>> rose: welcome to our program, tonig a special ededition. brain series year two in our third episode we focus on agnosias, they are selective deficiencies in consciousness or cognition. all right? >> i was driven to make portraits. i was tryi to understand the faces and commit them to memory of people that i know and love. and for me it has to be flattened out. once it's flattened out, i can commit it to memory in a way that i can't if i'm looking at you. if y move your head a half an inch it's a whole new head i haven't seen before. so i made my life which is cay ot oik, which is confusing and which i don't remember things, i can't mem orize, and yet-- memorize, and yet i found a waythat i add positively every day to what i did. and i don't have to reinvent

the wheel. today i'll d what i did yesterday. and tomorrow i am gointo do wt i do today. and if i just stay there long enough, i will eventually have a painting. >> rose: episode 3 of the charlie rose brain series two underwritten by the simon foundation coming up. >> the charlie rose brain series is about the most exciting scientific journey of our time. understanding the brain. the series is made possible by a grant from the simon foundation. their mission is to advance the frontiers of research in the basic sciences and mathematics. >> funding for charlie rose was provided by the following:

. >> rose: additional fuing provided by these funders. and by bloomberg, a provider of-- information services worldwide captioning sponsored by rose communicaons from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: tonight we continue our exploration of the brain and the mysteries of consciousness. for this program we consider agnosia, a neurological

condition which results in an inability to recognize people, objects, sounds, shapes or smells. while the defect is in the brain rather than the specific dence agnosic patients still perceive the world differently. it affectance estimated 2.5 percent of the population with. this disorder patients cannot consciously recognize facethis means it they may not identify their own family or even themselves when looking into a mirror. tonight the artist chuck close speaks to this he has face blindness and yet creates large scale portraits, paintings. also joining me a remarkable group of scientist, john brust of colombia surgeons. masud husain at the iversity of college london and senior fellow of the welcome trust, richard track o back. and oncegain, my cohoss dr. eric kandel, he is a nobel laureate, professor at colombia university and howard hugheses medical investigator. we begin our conversation

asking this question, so what's our subject tonight. >> last time we considered consciousness. today we are going to consider selective defects in consciousness. these are called agnosias. people with visual agnosia, for example, can see an object quite well, but can't name it. they don't understand what it is used for. and the whole idea of agnosia is a fascinating history. amazingly enough, the term was coined by sigmund freud. we think of sigmund freud as the founde of pshoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams, sort of the founding text of that. that was 1900. but for about 15 years before that he was a great neuroan at mist and fine clinical neurologist and in 1891 he krot a classic text on aphasia, disorders of

langge. and in it he coined the terming athosia. by that he meant that people in a variety of spheres have difficulty knowing exactly what the object is. it's a deficiency in knowledge. so for example, a person with visual agnosia might look at this cup, see that it is ite, see that it's round, see that it sits on something fl but would not realize this was a cup and you use it for drinking. this amazing insight that you can have a selective defect in knowledge agnosia, has stayed with us to the present time. moreover, it would have pleased freud perhaps even more than relizing that this terminology persisted was that although we don't know the mechanism for most types of agnosia, one kind of model that is being actively entertained right now is one that we considered last time can. i have the next image please.

last time we pointed out that perception really occurs in two phases. and unconscious perception and the conscious perception. in the unconscious perception what you do is you light up the back of the brain as indicated here. so if you look at an object the visual area, the primary visual area, maybe some of the surrounding areas light up. but are you really not consciously aware of it. when you become consciously aware the information propagates, it's broadcast to the front of the brain. and it is thought that for certain kinds of agnosias the difficulty is moving the information from its initial reception to its further propagion, to the anterior parts of the brain. now there are clearly many different forms of agnosia. and john is going to outline ot difrent forms, the four major types and is going to particularly focus on people who have difficulty perceiving the defect of the illness, being unaware of

the symptoms that they have even though they are obvious to everyone around. >> masud specializes in neglect, and will describe the many forms of that. and there are some fascinating aspects of that. these are, for example, cases in which something is obviously in front of you but for a variety of reasons you don't notice it. there's a fascinating ample of hemineglect in which you have a lesion on the brain in which you don't see the opposite side of the world. so when you draw something you really only draw half the imag you don't draw the other image. so we'll hear about the various kinds defects that you seeith these agnosias. richard has pioneered the use functional magnetic resonance centre imang, has done a lot of very important work with it and that has been very important foallowing us to understand perception of faces. may i have the next image please.

