Woman Unable To Recognize Voices, Unless It's Sean Connery

A 60-year-old British woman is suffering from a neurological defect that is sure to put her in the next version of "The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." She is unable to recognize any voice she hears — any voice, that is, but Sean Connery's. Unless she sees the face of the person speaking, she has no idea who is talking to her, even her daughter and co-worker's voices are unrecognizable. Dr. Brad Duchaine at University College London, thinks she might have the first documented case of vocal prosopagnosia, a condition which makes it extremely difficult for people to recognize faces. "His accent is distinctive," Duchaine explained. "And she is a British woman in her sixties ... let's say it's probable he got her attention."

Re:Sounds similar to face blindness

[geekgirlandrea]

There are two different types of prosopagnosia: apperceptive prosopagnosia, which is what the OP was describing, and associational prosopagnosia, which is more like not being able to use faces to query one's memory. I have the latter, and if I'm looking at a face I can parse it and work out age, gender, etc., which someone with apperceptive prosopagnosia typically can't do, but I can't make any associations with faces as such at all. I have to explicitly observe and notice features and make associations with those to recognize people. I usually end up going on hairstyles, with a somewhat limited success rate.

I'm pretty bad with voices too, although not as bad as I am with faces or as bad as the woman in the article. For what it's worth, I just had my first bug-fix (a race condition in arch/sparc64/kernel/trampoline.S) accepted into the kernel source a few weeks ago, so I guess I fit your definition of a Real Nerd.

Re:Sounds similar to face blindness

[geekgirlandrea]

Meh. That's only actually happened to me once, and the person in question was (probably) joking. Anyway, to extend your list:

• Lesbian. Check
• Has the exact same geek girl fetish most of the men here have, but would never *admit* to having looked at someone's homepage link for that reason. Check
• Involved with someone (who fits most of your list too). Check
• Writes code with above-referenced someone. Check
• Sometimes gets drawn into Linux vs. OpenBSD arguments with said someone. Check
• Really enjoys doing this to Slashdotters. Check