My top three posts of all time are:

Growing Up Super Masks vs Hiding in Plain Sight Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.

Is it somehow more honest to hide behind a mask?

September 24, 2012 in Random Ideas | Tags: face recognition, face-blindness, prosopagnosia, superheroes, superpowers | 1 comment

Is it a real superpower?

In a strange twist, mere days after I talked about prosopagnosia – the inability to recognise faces – I came across this article about people who have the opposite ability.  These police officers have the highest rate of recognising people from CCTV footage, by quite a long way.

Scientists investigating it had to devise harder face recognition tests, because the standard ones weren’t hard enough.  They concluded that these people are about as good at recognising faces as prosopagnosia sufferers are bad – in the top 2% of the population.

Of course, with my tendency to take things to extremes, I would like to propose something that surely must be an actual superpower.  The ability to recognise faces before you’ve seen them.

You might say that this is merely a facet of precognition, and you might be right, but it’s very specific.  So specific, in fact, that it would fit right in with Shovel Man (who can do anything, as long as it involves a shovel) and Invisible Boy (who can be invisible only when nobody is watching).
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