one ofhe really interesting agnosias and one we'll hear about from chuck close is blindness face. called prosagnosia. this is people can recognize all kinds of objects but they have difficulty recognizing a face. and this is discovered in around 1947 by johan-- who had several patients. one patient was a young guy who was shot in the head, almost died, survived, everything came back, all of his visual senses, his memory, everything was-- but he had difficult with one thing, conot recognize faces. you couldn't recognize his family, couldn't recognize friends. he couldn't recognize his own image when he looked in e mirror. he realized that there are different forms of agnosias, of they vary somewhat from each other. he saw two other patients

with the same thing with. time after he came along one realized there are two forms. a congenital form and the quiet-- acquired form. he studied the acquired form. the congenital form which is what chuck close suffers om i actuallquite common. so two and a half percent of the people have a significant form of prosagnosia. mild forms may be 10% of the population. we also know that it occurs itn the temp rohral cortex, we have very good evidence forbes and if you examine different people with prose agnosia you realize that they really can different from one another in a significant way, suggesting that there isn't simply a single sight for face recognitiobut a number of processing steps by can be selectively effective. may i have the next image please. march liviton and her colleagues did a set of sperms to test this notion. they looked in the temp roll cortex and showed monday

questions and later confirmed this in people, images of faces and they lit up not one area, but five different face patches. more over in the monkey they could record from them electrically and stimulate one and activate the others realizing this is an interconnected s nm fro nldow rm individu face patches, and ey couldhow that when you showed a monkey, an image of a monkey or image of a human the cells in that patch would fire like mad. they could now use a cartoon of that fi cell was fire likead. but then they discovered this follows a gestaltous principles. if you splify the face athe thep responding. so if you ve an outline of the face and just two eyes and just a mouth, the cells don't respond. so this is the hole is more than theum of the parts. you have see the whole face or at leasa significant part of it in der to get the cells to respond. and they were able to show

that several interesting features that explain our visual perception of faces you can see in these face tches. we respond dramatically to cartoons, to exaggeration of faces. these cells go wild if you exaggerate a face, if you spread the eye as part or bring the eyes together again. and of course, your and my favouriting pro as thosic is right here this man is absolutely reparkable. not only is he face blind, but he is a spectacular portrait artist so you can imagine making this your profession when you have a difficult time perceiving it. and chuck will tell us how he does this despite the fact that he has a significant handic. but i think in a larger sense and one of the reasons you and i admire m so much is he shows, really, the depth of human intelligence, creativity and character it tells you, number one, there's not single kind of intelligence. they are multipl intelligences. there is not a single kind of creativity, you can be creative in a number of

ways. and and he has implied this when we talked about it in another context that being handicapped in some areas may allow the plasticity of the brain to emerge and to give you new capabilities that you might otherwise not have. so we'll have a chance to have chuck tell us about his gifts so we're in for a trefx session. >> rose: let me gin with john brust. >> as we just heard agnosia is a failure to recognize what one touches or sees or hears. despite adequate tactile sensation, vision or hearing. and tactile is, as eric just said, might produc somebody who blindfolded is handed a key and can describe its shape and its size and its properties but has no idea what it is. he open os his eyes and then right away he recognizes what it is. visual agnosia might be the other way around.

theris a case report from long ago in which a woman did not recognize visually what a cigar was, it was put in her mouth and she recognized what it was. there are a variety of auditory agnosias. re word deafness effects people who have normal speech and they can read. but they can't understand anything that's said to them. agnosia for environmental sounds effects people who cannot recognize a dog barking, or an alarm clock ringing, or sneezing, or laughing. there are a variety of music agnosias, so-called amusias. and the best recognized there is so-called tone deafness. these are people who not only cannot carry a tune.

