Monday, August 11, 2008

"Something You Should Know" - Mentions Faceblindness

Transcript from radio show "Something You Should Know" with Mike Carruthers


August 8, 2008
The Crazy Things People Do
Interview with Andrew Williams, author of Are You Crazy?


Mike Carruthers:
People are weird. So many people do so many weird things that maybe being weird is normal. For example, do you know a lot of people suffer from something called face blindness?

Andrew Williams:
Approximately 5 million Americans are believed to suffer with face blindness. And face blindness is the inability to recognize people from their faces.

Andrew Williams, author of the book Are You Crazy?...

Individuals who have this cannot recognize their children, their spouses, people they work with; and those people who have it often report that if they stand on their head and look at faces upside-down, it's easier for them to recognize the individual.

It just may be that we all have something weird about us so maybe we need to be a little more understanding of people who have things like face blindness or something called pica.

Pica, or P I C A, this is eating foods that are not usually food items: coins, ash, cigarette butts, soap and coffee grounds.

It often starts in childhood, says Andrew, when kids start putting strange things in their mouths and an extreme case of pica…

It happened just last year where a 62-year-old man went to the emergency room because he had a total of 360 coins in his stomach.

And speaking of eating things…

There are individuals who are afraid to eat what they refer to as concealed food. And that is food that they can't see the inside of. So something like ravioli, they would be afraid to eat it because they don't know what's inside.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.