This Face And That Face

The bad news: Our refrigerator failed last week. The good news: It is still on warranty and will be replaced. The bad news: This will take another two weeks at least. The good news: It is cool enough weather than the condiments and cheeses are not spoiling, even though they are on the kitchen counter. The bad news: There is no counter space. The news: We are ultimately not cooking as much as usual. I eat a lot of toast.

We tried to get to the Peabody Essex to see the hat exhibit, although I raised the point, as I am wont to do, that this meant traveling to Salem in October. As usual, this was disregarded; how many people could really want to go to Salem on a rainy day three weeks before Halloween?

Needless to say, we did not make it to Salem. Tune in next year to see whether we are disrupted by psychic conventions* three years running. (Last year, we failed to meet Tommx and Lisa for lunch in Salem, although we managed to fall back to another town after two hours' lost time.)

Meanwhile, I was informed there was a clever test to tell you whether you are good or bad at remembering people's names. This would seem, on the face of it, to be one of those areas easily extrapolated by life experience, but I suspect it is especially susceptible to self-reporting bias (particularly with respect to dualistic thinking, that whole "I'm an introvert/I'm an extravert" identification that begs the question: compared to whom?)

In my case, I have suspected, in a way that is both self-flattering and autocritical, that I am good with names but don't usually pay attention. Which sounds as though I don't care about people (and also as though I don't believe I could be bad at something), but I do. I just don't care much about their names, at least in social situations where I'd rather pay attention to making good conversation. (Work is something else. When I'm working, I remember everyone's names. In a work environment, efficiency is more important than pleasantries. And online, obviously, one has only names to go on.)

Unfortunately, the test, which is part of a research study by Washington University in St. Louis, doesn't test whether you remember names. It shows you name/face pairs very quickly, and then after a short break shows you more name/face pairs and asks whether you have or have not seen them before. I'm good at it. Of course I am. I'm a filmmaker; I am trained specifically to be able to recall whether I've seen a fleeting image before, because I may have to match it in another take if I'm the camera operator, or I may be watching rushes figuring out how I'm going to fit things together in editing. I can tell you that I'm not using facial recognition so much as image matching, because part of how I'm recognizing the images is things like "aspect ratio is stretched." "Background is wrinkled." "Brow shadow."

There is no place for me to raise my concerns with the researchers. I can also not observe to them that I'm looking exclusively at pictures of white people. Maybe that's secretly what they're testing - racial differences in identifying white people - and the names thing (they're really white-sounding names, too) is a red herring. Probably I am giving the researchers too much credit for being clever, but who knows.

Mine is not to reason why. Mine is merely to be once again frustrated in my not-pressing desire to find out whether I'm good or bad or average with names.

In other news, I recently cut and colored my hair; Ciro says I look like Sarah Connor in the first Terminator movie, which is kind of like saying I'm his dream girl. I don't see it. But I looked in the mirror today and thought "you know who I do look like? That chick in the 80's TV series Beauty and the Beast." I looked up a picture to show him, but it turns out that chick was Linda Hamilton. From Terminator. Which just goes to show - remembering images and remembering faces. Not the same.

* I only trust psychic conventions that meet astrally.