>> that's me. >> yeah, but they don't recognize if you give a tune and alter it or make it dison at, they don't recognize anything's wrong. they night, if it's severe, be able to tell which of two pitches is higher than the other. i think one of the most fascinating agnosias though is the long name agnos agnosia which refers to the ability to recognize that anytng was near logically wrong-- near logically wrong and a spectular form of this is agnosia for one side of your body being paralyzed. somebody with a stroke might have complete paralysis of the left arm and leg. >> rose: and not know. >> and when it's pointed out, refuses toecognize it. >> some patits actually move the arm out of the bed thinking it doesn't belong to them. >> write, yeah. >> it's amazing. >> you say raise your right arm it goes up, you is a say

raise the left arm nothing happens. you say why dn't you raise the left arm. i did. and you say raise the left arm and the right goes up. and you say why didn't you raise your left arm and he says well i've got ar delight nis my shoulder. they mak excuses. they try to get out of it. and it's important to recognize, this is not psychological denial. >> rose: right. >> this is not the woman with the breast lump who doesn't go to the doctor. they do not recognize it. >> what is also interesting about this, and freud made this point that i should have emphasized is the defense apparatus for perception is normal. so this is a higher order defect in conscious knowledge, of what it. >> there's agnosia for blindness. it's called anton syndrome. d these patients, the blindness is usually from a problem in the back of the brain, not the eyes but they think they can see. andhey confabulate. and when you say say let's see you walk and they plow not table. you say if you can see why

did you walk not table. they say if you hadn't turn the lightsut on me i wouldn't have. >> rose: sho what has gone on here in terms of the newero science there say break from the pathway from a legs or stroke or something. >> one doesn't quite know whathe mechanism is in many of these case. one knows that peripheral sensory apparatus is normal. there is something that is defective higher on. anone hypothesis that is become entertained for the simpler cases is that the movement in the brain from the early stage of perception, the broadcasting function to the conscious one is disturbed. >> rose: go ahead. >> well, i want to finish with agnos agnosia for aphasia an i have a video that will illustrate this. aphasia is a language disturbance. and it may effect the ability to produce speech

properly or the ability to comprehend speech properly. and th tape is of a woman who had both. are you going to think she's speaking a foreign language and she does have an accent but she is speaking english and i was told by ron lazar, the psychologist that gave me this tape that she speaks excellen english. >> before her stroke. >> b to me the most fascinating part of this tape is that she doesn't recognize that she doesn make any sense. anshe doesn't recognize that she doesn't understand. >> uh-huh, wha else.

>> okay. good. >> now i'm going to ask you to do a couple of things, okay. can you close your eyes. en your eye. sh me two fingers. two fingers. okay. now watch. two fingers. can you show me that? >> so you see, she doesn't recognize what she doesn't recognize. and if you find that philosophically daunting, i think you should. >> but there is a common theme here. >> yes. >> go ahead. >> well, hemineglect is a striking syndrome that we see commonly after right hemisphere stroke. people w have had a stroke on the right side of the brain. and these patients are unaware of objects to the

left se. you can have a person on the left side, they will be unaware of them,ood on the left side of the pla can be neglected. and if you ask patients like is to draw objects, like in thema ige i would like to call upow, you iyoan see that thesean patients may miss out things on the left side. they can miss out the left o oe clf t, the l,he welhe he, wheel on the left side of the bicycle. all of this is happening with the primary sensory apparatus intact so the eyes are functioning normally. the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain which receives input from the eyes is functioning normally. but these patients are unaware of objects to their left. and neglect isn't just for vision, it extends into touch and hearing. and fascinatingly i ca also extend into people away of managing things so this is a famous study that was

performed by eduardo biziak a neuropsychologist from milan and he asked his right hemisphere stroke patients to imagine the central cathedral square, the piazzod-- in the center of min from their hospital beds, just imaginthinking about that square. and saidimagine looking at the square from this viewpoint. right toward the cathedral. and tell me what you can remember about the square. and those patients could recollect the roads, the cafes, the shops on the right-hand side of the square but they neglected to mention the stores, the roads on the left-hand side. so neglect also occurs for mental imagery, just being able to draw up a picture of a scene. but he was clever because he then asked imagine that you walk to the cathedral and you looked back at us from the door, so you are now looking back at us. what can you remember about

