resources to mount a fifth. >> pelley: you couldn't have gone on at that point? >> musk: yes. death would have been, i think, inevitable because we did not have the resources to mount a fifth launch. >> pelley: this is a tricky business. >> musk: tricky. ( laughs ) yeah, the... with... yeah. i wish it wasn't so hard. >> pelley: in 2010, spacex tested a larger, more powerful nine-engine rocket called the falcon 9, and an unmanned cargo

capsule known as dragon. it was the first privately developed rocket designed to carry cargo and, eventually, astronauts to the space station. >> m-vac ignition confirmed. 3.2 kilometers per second. >> pelley: in its first test flight, the dragon capsule performed flawlessly, orbiting the earth twice before splashdown in the pacific, the first time a private company had launched and recovered its own spacecraft. and this is a historic spacecraft. >> musk: it is, yeah. >> pelley: we came across the dragon capsule while musk was showing us around. you know what i noticed about your cargo ship is that it has windows. >> musk: the windows are there in case there's an astronaut on board who wants to look up. >> pelley: but people don't put windows in cargo ships. >> musk: that's right. exactly. ( laughs ) >> pelley: so what that tells me is that this was never intended to be only a cargo ship. >> musk: no, it... no, the dragon was always designed to carry astronauts.

>> pelley: musk says that a manned version of the dragon capsule will be safer than the space shuttle, and a lot cheaper. engineers are already designing escape rockets, life support equipment, and computer guidance systems. they were studying seating for seven when we were there. do you believe that your rocket will be the next american rocket to take an astronaut into space? >> musk: i believe that is the most likely outcome, yes. >> pelley: that sort of confidence has not exactly endeared him to the space establishment, or to his competitors. there are people who've been in the rocketry business for decades who say about you that you don't know what you don't know. >> musk: well, if... i suppose that's true of anyone. how can anyone know what they don't know? ( laughter ) >> pelley: but when critics say, "you can't do this," your answer to them is? >> musk: we've done it. >> pelley: he's done it, in partnership with nasa, which has given spacex technical advice and a contract worth up to $1.6

billion, mostly for 12 cargo flights to the space station. but spacex's lack of experience bothers some nasa legends like apollo astronauts neil armstrong and gene cernan. they've testified to congress that the obama administration's drive to commercialize space could compromise safety and eventually cost the taxpayers. >> gene cernan: now is the time to overrule this administration's pledge to mediocrity. >> pelley: you know, there are american heroes who don't like this idea-- neil armstrong... >> musk: yeah. >> pelley: ...gene cernan have both testified against commercial space flight and the way that you're developing it, and i wonder what you think of that. >> musk: i was very sad to see that, because those guys are... yeah, you know, those guys are heroes of mine, so it's really tough. you know, i... i wish they would come and visit and see the... see the hard work that we're doing here.

and... and i think that would change their mind. >> pelley: they inspired you to do this, didn't they? >> musk: yes. >> pelley: and to see them casting stones in your direction? >> musk: difficult. >> pelley: did you expect them to cheer you on? >> musk: certainly hoping they would. >> pelley: what are you trying to prove to them? >> musk: what i'm trying to do is to make a significant difference in... in space flight, and... and help make space flight accessible to... to almost anyone. and i... i would hope for as much support in that direction as we... as we can receive. >> pelley: president obama made his support clear when he visited spacex's launch site just before falcon 9's first test flight. as this animation shows, elon musk's next flight will be far more ambitious, carrying cargo all the way to the space station. it was scheduled to fly in february, but it's taken longer

than expected to perfect the flight software. the flight will be a complicated rendezvous with a space station that is moving 17,000 miles per hour 240 miles above the earth. >> okay, so it looks like our burn performance is nominal. >> pelley: in the spacex mission control, flight simulations are continuing. and if all goes well, spacex will begin routine space station cargo deliveries later this year. but the big prize is winning the nasa contract to build america's next manned spacecraft. and elon musk is facing stiff competition. >> musk: i'm probably not... not the guy that most people would bet on. usually... >> pelley: who wins? >> musk: ...it's like a little kid fighting a bunch of sumo wrestlers. ( laughs ) usually, the sumo wrestlers win. we're a little scrappy company. every now and again, the little scrappy company wins. and i... i think this'll be one of those times.

