If that familiar person is utterly unidentifiable until he or she speaks, a diagnosis is made. Mimicking real-world situations, physicians line up a number of people of similar sex, age, and clothing (wearing hats to cover their hair), slipping in a family member or friend of the patient among them. The test for face blindness is more straightforward than you might suspect.

It’s no wonder nobody at the Daily Planet can match this constellation of clues to Superman in his cape.

So for prosopagnosics, Clark Kent is a familiar assortment of suits, nervous mannerisms, and glasses. She responded that it could be one of her neighbors. A team of scientists showed a woman with prosopagnosia her own image and asked her what she saw. In the first recorded case of the disorder, Jean-Martin Charcot (considered by some to be the father of modern neurology) in 1883 described a patient who mistook his own reflection in a mirror for a stranger and apologized for blocking the way. But the ability to recognize a person from the face alone evaporates. They aren’t even all that socially disabled: They rely on voices, gaits, and typical clothes to identify people. People with face blindness can read, drive, and even realize that what they are looking at is a face. Other areas of visual perception remain (mostly) intact. Prosopagnosia is a brain disorder that severely limits a person’s ability to recognize and remember faces. Because Superman is trying to project the persona of Clark Kent-a meek, frail, and “not terribly handsome” version of himself-that is what everyone sees.īut science fiction can do way better than that. In Superman #330, it’s revealed that Superman focuses a hypno-beam through his kryptonite-lensed glasses at everyone he meets. Unless you are a comic book aficionado, you may not know that DC Comics did, in fact, try to resolve the issue of his pathetic disguise.

Man of steel xray vision