the squareha.ow n now. >> and remarkably these patients would say that ty could recollect things on the side of the square they had just been neglecting. so now from that vantage point, right and left is reversed, they could remember things that they hadn't priously remembered, but neglected. so what's happening there is that all the information about both ses of the square is present in the brain, but they can't access it consciously their view of the left side, regardless of which viewpoint ty are thinking about the square. and so that's a recurring scene in neglect research is that iormation can be in the brain, gained access but it's to the going reach conscious awareness unless something else happens. eric mentioned this theory that you need to broadcast to larger areas in the brain

to gain consciousness. and nctional imagin here can help us. so this is a slide here of a patient's brain who is being presented something on the left side. the patient is unaware of this object but what we can see is activity in the back of the brain, in the primary visual areas of the brain. so the patient's eyes saw this object on the left. parts of the patient's brain as we can seesaw this object on the left. but the patient wasn't able to be aware of it. so there's more to being aware of objects than just seeing with your eyes or seeing with the back of your brain. you need more to be consciously aware of objects. >> one thing that is important sort of to discuss is that the area that lights up is the primary receiving area in the cortex as part of the visual system. but the visual systemix tends beyond that.

>> it's a huge sway of cortex that is devoted to vision because vision is so important for human brains. >> well, let me come back to it, so why, i keep asking e same question, i asked earlier. john, what why? >> well, i think actually the other way to think about it is what does this tell us about how our own brains work. >> re: better. >> so 're bombardedith information all the time. >> right. >> our senses are completely overwhelmed with information. and the brain has limited capacity. we can't take in all that information. nor would we wish it to take in all that information because most-of-it isn't frankly useful swhat we want to do is to select the information that's important to get into that limit cad passity system. now to give you an example the fact that we don't actually see everything that's presented to our eyes, we hav a movie here, a change blindness movie. >> so two images back-to-back. and most pple don't see

the change between these two images. most of us are looking at the soldiers going on to the plane. but the change here is occurring in the engine between the images. and that shows us that although our eyes see the image, the back of our brain, the primary visual area sees the image, but we aren't aware of that changeecause we highly selective. we're only taking in certain bits of the information that's hitting our sensory system. and that bit is the one, 9 bit of information that we tend to and usually that's e information that reaches conscious awareness. and when you say taking in, you mean what? >> so in terms of sensory stimulation, our eyes are obviously being hit byll sorts of information all the time. >> our brain is recording it. >> our brain is recording it. but recording it isn't sufficient. because we're only going to take up a little part of that information because that's 9 only bit that we think is important. in this case we're looking

at those guys coming up on to the plane rather than looking at the airplane engine. because we're not really interested in airplane engines. >> the ics of the brain is aware of it but the patient is not. >> exactly. >> it actually makes a very interesting point. spoke before what about how creative the brain is, that the eye gets limited information about your face. it reconstructs this in part by memory that exists top down processing as well as bottom up processing and taking some guesses here and there. but in addition to restructuring it, part of the creative process is omitting things that are not important for every day perception. and this is what agnosia hits in this case. >> and the greater the clutter. >> right. >> the competition. >> yeah. >> so i think one of the interesting things we've learned is that, and again from neglect patients, is that items are out the

competing for our attention. >> right. >> sometimes something wins. sometimes something loses. but what you find in neglect is that the playing field is skewed. everything on th left is at a disadvantage to be selected comrepado t tpahings on theight which win in this selection. ntie who's p be g piven antiece of paper and asked to finenll the lines on here. cross out all the lines you can. and you can see that she's found half of them on this sheet of paper. >> and they're all on the right. >> all on the right. now here there are only these lines. bu t now she hasee bnn given something more difficult. so ere eha shs to make a f muchiner discrimination. she'gotheseargets which are theseli ttle circles with spokes. t all of these targets, arrar 6e 0 of them on here edemb edemb amongst a clutredd fiel of distcting information. and when you hav more competition, you get more neglect. so the greater the