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>> stahl: most of us take for granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. it's so automatic, it almost sounds silly to even say it. friends can put on a hat, cut their hair, and still, we know them by their face. we can do this for thousands upon thousands of faces without ever giving it a moment's thought. but imagine for a second what life would be like if you couldn't-- if your wife or husband looked like a stranger, you couldn't tell your kids apart, couldn't recognize yourself in a mirror.

well, that's what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, that can make it nearly impossible to recognize or identify faces. if you've never heard of face blindness, you're not alone-- chances are, your doctor hasn't either. it's been unknown to most of the medical world until very recently. hearing about it can feel a little like entering the twilight zone. but for people who are face blind, the condition is very real. jacob hodes is one of them. he's 31 years old, he has a college degree, has had great jobs, and he seems perfectly normal. just don't ask him to identify any faces... we're going to put up the first one. ...even very famous ones. >> jacob hodes: no idea. we showed jacob faces without hair, a pure test of facial

recognition. >> hodes: no. nope. i can't say if i've ever seen that person. >> stahl: he's seen jimmy carter plenty of times. and knows michael jordan, too. >> hodes: oh, lord. >> stahl: he just can't recognize their faces. >> hodes: now, that's just impossible. >> stahl: can you describe my face? you're staring right at it. >> hodes: high cheekbones, light eyes. >> stahl: clearly, jacob could see my face, but he says if we happened to run into each other in a few days, he wouldn't know me from any other woman with short blonde hair. >> brad duchaine: they meet somebody, they have a good time with them, they have a nice relationship. then, a week later, they walk past them. >> stahl: brad duchaine is a professor at dartmouth college who has been studying face blindness for nearly 15 years. he says the hardest thing to understand is how people can see a familiar face but not recognize it. so he created a demonstration to give me a little taste-- faces

turned upside down. >> duchaine: so here are some famous faces. you're going to be tempted to twist your head, but don't do it. >> stahl: okay. >> duchaine: you know, can you... >> stahl: boy, that is hard. >> duchaine: ...can you identify any of these people? >> stahl: i was completely at a loss. you think i'd know all of these people? >> duchaine: you've seen them all a lot. >> stahl: i don't know any of these people. i really don't. >> duchaine: you want to see them upright? >> stahl: sure. it was astonishing. with just that click, they became recognizable people before my eyes. ( laughter ) i know john travolta. i know morley. and there was denzel washington, jennifer aniston, sandra bullock. but the one that really got me was the young woman on the lower right-- my daughter. i didn't know my own daughter? >> duchaine: yeah. >> stahl: i didn't know my own daughter. wow. so is this... am i getting a feeling for what people with face blindness have? >> duchaine: this is... when you look at that, there's clearly...

there's a face there. >> stahl: oh, yeah. >> duchaine: there are parts. there are eyes. there's mouth. but you just can't put it together. >> stahl: wow. that's stunning. i feel terrible for them now. >> duchaine: yeah. it's really difficult. >> stahl: and largely unknown. prosopagnosia only got its name in the 1940s, when a couple of soldiers came back from world war ii with head injuries and couldn't recognize their wife or parents. and it took another 50 years for science to discover that people could be born face blind, like jacob hodes, and jo livingston, a retired teacher; ben dubrovsky, a software products designer; and meg novotny, a doctor. if i were your patient, we... you'd spent a long time with me discussing a problem. i come back the next time. >> dr. meg novotny: oh, no, no, no. you walk out to the window at the front and start checking out, and i walk out of the room and i don't know who you are. >> stahl: come on. she relies on patient charts, she told us. but there aren't any of those in

ben's office, where lunch in the cafeteria can be tricky. >> ben dubrovsky: i was sitting down at lunch, having a discussion with someone about one of my projects, and the guy across the table gets up from lunch and says, "god, that's really interesting. when you have that meeting, can you invite me? thanks. see you." who is it? i don't know. >> stahl: who is it? >> dubrovsky: i have no idea. >> stahl: is it a memory issue? >> hodes: not only. >> jo livingston: the memory is never created. >> stahl: the face doesn't get put... >> livingston: it doesn't get filed. >> stahl: so they have to rely on other strategies to identify people-- hair, body shape, the way people walk, their voice, even style of dress. but jacob told us that it can all fall apart when someone changes their hair, like a colleague named sylvia who he couldn't find one day until she started putting her hair into her usual ponytail. >> hodes: and she, like, put it into the ponytail, and once it was in place, that was sylvia. it clicked. then, she took her hair back out of that ponytail. >> stahl: right then and there?

