I've seen a lot of faces I can't forget.No, I'm not talking about being in love, as the Beatles lyrics might imply. Instead, Imay bea super-recognizer, meaning other peoples' faces getstrangely seared into my braineven those of complete strangers. It's not that I necessarily want to remember them; I just can't seem to help it.And I'm not alone.Josh P. Davis, a psychology professor at the University of Greenwich in England who studies the phenomenon, told Yahoo Healththat he estimates some1% of the population could qualify assuper-recognizers.Davis developed a brief online test for super-recognizers, and you can take it now.Keep in mind, Davis notes:"Ifyou do very well then you maybe a super-recognizer." If you want to know for sure,you can inquire with his team aboutadditional testing.A 'creepy' abilityIn 2009, ateam of neuroscientists from Harvard did one of the first studies of super-recognizers. In it, they looked at just four people who claimed to have an unusuallygood ability to recognize faces.All four subjects told the researchers about instanceswhen they'd recognized practicalstrangers:family membersthey hadn't seen for decades or actors they'd glimpsed once in an ad and thenseen again in a movie. Theyfelt like there was something wrong with them.One of thepeople in the study told the researchers she tried to hide her ability and "pretend that I dont remember [people]...because it seems like I stalk them, or that they mean more to me than they do."What the researchers wanted to know, then, was if therewere moresuper-recognizers out there. So they cameup with a series of tests (like this one) designedto find out if other people had their subjects' uncanny abilities. Sure enough, they found a few more super-recognizers. But theystill haven't found very many. All of the studies of super-recognizers to-date are based ontiny samples of peopleanywhere from just two individuals to a half-dozenpeople. For that reason, it's tough to draw too many definitive conclusions about the ability.Still, research suggests thatsuper-recognizingis fundamentally different from memory, and isn't a skill that can be sharpened with training, like some aspects of traditional memorization can.In a recent study in the journalPLOS ONE, researchers studiedtwo so-called "memory champions"people who'd competed extensively in memory contests and had even achieved recognition in the Guinness World Book of Records for their memorization abilities. When they studied their face-recognition abilities, the memory champs'skills weremerely average. "These findings lend support to the idea that face processing abilities are at least to a certain extent hard-wired," the researchers wrote in their paper.There's something special about facesIn the 1990s, researchers identified a region of the brain called the fusiform face area (FFA) that is thought to play a key role in our ability to identify aface.Some people with damage to that region experience a condition that is essentially the opposite of super-recognizing, called prosopagnosia or face blindness. Others appear to be born with it. People with prosopagnosia have difficulties recognizing familiar faceseven, sometimes, their own. Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks was a famous prosopagnosia sufferer, and wrote about his condition in the book, "The Mind's Eye.""I am much better at recognizing my neighbors' dogs (they have characteristic shapes and colors) than my neighbors themselves," Sacks wrote.SEE ALSO:Here's the test you can take to find out if you have synesthesiaDON'T MISS:People with these rare brain disorders have a disturbingly skewed perception of realityJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: How to remember people's names
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