competition for selection, the less, the greater the inattention you find in these patients. >> and the definition of neglect here is the idea that it doesn't, it doesn't get your attention. >> yeah, that's right. >> indeed. >> it also makes thepoint that you made last time, how much relearn about the normal functioning of the brain. it's amazing. amazing. in fact, in the old days as you pointed out, all that we really knew of brain function came from these guys, clinical neurologists. no wonder we were in bad shape. >> rose: let me just talk about the relionship of this in some sort of globa global-- workspace. >> so what we know is the areas of the brain that are damaged in neglect involve usually the parietal cortex or the frontal cortex or the connections between these regions. and particularly in the

right hemisphere, actually corresponding areas in the left hemisphere are involved in language in the human brain. but these areas are not only involved in selection, so if you get damage to these first areas you getroblems with attention and selection, but they are also the areas that have been implication-- implicated in conscious awareness. so this global workspace that eric was mentioning, you need to broadcast to the rest of the brain before things become aware. these areas were supposed to be those critical knows broadcasting that information, making thing things consciously aware to the brain. >> what i think is so wonderful about this is we had such a primitive understanding of the biological nature of consciousness even a decade ago. and we don't have a profound understanding now. but at least we're begin tolling understand not only aspects of normal consciousns but really

subtle defects of consciousness. you can begin to think about them in biological terms. >> richard, this is where we ask toou help us undersnd exacy why faces are uniquend -- >> yeah, the question is what is special about a face. it is a pretty special thing that there are experiments that suggest that a newborn baby at the age of nine minutes will prefer to look at faces when shown pictures of things than other objects. nine minutes after birth. and at a year, will recognize itself in pictures. so it's quite a remarkable thing. i want to talkabout something that masud mentioned. that humans are visual beings. and when we start asking questions such as why, i think we need to go back to basic principleses.

and of course for us that's charles darwin. now what darwin said was that we became adapted to our environment in order to feed and pro create. i abbreviate, of course. and the face people ofte forget san organ of communication quite apart from everything else. >> emotion. >> but also speech also the mere fact of kinship, knowing who is yr kin, who you are going to fight with in order to get to the food and so on. now of course these are very basic things but one can extrapolate them to a life of social beings. so the face is vital to social interaction. we are the most, one of the most especially attractive species around well. have an enormous visual

cortex. about a third of our brain is involved in vision. and we are constantly doing it. to the recognition of faces is critical to us. there are various ways in which we can do it. some people are superexperts. they can pick out faces le that. others are very bad at it. here's a face, everyone recognizes there is a face. so a fis is a face. that's the very lowest level. >> yes. >> then yohave got tory and understand well what's happening in terms of recognizing that face as being a particular face so this is where the-- agnosia comes it in this is where some people find it extremely difficult even to recognize their own face in the mirror. and can't can be even be startled by the mirror when coming to shave.

some people have defects which appeato be lying in between the sort of low level getting the first bit of information, tells you it's a face, and the processing which leads you to pick up an individual face. so they n be shown faces of family members and not recognize them. but if all the family members are put together, they can pick out individual familyembers. so the context changes the way that you perform. people with this condition from lesions are not common. and they often have other neurological disorders. they might have a bit of blanking out of a corner of space. they might not ceclors properly so they're getting information which is less rich than the rich information that mals ud was talking abt. so some of the information that gets taken away from this masse sense other manufacturing that comes in is perhaps being taken away

successively by brain mechanisms, modules in the brain which are designed to help us recognize a face so this is a slide that you haveeen already on the left where you can quite clearically-- clearly see the face. on the right it quite difficult to see the face. you can see the vegetables. >> see, i would have said when you said this is a face, i would say no, it's not, it's a painting because i'm mortgage interested in the artificialiality, in many ways, then i am in the reality. >> rose: interting. well, are you making another interesting point. which might be worth inserting here. in the sense that i think we've got to understand that the vish sul-- doesn't record anything, the visual system doesn't record anything t is creating a visual reality. what is out there in physical space is not necessarily what our brain is creating. what our brain creates is an