>> hodes: yep. she just put it in and then took it out and... >> stahl: so she went from sylvia, not sylvia, sylvia, not sylvia? >> hodes: she disappeared. >> stahl: come on. >> hodes: yeah. >> stahl: to him, it was as though her face had changed into someone else's before his eyes. >> hodes: so now, i'm confronted with this situation that... that got weird. because i knew this person was sylvia, but it didn't feel like sylvia. >> stahl: faces mean so much to us-- identity, beauty, character, a place to hang all our memories about a person. faces have captivated artists forever, so it may surprise you to learn that the man who painted these faces, renowned portraitist chuck close, is also face blind, and severely so. let's say you went out to have dinner with somebody, and then you saw her the next day. >> chuck close: wouldn't remember her. >> stahl: and yet, he has spent his career, even after a collapsed spinal artery left him mostly paralyzed, painting, well... faces. chuck close has face blindness and he paints faces. >> close: the reason i think i

was driven to it was to... to take images of people that matter to me, and commit them to memory in the best way i can, which is to slow the whole process down, break it down into lots of little memorable pieces. >> stahl: which is exactly how he creates these works. he can't make sense of a whole face, so he works from a photograph with a grid on it, and translates what he sees, square by square, onto his canvas. well, guess what we've done? >> close: i don't know. >> stahl: we put together a quiz for you. we brought some of our famous faces along to show him. >> close: from the chin, i think it's, um, leno. >> stahl: and were surprised that he did pretty darn well. >> close: well, from the lips, i think it's tiger woods. >> stahl: yeah, well, you're pretty good. but, of course, not perfect. >> close: i don't have a clue. >> stahl: that's tom cruise. >> close: right now, my guts are tied in knots because this very

activity is the thing that makes me most nervous. "oh, now, i have to figure out who this person is." >> stahl: because he isn't recognizing these faces the way most of us do. every face is a puzzle he has to solve. >> close: what i'm thinking? you don't see too many people with just a mustache anymore, so that means it's probably somebody who's not alive. so, if it's an african american of a certain age with a mustache, it... it might be martin luther king. >> stahl: you're amazing. you deduce, deduce, deduce. you're like sherlock holmes here. >> close: yeah, this is how i get through life. >> stahl: of course, he knew we were showing him famous faces. with our group, we threw in a trick one, a photo of jo's daughter. does anybody know who that is? jo? work on it, because it's somebody that jo knows.

>> livingston: well, it may be, but nothing's coming. >> stahl: it's someone in your family. but still, she didn't get it. >> stahl: it's your daughter. now, can you see it? is it clear now? >> livingston: it is believable now. >> stahl: we were baffled that a condition so extreme, it could keep people from recognizing their own children, could have been almost completely unknown until very recently. we asked dr. oliver sacks, the famous chronicler of fascinating and bizarre neurological conditions, who wrote about face blindness in his latest book, "the mind's eye." >> dr. oliver sacks: it is with our faces that we face the world. >> stahl: how do you explain that the medical world did not identify this problem? >> sacks: it is not usually a complaint of people. people do not bring it up. many people who are color blind do not know of it until they take an army medical.

one sort of assumes that other people are the way one is. >> dubrovsky: it never, ever, ever in my life occurred to me that people would look at a face and just get it like that. >> livingston: i believed that i was not good with people. but i had no idea of the reason. i just thought i was stupid. >> stahl: jo only learned there was such a thing as face blindness when she stumbled across this article, and came in to be tested in duchaine's lab. a few hours after her second visit, in a bizarre coincidence, she and duchaine ended up attending the same event. >> duchaine: i kept placing my face in a position where she could see it. >> livingston: i realized that one of the group was staring at me in a way that people don't normally. >> duchaine: and so finally, at one point, i said, "do you know who i am?" >> livingston: ah. >> duchaine: and she put it all together. >> stahl: duchaine had seen face blindness in action; jo had seen the missed connections of her life. >> livingston: if that had been anybody else, they would have been presumably furious, would

