Exploring connections between face memory, synaesthesia, law enforcement, the arts and the immune system. Is personification synaesthesia the key to understanding face recognition?
When I look at the dignified, rectangular face of the female candidate for Vice President of the United States of America, I see the face of a highly-respected Malaysian-born male Australian singer who was most popular in the 1960s-70s. Why? They have two thngs in common – similar names and Tamil genes. I never cease to be amazed at the talents of the Tamil people. I would love to see Kamala Harris running the USA!
I’m not the only person to wonder if the older and younger actors in the latest Trivago ad might be the same actor altered with makeup etc. It appears that the actors are in fact Charlotte Weston and the Australian actor Gabrielle Miller. Was any kind of face-matching technology or expertise used by an actor’s agency to deliberately find an older actor who looks a lot like Ms Miller?
Wikipedia lists performance artist, tap dancer, mime and puppeteer as talents of Ms Miller, on top of her famous work in advertising. I think that is a remarkable committment to annoying the general public.
After watching the American journalist Ronan Farrow, the son of actress Mia Farrow and supposedly the son of actor/director/creep Woody Allen, I must declare that there is no way in the wide, wide, world that Ronan Farrow is not the biological son of Frank Sinatra. Just look at those eyes! And the rest of his face, which I could happily look at for hours. He got genes for looking good from both biological parents. Life is not fair. Surely one doesn’t need to be a super-recogniser like me to see Sinatra when Farrow speaks?
I think Farrow also looks a bit like the blond actor from the TV series Starsky and Hutch, but that’s probably just a coincidental mix of similar attractive features and the blond hair. One American actor that Farrow does not look at all like is Woody Allen, and I think we can all agree, that’s a good thing.
A total of five free shows between two different venues spanning the dates September 30th 2017 to October 5th 2017 inclusive are scheduled, but note that she has NO SHOW scheduled for the Wednesday.
Late-night TV is the best TV, for many reasons: programs don’t have to rate well and don’t have to pander to the mindless masses, programs can have challenging or naughty content, such as satirical comedy or heart-rending documentaries, because of less restrictions from classifications, and news TV in the small hours picks up the best part of the news-creating day on the other side of the world where all the exciting stuff happens, and late-night news TV has shows from the BBC and other overseas news networks with serious content that operates on an entirely different level to the mediocrity of news in remote Perth or down-under Australia. One of these worthy foreign news programs that you only get to see at a ridiculous time of morning is the political interview show Conflict Zone. I do love watching Tim Sebastian glaring over his specs at major foreign public figures while relentlessly demanding that they answer his questions, in full. I have no idea why these politicians and assorted suits consent to these public inquisitions. Masochistic streak? It makes 7.30 on the ABC look like daytime chat.
My super-recognizer thing often “goes off” when I watch Mr Sebastian’s mature male face, with his dark eyes fixed on his prey and his head at a lowered angle that is reminiscent of a wolf’s aggressive stance. I know of no other journo or TV personality who has this “look”. It’s confronting.
I have absolutely no conscious intention to compare Mr Sebastian to any infamous historical figure, but I can’t help automatically seeing the visual facial resemblance and the emotional similarity in the situation between Mr Sebastian’s bracing interview style and scenes from a German movie featuring a mature male actor that are so over-the-top in interpersonal fury and entertaining that they have taken on a second life as internet meme fodder.
I try to avoid watching the 1990s American TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, but on the odd unavoidable occasion when I do, every time I see the American lead female actor Sheree J. Wilson my super-recognizer brain tells me her face is in some way a match for……
….the Australian politician Terri Butler, who has an intelligent, understated style that I find fascinating, even if I don’t take her politics too seriously. Do Butler and Wilson have anything in common, apart from similar faces? No idea.
A man’s mouth decorated with black lippy, those sad-looking eyes that seem to be melting down the side of a long face with minimal cheekbones, on a man with a tall, powerful build and a deep voice that is simply stunning.
Why is this look so familiar?
Why?
Oh yes, that’s why!
Interesting that Fred Gwynne was also a great slab of a man with a deep voice that he shared with us in song, and had a great love of theatricality, a sense of humour, and a willingness to dress like a horrific freak for a job. Similar faces often go with similar lives and similar personalities. Are these similarities more than skin-deep?
We stayed up late to watch the 1940s classic movie Gaslight the other night. What an amazing story and brilliant acting from Boyer and Bergman! Charles Boyer was not an unusually handsome man, but her certainly knew how to use his eyes, and he also knew how to use his voice.
Was it the detective recognizing a family resemblance between Paula and her late aunt that caught the attention of the detective, or was it that combined with a visual recognition of Serges Bauer?
I’m amazed by two aspects of this interesting news story about an international competition run by the highly original author Douglas Coupland to find the world’s closest lookalike to the late great epileptic painter Vincent van Gogh. I’m amazed at how closely the British actor Daniel Baker in the photo shown visually resembles van Gogh in his face but also in so many other distinctive visible features. I can’t help wondering how closely the British man is like the legendary artist in his personality, talents and behaviour, if at all, and I’m also left wondering how far back the two might be related (all humans are related if you go back far enough), but all that is of course none of my business. This super-recognizer gives her seal of approval to the idea that Baker looks a heck of a lot like van Gogh. I am truly impressed, because I usually find celebrity lookalikes and lookalike competitions to be laughable due to the glaring differences between the faces of the “lookalike” and the real celebrity.
The other thing that I’m amazed about is the fact that all those other pictured men thought themselves as possible winners of the competition, when so many don’t really have faces or heads that look much like self-portraits of the artist (which we can assume were good likenesses). Being a van Gogh double requires more than having short ginger hair and beard and being a white man of similar age, with an intense look on your face. The face is the thing, and the shape of the head, the shape of the hairline and also the shape of the natural beardline, even the shape of the outline and the inner lines and the size of your ears (which may number one or two). I think it is interesting that it appears that the winner of the competition was not self-selected. It shows how little judgement some people apparently have into how visually close in resemblance one person is to another, which I guess is the result in a spectrum of person visual recognition ability.
I’m going to be really annoyed if in his acting career Baker never gets the chance to play van Gogh. It would be such a waste!
Van Gogh lookalike competition won by Dorset man. BBC News. November 25th 2016.
Am I a super-recognizer? 