interpretation of physical space which going to give us the advantages, the evolutionary advantages which i was talking about. >> richard is also make noring point. if you look at this cup and i turn it upside down, you have no difficulty seeing it's a cup. that's not true for the face. it's the only object if you turn it you have sipe-- upside down you have difficult recognizing it, even if you are family you have difficulty recognizing subtle changes. >> it seems to be that the brain devotes more space to representing faces than any other object. it's extraordinary how much. you see all those patches at we discussed before so owsho oingfi to show you is a ort vide first. you need to look carefully there are two patches on both ses, indistinguishable. and there will be a sudden flash and then you ought to pick something out on the left side better than on the right. now let me takyou through them slowly one after the other so this is what we saw first. the face, you now kno it's

a face on the left. a banana on the right. the next image we'll show you the full scale image. there it is. you can see the face. you can see the banana. now if we move on to the last image, we're back at the black and white, the bipolar if you like images and the face is clearly visible to you now. now in a laboratory condition, that little flash could be paired down to 100 milli seconds. would you have one flash. and that image of at face will remain in your mind for at least the next six weeks if you are never shown it ain. and you see that image again in six weeks time you'll see the face immediately. that's how good a learning machine it is. >> that say wonderfu example of what is called chop down procession. when you look at an image you not only look at the incoming information but you compare it to previous images that you have seen and part of a guesswork that the visual system does is to

see whether or not this is something you have recogned from contact with it before. that's a beautiful exale of that. so it gives you really as you said before profound inside into how the brain processes information. >> we have here a wonderful example. >> great thist. >> -- who suffers from this. >> i don't really consider it suffering. >> you're right. and in no way has handicapped you from doing outstanding world-class art. how do you do it, kid. >> well, it's not-- it's not so much, well, i think if i believed in god, i would think a good and kind god gives you something to mitigate f your deficiencies. i don't believe in god -- >> so i find it even more amazinghat natureas able to give us that ability to

you know, try to reopro ses all that information and come up with something else. and for me it's not so strange that i, you know, made portraits. i was driven to make portraits. i was trying to understand the faces and commit them to memory, of people that i know and le. and for me it has to be flattened out. once it's flattened out, i can commit it to memory in a way that i can't if i'm looking at you. if you move your head a hf an inch it's a whole new head i haven't seen before. but once it's flat, in fact, when you were showing the thing earlier, the flat-- hi no trouble seeing that was a face because i can see flat patterns of face. i would not necessarily know who it was. in fact, i didn't know who it was. but reading flat patterns is a very interesting thing. and before i was as

interested in the artificiality as i was in the reality. its pictorial sin tack. like any incremental way of working or thinking. it's like you write a novel and you're putting words together. and you're t thinking are you putting those words together. and clusters of those words become thoughts and pretty on you have constructed a mental image. i work the same way. i have broken down the image, i'm overwhelmed by the whole. i can't make a decision. i ve broken it down into small bite size incremental units. and the degree to which that i can move fm increment unit to another and build clusters, that stack up to make something, is because i am profoundly interested in

artificiality. and that's one of-- i chafed under the term realist because it denied the other oak wallly important aspect of what i do. which is the distribution of color dirt on a flat surface. and the more i am aware of the nature of that artificiality, the nature of that kind of activity and what it can stack up to mean, the more i am able to make something. and that's, i'm, everything i do iriven by my learned disabilities. i was-- i never learned to add or subtracts, multiply or denied vied, i didn't take all go gra, physics or chemistry. i got through life by making extra credit art projects to show the teacher that i was interested in material. even though i wouldn't be able to spit back the facts. so i got reinforcementor

demonstrating that i had these skills. and it made me feel special. and everyone needs to feel special. >> rose: so help me understand how you see this. i mean when you loo me, what do you see? >> i see you. i see you because i see you often. >> rose: yes. >> there is a decay. i have not-- i did not recognize it when i lived with it for most of a year, two years later this is just not go over very well, let me tell you. >> this is a way you could have got yourself out of that problem. >> yes. >> so there are people who like you, have this condition. but if you put a little ring electrode on the finger and measure conductance through that finger, this is an indirect way of measuring emotional responses, or look

at their pupils. you can give-- those of a certain type images, people they don't know and images of people they do know in random fashion. and every time they come across an image of the face of the person they have met before or they have known or whatever, they say nope, don't know who it is, nope, don't know who it is, when they come through, when they do know like the woman you lived with, they say no, but big emotional response so this comes back to that original question what is consciousness and what is not consciousness. here is a clear emotional response. it's not conscious. perhaps if y knew that if you could feel your pulse perhaps that might be a clue. sounds to me as though by dividing up your visual space into little patches, you have sort of a new way of structuring the information coming in through your eyes, which allows you to do things which someone who hasn't