not have spoken to me, and would have probably never have spoken to me again. but i would never have known they were there. >> stahl: yeah. >> livingston: it made me realize, "how many times have i done this?" >> stahl: right. "how many friends have you offended? how many people aren't talking to you and you don't know why?" >> livingston: and we'll never know. >> sacks: people do think you may be snubbing them or... or stupid, or mad, or inattentive. that's why it's so important to recognize what one has, and to... and to admit it. >> stahl: which is exactly what sacks himself has just done-- written about the fact that he, too, is face blind. >> sacks: i have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as i can remember. my problem extends not only to my nearest and dearest, but also to myself. i've sometimes had the experience of apologizing to someone, and realizing it's a mirror. >> stahl: no. >> sacks: i have, indeed. >> stahl: no. because you didn't know it was

you? >> sacks: i... i could see that it was a large, clumsy man with a beard. now, i've now found a way of dealing with this. i have one special feature. i have rather large ears. ( laughs ) if the large, clumsy man with a beard has extra large ears, it's probably me. >> stahl: i shouldn't be smiling, but it's funny. >> sacks: well... well, it is f... i... i mean, these things are both comic and serious. >> stahl: and surprisingly common. recent studies show as many as one in 50 people may be face blind. and the search is on for clues inside their brains. we'll show you what the research is finding, plus, would you believe, super-recognizers... >> i would say mike wallace. >> stahl: that is mike wallace. ...who never forget a face... >> i don't even know how to get rid of people. >> i don't even know how to get rid of people. >> stahl: ...when we come back. aha moment. the first call that i had on crisis line was a person who was suicidal. we talked for about four hours, and i learned this

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causes lifelong face blindness. it was discovered so recently, scientists are just beginning to unravel its secrets. and some of the clues are coming from people who once had normal face recognition, but lost it after suffering damage to part of the brain. and in an interesting twist, those people are also offering insight into the way the rest of us recognize faces. imagine waking up after a trauma and not being able to recognize the people closest to you. that's what happened to colleen castaldo. up until the fall of 2009, did you have any trouble recognizing faces at all? >> colleen castaldo: no, not at all. >> stahl: like everybody else? >> castaldo: like everybody else, yeah. >> stahl: that all changed late one night when colleen had a

seizure and was rushed to the hospital. her doctors found a brain tumor, and did surgery to remove it, but as she recovered, she started noticing that something wasn't right. >> castaldo: the nurses-- i thought that i was meeting them each for the first time. and then, i would, you know, listen to them and think, "i don't know, they... they were acting like they knew me already." >> stahl: oh, disorienting. she figured it was the medication, until her close friend doreen came to visit wearing white, and colleen assumed she was part of the medical staff. >> castaldo: i looked at her, i smiled, and i turned back to my husband and started to talk to him, and he stood up and said, "doreen." and i looked and thought, "doreen"? and then, it hit me. i knew right then and there, this is the problem i had been having, that i... >> stahl: faces. >> castaldo: yeah, faces. >> stahl: now, even faces she knew well before... >> castaldo: no. >> stahl: okay, well, that's george clooney. >> castaldo: oh, wow. no, i wouldn't know that. >> stahl: ...are a mystery to her.

>> castaldo: no, i don't know who that is. who is it? >> stahl: the president. brad duchaine showed me an mri scan of colleen's brain. is that a hole in her brain? >> duchaine: that's right. it's in the right temporal lobe. >> stahl: so back here. >> duchaine: that's right. >> stahl: and the location of that hole where the tumor had been was a clue-- if removing that area caused the loss of face recognition, could that be where all our brains process faces? it turns out that neuroscientists have been trying to figure out how it is that our brains recognize faces for decades. >> nancy kanwisher: face recognition is a very difficult problem, because all faces are basically the same. >> stahl: m.i.t. neuroscientist nancy kanwisher. >> kanwisher: there are these two roundish things here. there's this thing there. there's this thing there. they're all the same.

and so discriminating one face from another is a very computationally difficult thing, because it's those subtle differences in the same basic structure that distinguish one thing from another. >> stahl: and it is exactly those subtle differences face blind people like jo livingston miss. >> livingston: i could describe anything that i can put into words-- eye color, general overall shape, whether your ears stick out. but those things would bring it down perhaps from the population of the world to a few million. >> stahl: so, she could say this person has dark eyes, high cheekbones, an oval face, which would allow jo to distinguish her from this person. but this face and this face? impossible. >> livingston: i can say what i can see. but i cannot say the micro- measurements that are what tell a normal person that it's you and not somebody of the same specification.

