Learning faces

An anonymous face, once learned, stands out and becomes easily recognized and identified in a crowd.

This is true of any process of learning -- words, symbols, paintings, names, book titles, quotations, kanji characters, car models, and whatever. As an art historian I was trained in connoisseurship and learned to detect individual styles in works of art. Yet I am slow learning faces.

I have taught classes, and at the first meeting, I see all those new faces, all anonymous. In time I begin to recognize them by and by. Some faces are easier to commit to mind than others -- those with distinct features, that is, those with distinguishing traits by which I register the face: a wide forehead, an aquiline nose, a big mole, a pouting mouth, a receding chin, etc. Conventionally good-looking faces are harder to remember. I admire their beauty but they get lost as a blur once they merge into a crowd.

The face I learned to recognize remains indelible in my mind. A chance encounter after many years with someone I knew is sometimes disorienting because the face fails to match the one etched in my mind. Conversely, I see a face from the long past and it takes me a moment to realize that it can't be the person I identify it with because it is undoubtedly no longer that face, having aged surely, perhaps even beyond recognition.

These thoughts come to me time and again watching ballet and trying to learn the faces of the dancers. Male dancers are easier to remember; their more bony features distinguish individuals better. Ballerinas, with their hair pulled back, identically dressed, and holding a pasted grin on the face, are very difficult to learn. But a few faces in the corps that I managed to recognize, once learned, stand out in the line up immediately as the curtain rises; and, once learned, they are never forgotten. But the rest remain all alike.

It is curious that the face I learned to recognize was anonymous and totally indistinguishable, if undistinguished, too, before it became recognizable.

There is nothing very substantial about this observation. But I find it fascinating and a bit mysterious. I had to get it out of my system.