thought about it creatively, is unable to do. >> my paintings have taken as much as 12 or 14 months. and they're built very carefully. left or right, top to bottom, the same way you type. but the interesting thing is that i'm lazy. and i have a short attention span. and i and i have so many things that would sm to guarantee-- and a slop, you know, i make a internal mess. and all these things would tend to guarantee that i wouldn't make what i make. so you either go with who you are and just say make sloppy, quick messy paintings, or construct a situation in which you caot behave that way. and in so doing, i overcame a lot o my deficits, not ju face blindness. but i was able to give

myself a situation in which i, overwhelmed with the whole. u know, i sit there and i know every day is a positive y. every day i add to what i already had. i leave the studio at the end of the day, look over my shoulder and say oh, i got that-- so i made my life which is chaotic, which is confusing, in which i don't remember things, i can't mem orize. and yet i fnd a way that i add positively every day for what i did. and i don't have to reinvent the wheel. today i'll do what i did yesterday. and tomorrow i am going to do what i do today. and if i just stay there long enough, i'll eventually have a paintin well, it removes all the anxiety and all those other things that used to drive me nuts. >> there are several things that you see that i find so interesting. you said to me one time that

you never tried to hide your handicap so when kids had dyslexia oring proathosia they would sit at the back of the room and hope they never got called on. you always sat in the front. >> this was the thing that oliver sacks was so amazedment because oliver who is much more severely face blind and place blind and everything than i am, his approach was he would sit inhe back of the room and hope that nobody called on him. my approach was i'll sit in the front and i'll go like that. i won't have the answer, but i will demonstrate the fact that i care about the materi. >> that you're keen. >> and they'll remember me as being somebody who was engaged and somebody who cares, and the material matters. >> what about animal faces. >> well, it's funny, oliver sacks recognizes people who live in his building by their dogs.

>> yeah. >> can remember their dogs. >> there is a famous case in the literature. he was a well shall farmer, welsh farmer and came from wales, and he is a totallying pro thosiaagnia after an infection, he would go in the field and recognize each of his sheep. he would know which sheep he wanted to get, by the face. and when shown pictures of the sheep he could identify them and do all sorts of. >> well, what-- how is it different from animals. how about the way penguins can recognize, in the thousands of penguins they can find their own, are they doing a similar processing. >> i tnk so. did you read the thing in i think it was the washington times yesterday, on the aircraft i read it. that there is a group tt has now found that wasps recognize other wasps by

their facial features. and so the form will not fight itself but if they come across another form, they come to the territory, they go for them. >> the amazing -- >> much more primitive though. >> this is very much for the point you were making before, when kids are very young they are universal learners and they can learn to distinguish as adults can, literally a thousand faces from one another. but they can also learn to distinguish a thousand monks from one another. but because they are not exposed to monkeys later on, in almost all cases, they lose that ability. and one monkey looks like all other monkeys to them. >> there is one other thing that struck me and correct me because thi is likely to be wrong testimony that how your work fits into the western art, okay to. begin with, there is an implicit assumption that was really not spelled out for the longest time, that is is there is a compact between the viewer and the artist.

the artis creates a two-dimensional image no matter what he does it is two-dimensional, it's on the canvas but somehow because of how our visual system works we reconstructed if the artis is at all suessful into three dimensions so we have that capability to take a flat object and give it perspective. for the longest time this was really the tradition of western art. the whole ambition was to become more and more realistic, better perspective, more faithfulness to nature. but when photography came along and it can do this better than any artist can do, people began-- began to create aspects of reality very well. artists began to explore that. and actually began to flatten their paintings and do things like thment and you fit it into that tradition in a very -- >> this is sort of an aside but it may have relevance to what we are talking about.