>> stahl: but how is it that the rest of us can perceive these two people as distinct individuals, despite the similarities? an important clue comes from what we can't distinguish-- as we saw earlier, faces upside down, like these two duchaine showed me, which looked very similar. >> duchaine: maybe you don't even see that there's any difference. >> stahl: i see something different in the lower lip. eyes are a little different. >> duchaine: but then, if i show them to you upright... so, here's the one that you saw on the left there. looked perfectly normal. and then... >> stahl: oh. >> duchaine: here's the one you saw on the right, you saw upside-down. >> stahl: oh, my goodness. the eyes and mouth in the photo on the right had been turned upside-down. >> duchaine: and now, the face looks really grotesque. >> stahl: wow. >> duchaine: but... >> stahl: but upside-down... >> duchaine: upside-down, it's really hard to see that. >> kanwisher: if you look at a face upside-down, you're very bad at recognizing it. if you look at a word or an object or a scene, you can recognize it fine upside-down. >> stahl: so what did that tell you? >> kanwisher: it tells you that there's something very special about face recognition. it works in a very different way from recognition of everything else. >> stahl: and that got kanwisher wondering if there might be a part of the brain responsible just for seeing faces. she started putting people with normal face recognition into m.r.i. scanners and watching

what happens in their brains as they looked at different images. this is what she's seeing? >> kanwisher: yeah, this is what she's seeing. >> stahl: she's seeing faces. >> kanwisher: exactly. and now, she's seeing objects, because we want to know not just what parts of the brain are active when you see faces, but what parts are more active when you see faces than when you see objects. >> stahl: kanwisher discovered that there was indeed a place in the brain that becomes very active when we look at faces. >> kanwisher: in every subject, boom, there was this nice, big response there. it was very exciting. >> stahl: and it was right in the same area where colleen's tumor had been. it's called the fusiform face area. so could that be what's missing in people with lifelong face blindness, like jacob hodes? kanwisher put him in the scanner to find out. >> kanwisher: i really did not expect to see a fusiform face area. >> stahl: so you thought there'd be nothing there-- like as if instead of having a bullet go through it, he was just born without it. >> kanwisher: that's right. that's right. >> stahl: and? >> kanwisher: and we looked at the data and his face area was beautiful. it's textbook. >> stahl: she scanned jo, ben,

and meg, as well, and they had fusiform face areas, too. so what does that say to you? >> kanwisher: it tells us that the problem is not that this thing doesn't exist. there it is. but see, that's the fun of science. it's fun to be told you're just completely and totally wrong, because now you have to go back and, you know, think anew. >> stahl: and one thing she and other researchers are thinking about is a phenomenon as mystifying as face blindness-- its polar opposite, super- recognizers like jennifer jarett, who say they recognize almost every face they have ever seen. waiters? >> jennifer jarett: yes. >> stahl: salespeople? >> jarett: yes, yes. >> stahl: oh, like, of course. >> jarett: yes, absolutely. yes. i'll be walking down the street and i'll see someone, and i'll think, "oh, retail." and then i'll remember, "oh okay, that person works at... as whatever store, and that's where i... or they used to work at that store ten years ago." and then, i remember. >> stahl: ten years ago? >> jarett: yes, yes. >> stahl: so, they're... it doesn't matter how far back you

saw these people? >> jarett: yes, yes. >> stahl: so, as long as you look at a person and take notice, they're in there. >> jarett: i... i don't even know how to get rid of people. >> stahl: only a handful of super-recognizers have been discovered so far, and duchaine and his colleagues had to come up with a whole new way to test them. >> duchaine: so here are three faces here which you're familiar with. >> stahl: i am? it's called the "before they were famous test," because super-recognizers can also recognize faces as they change through time. >> duchaine: does that help at all? >> stahl: you sure i know that person? >> duchaine: that's dick cheney. >> stahl: oh, my god. that's dick cheney? he told me the top right was richard gere, and the bottom, nancy pelosi. those three people have changed dramatically. ( laughter ) he even gave me a hint with this one-- he's now an actor. and i'm supposed to know this actor? clearly, i am not a super- recognizer. >> duchaine: that's george

