About five months ago, I set out on a humble mission in my neighborhood. Though I have a good number of friends sprinkled across the sprawl of Los Angeles, I’d been wanting to extend more hyper-local roots. Community is notoriously hard to come by here, so one morning, I hatched a plan — frankly the first plan that came to mind — to become A Regular somewhere around the block.
I wanted a sense of home; I wanted to exchange faces and names. More than that, I wanted to be a face and a name.
In hindsight, the mission was pretty true to form for me: an unimpressive goal rendered lofty by poor strategy and clumsy execution. I live beside a ludicrously trendy coffee shop, the type of place that sees many, many faces and names all day everyday. Faces and names accessorized with distinctive hairstyles and thin-line tattoos. Faces and names more recognizable than mine, flung quickly at busy baristas who ping-pong their attention between drink orders and a line that famously stretches 40 feet out the door.
But I like their matcha. I like their afternoon light. I like the buzz of their patrons. So, one Sunday in May, I walked over, ordered my usual-to-be (iced oat matcha: $8 incl. tip), found a seat, and journaled while nursing my soft green drink.
Over the next seven days, this became a new ritual. Some days I chatted up strangers. Some days were unusually packed. I never went at the same time, and I rarely saw the same people. But I began to wonder: was I really not seeing the same people? And how could I be sure? This took me down a facial memory rabbit hole. I can recognize the baristas who I always see in the same 20-square-foot space behind the counter. But would I recognize a guy pretending to read Joan Didion today if he showed up without the same performatively dog-eared copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem weeks later? Would I recognize the Parisian girl who kindly renovated my French slang were I to run into her on the street?
As I summoned mental images of various café folk, I realized: I couldn't picture every face. Even faces that I knew I'd recognize were difficult to recall.
I’d hit upon a fundamental quirk of human memory. Remembering is not a monolith: Recall and recognition are two very different challenges for your brain.
And conjuring an image is the trickier of the two. It requires both a memory and an ability to neurologically paint that memory in front of your mind's eye. Though most people can do this more easily with photographs seen repeatedly, attempting to imagine a recent face can feel like twisting the key into an ignition that just won't budge.
Remembering is not a monolith: Recall and recognition are two very different challenges for your brain.
“Visualizing faces can be oddly difficult, even faces of people you're very close to at times,” said Adam Zeman, a neurologist who studies memory and imagery at the universities of Edinburgh and Exeter.
But why? Facial recollection plays a crucial role not just in our modern-day lives, but in our evolutionary history as a highly social primate, too. Neuroscientists have progressed our understanding thanks to fancy imaging equipment and naturalistic memory testing. They’ve identified some cues that help our brains recall faces. We also know that the human brain comes equipped with face-specific machinery and neuronal highways that beam signals correlated to how we process emotions, vision, and so on. More research is revealing a litany of open questions about facial memory, and the answers trickling in can reward us with a new appreciation of our brains — charmingly imperfect and unexpectedly diverse.