because when photography came along it changed the course of modernism. >> completely. >> totally because painting immediately became everything photography couldn't be. >> photography was static, long exposures and nothing could ve and if it didn't, did move t disappeared and it was insistently black and white. the fit person to see a deguer te of a red apple must have been shocked t see it was black. and s immediately art went to somethi very colourful. and then you've got broken color that wasn't sharp like photographs are sharp. and then you got movement like in futurism or different points of view like cubism. one could make i think a very good argument that photography actually created modernism. >> so how do we sum this up

in the sense that what we have learned this evening. >> what we have learned this evening is that the brain is amazingly complex which of course you've been gathering all alongment and you can get selective lesions of the brain that interfere with recognizing and appreciating the particular persept that we are dealing with either in music, in art, in language. so the brain is so complicated that you can lectifferent parts that qb disturbed by lesions. and the rest of the brain functions perfectly well but you can't translate one particular aspect into the knowledge that goes with it. >> how about someone without doesn'function at all well like a sav ant. who has seltive skills like the guy who can drive down a road and he's an english person and can draw every building on both sides of the building, how many windows it has, absolutely

accurate. and yet he can't really -- >> well there is a big discussion about it. some of it fits in with what you s, the sav apt, the arstic sav apts have a compromise a social functioning. and they have, for example, when you and i look at each other we look at each other's eyes. one of the characteristic thing about autistic people is they look down. they look at your face in a different way. so if you track their eyes, they do it differently than you and i do. and one way to think about sav ants particularly people who paint or draw very well is that because they have a defect in language, other parts of the brain have become powerfully developed, particularlyith people like yourself, who must have had some indoor cap table-- capability of skill. they take advantage, become even stronger. yoknow, the brain sun believeably plastic so if you were to just oppose these fingers, do this for

days you would see that the area that is concerned with these two fingers, engarage-- enlarges in your brain if u do something over and over again particularly if u are ung that pt of the brain expands. so this probably holds for creativity as we so if i begin to draw and try things, that part of the brain may very well, you know, use that function much more effectively. >>here an aspect to sav ants, though, that is crippling. and i think it's probably related to-- they lose the filter. >> that's right. >> i mean leuri is a famous themenist who could not remember. >> the brain was filled with -- >> yeah, and he was hopeless. he couldn't make a living. >> but the ones he is referring to use their creativity, in a very productive way. i mean this guy can fly over the scent of a town for 15, 20 minutes, come back and

spend the next four weeks drawing every single building, every single window, every single ornament aroundith amazing accuracy. >> we did the same for the world science thing. did a very interesting test to find out how many people recognized how many aim j-- images. and there are people like me who you know were in the very, i think i recognized one person. and there were other people that you called superrecognizers. and it was spread out throughout t audience. we asked how many people got 20 of them and then how many got 19, et cetera. so how do you, what happens withhe brain that if you are the opposite end of the spectrum of face blindness

and i can only imagine that they are-- with an inability to shed the imacs of people that they bump mood once. >> this may very well be so. i mean it is true and i was pleased to learn it because my memory is quite imperfect is that people who have perfect memories are miserable. they feel like their head is filled with garbage because the brain is designed to filter things out as we saw it. if you don't filter things out you have a lot of stuff there that you don't really need. so my guessis they're having problems. >> it seems to me that its essence of what we are saying, and help me if i have not gotten this, it is that there is a whole bunch of stuff going on in the unconscious mind that is not communicating to the conscious mind. >> that's right. >> and that the essence of this is-- and it is one more part of the magic of the brain. >> right. and it's also further

evidence about how important unconscious mental functions is. you see everything is procds-- processed first. and here you see selective defects in this propagation to consciousness >> so what do we do next time. >> next time we deal with a diffuse disorder of cognitive function which is alses alz disease. as you know, as t population ages, thiis becoming an epidemic. so it's thought that anywhere from 30 to 40% people over 80 are are likely to have alzheimer and once you get not 90s the percentage is higher. we want to understand what cautions alzheimer disease, how does it manifest itself, how does it differ from age related memory loss that is not alzheimer disease and what are the chances of trying to get some really good pharmaceutical approaches, drug treatments for alzheimer disease. we will have people who represent various aspects of

it including somebody interested in drug development who s insights into how we might be able to come up with some new drugs. >> thank each of you very much. this is enlightening for me and the audience and we look forward to our brain captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org