clooney. >> stahl: man. and these super-recognizers just know this? >> duchaine: the supers are really good at recognizing these faces. >> jarett: george clooney. >> stahl: how could you tell that was george clooney? >> jarett: it just looked like george clooney to me. oh, prince charles. oh, madonna. michael jordan. oh, that's kato kaelin. >> stahl: the o.j. simpson trial. wow, you are good. but we thought we had finally stumped her with this one. she said she only had a guess. >> jarett: if i were to guess, i would say mike wallace. >> stahl: that is mike wallace. she recognized mike wallace as a six-year-old. i don't even understand how you do that. i can't fathom it. >> jarett: as people age, i guess the aging process somehow, in my brain, just seems very sort of superficial. and, you know, as if... if someone gets a haircut, you... you an still recognize them. it's still the same face to me.

it's just the adult version. >> stahl: so why is 60 years like a haircut to her, while face-blind people can't recognize someone they just saw? a team of scientists at harvard has begun scanning the brains of super-recognizers, too, to see if they might yield any clues. the science of facial recognition is in its infancy. but new discoveries can't come fast enough for one last person we'd like you to meet-- 13-year- old tim mcdonough from boston, who is severely face blind. so, can you describe what it feels like when someone comes up? you know you're supposed to know who they are... >> tim mcdonough: i usually just say, you know, "hi, nice to see you." >> stahl: so, you... you sometimes pretend. >> mcdonough: yeah. >> stahl: you fake it. >> mcdonough: i fake it, yeah. >> so, you think it's not your mom? >> mcdonough: yeah. >> mcdonough: okay, so that actually was your mom. >> stahl: tim is working with the harvard team to see if they can help him learn to recognize his mother's face. >> now, is this one your mom or

not? we could start at the top. we could do eyebrows, eyes, nose, we could even use the cheeks there. >> stahl: it's part of a pilot program to see if face blindness might someday be treatable. >> mcdonough: this one's a little bit harder. >> stahl: so far, it's not. >> mcdonough: i don't know. i just hope that nobody tries to talk to me because, if they do, they... >> stahl: they want to talk about something you've done with them or something. >> mcdonough: yeah, and i don't know who they are. >> stahl: so it must be really hard to make friends. >> mcdonough: it is, yeah. takes me a while to make friends. >> stahl: it turns out making friends can be tricky at both ends of the face recognition spectrum. super-recognizers can seem like stalkers. >> jarett: i would see someone, you know, weeks or months later at a party and people would say, "oh, do you know each other?" and i'd say, "yes." and the other person would say, "no." and i'd say, "no, don't you remember the first week of

classes, you were walking to english class with someone..." ( laughs ) and people would look at me really strangey and sort of uncomfortably, i think, a lot. >> stahl: jennifer says she's now learned to take cues from others, ironically, just as face blind people do. >> hodes: i'll play this eye contact game where i'll wait. i'm not going to really look at you, but i'll wait to see if you look at me. and then, "oh, you look at me. oh, look. oh, hi." >> stahl: so, you're always waiting for a cue from them. >> hodes: yeah. so i'll hang back a little bit, which i don't want to do. >> stahl: in any social situation, are you always a little anxious? >> sacks: i'm more than a little anxious. and i... i tend to keep my mouth closed before i make some awful blunder. of course, another tactic or strategy is to smile at everybody. >> stahl: that's what chuck close told us he does. >> close: you have to be really charming. if you are going to insult them by not remembering them, you just have to be extremely charming so that people don't

hold this stuff against you. >> stahl: do you feel now that you're missing out on something? >> dubrovsky: oh, yeah. >> novotny: yeah. >> dubrovsky: definitely, i notice a loss. i understand someone by an abstraction. i put together a set of information that, to me, means "mother" or means "lesley." >> stahl: but it's not a visualization of a face. >> dubrovsky: and the question... the thing that i wonder next, you know, is how does it affect even things like love? >> stahl: how does it? >> dubrovsky: when people talk about love they say, "i carry the person with me. i carry their image with me." i don't carry their image. does that mean i experience it differently? and how would i ever know? i don't know. >> hodes: there's a long tail of stuff that happens that you're missing, connections you're not making. >> stahl: still? >> hodes: oh, yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah. >> novotny: at least now we understand why. >> hodes: yeah, right. >> novotny: and it's therapeutic, but it doesn't fix >> go to 60minutesovertime.com

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