Are you ‘good with faces’? Are you sure???

Hey hey Sequins, it’s Max.

I hope your autumn is off to a nice start. I'm currently typing in my favorite local coffee shop with an iced drink, braving the tail-end of what I’m hoping is our last heat wave of the year. This week I’m (finally) bringing you an essay that I’ve chipped away at for months. It’s about remembering faces. 

I’ve spent an uncountable number of hours inside this coffee shop this year. And in that time, I’ve seen an uncountable number of faces. I see some of them almost every time (the usual rotation of baristas), some of them just once (tourists), and some of them exactly twice (Colin Farrell).

This story is about how my time in the coffee shop inspired me to investigate my memory with faces. When someone says they’re “good with faces” they’re usually talking about recognition. If you see someone who you’ve met before, will their face spark a realization — that “Oh hey again!” familiarity?

But that’s not all we mean when we talk about remembering. Remembering can also mean reconjuring. Can you picture your mother’s face if you close your eyes? How about a dear friend? Or a new friend? A crush? Colin Farrell?

For this story, I spoke with researchers who helped me understand what it means to remember a face, and why recall is so different from reconjuring.

More Than Meets The Eye: The Enigma of Being ‘Good With Faces’

When I wondered what it takes to remember people I’ve seen, I had to relearn what it means to really know a face.

Sequencer •Max G. Levy

Anyway, I do hope you read it all the way through. We've got some great other stories in the works for you all. Keep scrollin’ to see what my pals have been up to, and please forward our website or newsletter to a pal of yours.

Love, 

Max

PS: Colin Farrell didn’t make it into the final story but here’s a quick version if you’re curious. I saw him on two consecutive Sundays in peak times. He seemed fine. Waited in line for 15 minutes like everybody else. The first time, after he got his coffee, he walked out and hocked a very large loogie on way to his very large black car. The second Sunday, I was chatting with someone from Armenia (whose name I forget but whose face I’d recognize) about immigrating from our respective countries, and over the course of 30 minutes, every time I glanced over to Colin, he was staring at me. I wonder if he remembers.

What we’re working on

Maddie: I am revisiting a profile I started working on over a year ago (I learned my lesson and will not be going into any further details except to say I would love to see it eventually run and will post it here when it does.) In the meantime, I recently got to talk with a couple evolutionary biologists about cricket research for my day job. What’s great is that I had been nerding out about their research for months, and now I’m re-energized to write about lava crickets, which are so cool and (imo) misunderstood.

Also in day job land, I interviewed one of the teachers who influenced me most, which turned out to be a really emotional experience. Plus, pig disease!

Max: Last week, I published a feature in Quanta Magazine about a hidden dimension of the natural world used by bugs and plants: electrostatics. Just 15 years ago, ecologists only thought that animals sensed and used electricity underwater (think eels, rays, etc.) This makes sense. Air is a famously bad conductor. But science has seen a rush of discoveries about flying insects and spiders sensing static and apparently rusing it in various ways to survive. 

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology | Quanta Magazine

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.

Quanta Magazine •Max G. Levy

Kim: I've been working on a Brazil feature for Mongabay and squeezing in some quick-hit stories for Smithsonian Magazine on breast cancer stats, a temporary second moon for Earth, and detections of a long and long-lasting black hole burp. I'm grateful that I get to learn about eclectic science!

What we’re reading

Maddie: I’ve been sending this investigation from The Transmitter to everyone I know. The story of scientific misconduct (image doctoring, data fabrication, etc.) is so often told as a single individual’s failing and makes them the center of attention. What I love about this story is that it instead focuses on the reverberations of a single paper/student. The choice to treat the graduate student at the center of this mess as unremarkable (even going so far as to not name them) is a genius choice that underscores how universal the story of scientific misconduct may be. Truly bone-chilling stuff.

Dan: I started reading Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, a non-fiction account of the Mercury Seven, the seven astronauts chosen for Project Mercury, the first crewed US spaceflight program.

The thought that I've kept returning to in reading the book is the type of person selected for space missions in the late 1950s and today. Every single person even considered for Project Mercury, let alone selected, was a walking crew cut. To a man (they were all men) they were all rah-rah military men, fighter pilots whose only job was to have the nerve to be shot into space. One particular passage stood out – a group of pilots are summoned to the Pentagon and told that Project Mercury is strictly voluntary. It was considered so dangerous, so high risk, that not joining the program wouldn't be held against anyone in terms of promotions down the line.

Moreover, being an astronaut didn't involve any actual piloting. The humans could adjust a few nominal parameters from within their tin can, but the flight trajectory were controlled from the ground. They would be human Laikas, strapped in just to see if they'd live (I should say that Laika was not expected to survive her trip and did not; the first animals to survive a trip to space were dogs Belka and Strelka). Not being able to actually pilot the damn thing was a serious concern for all these pilots, but nevertheless most volunteered anyway. You simply did not turn down a combat mission, as early space flights were thought of.

Today, as many are aware, you have to have three PhDs to do an astronaut's laundry, as the joke goes. Astronauts today are scientists, who bring field-specific expertise to space. Recent astronaut classes have included neuroscientists, mechanical engineers, astrophysicists, and a bioengineer and professional racing cyclist.

Max: I’ve been on a Shea Serrano kick lately. He usually writes about culture, like his books about movies, hip-hop, and basketball (“and other things”). But recently he dropped a legal thriller called Werewolf Lawyer. Friends. It’s so good. So funny. I devoured it. 

In the science world, there’s this important story from Vox: The world’s spending to fight global lead poisoning just doubled. And this important feature from Lois Parshley about corporate abuse in Arctic fisheries (Deadly Harvest: The Hidden Costs Of Your Filet-O-Fish). 

Also, if you liked my essay about remembering faces (PLEASE READ, THANKS), you might enjoy this Quanta story about aphantasia by Yasemin Saplakoglu. Let me know what you think! Tell me what’s on your mind/heart/face.

Kim: It's Nobel week, and I'm following the announcements! I know that the prize has been controversial in the past, but I love that even nerdy science gets its Hollywood treatment and drum-roll moments.

This barely counts as scientific reading, but I'm devouring the novel "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus. I don't think anyone should take the science too seriously — a chemist friend of mine doesn't enjoy the book for this reason. I, on the other hand, love it — the book shines the brightest in its human elements. Resist if you can, but the quirky scientist protagonists and the supporting cast will steal your heart.