Transcripts For WBZ 60 Minutes 20160229

Stahl most of us take for granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. But imagine for a second what life would be like if you couldnt. No idea. Dont have a clue. Stahl couldnt recognize yourself in a mirror. This is a problem i have been having. Stahl faces. Yes, faces. Stahl thats what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious neurological condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia. Does anybody know what that is . It is someone in your family. It is your daughter. Im steve kroft. Im lesley stahl. Im bill whitaker. Im scott pelley. Those stories on this special edition of 60 minutes. Mmm, this turkey is natural . Yeah. Its too good to be true. Not again. Real estate never goes down. Fact. Well have the baby, and ill have my band, and itll just work. Dont worry about it honey. All of our family photos are right here banging sound on the hard drive. Its called a timeshare. We dont own it, we share it. Lets do it. Oh yeah. That is good. Mmhmm. Finally, something thats not too good to be true. Its oscar mayer natural turkey breast, and it tastes great. For adults with an advanced lung cancer called squamous nonsmall cell, previously treated with platinumbased chemotherapy, its not every day something this big comes along. A chance to live longer with. Opdivo, nivolumab. Opdivo is the first and only immunotherapy on a Clinical Trial demonstrating longer life. For these patients. In fact, opdivo significantly increased the chance of living longer versus chemotherapy. Opdivo is different. It works with your immune system. Opdivo can cause your immune system to attack and affect how they work. This may happen any time during or after treatment has ended, and may become serious and lead to death. See your doctor right away if you experience new or worsening cough; chest pain; shortness of breath; diarrhea; severe stomach pain or tenderness; severe nausea or vomiting; extreme fatigue; constipation; excessive thirst or urine; swollen ankles; loss of appetite; rash; itching; headache; confusion; hallucinations; muscle or joint pain, or flushing as this may keep these problems from becoming more serious. These are not all the possible side effects of opdivo. Tell your doctor about all your medical conditions, including immune system problems, or if youve had an organ transplant, or lung, breathing, or liver problems. A chance to live longer. Ask your doctor if opdivo is right for you. Bristolmyers squibb thanks the patients and physicians who participated in the opdivo Clinical Trial. Wassup . Im hannibal im gonna use samsung pay to get a katzs deli pastrami sandwich. katzs employees hey hey whats up . Hey can i pay with my phone . You mean like apple pay . No like samsung pay. Kind of works everywhere. Even on this janky old thing. He wants to pay with his phone. Whadda ya want hannibal . I want to pay with my phone. Dont look at the cameras mike. You ready . It doesnt work. Watch me. Boom oh samsung pay is here and pretty much everywhere else. Forget about the cowboy walk because of a saggy diaper it s time to dance freely thanks to new pampers cruisers the first and only diaper that helps distribute wetness. Evenly into three extra absorb channels. So it doesn t sag and stays dryer so wiggle it and jiggle it in new pampers cruisers. Wishing you love, sleep and play. Pelley it was Benjamin Franklin who wrote, nothing can be said to be certain but death and taxes. Turns out, with taxes, that may be true, but not so much with death. In america, the job of ultimately accounting for who is dead or alive belongs to the Social Security administration, which compiles something called the death master file. There are about 86 million names on this National List of the deceased. And its deadly Serious Business because when youre added to the file, that means that banks, the i. R. S. , medicare, Law Enforcement and the like scratch you out of existence. But we found out that the death master file is often fatally as we first reported last march, a lot of people who pass on dont get on the list, which costs taxpayers billions of dollars in fraudulent payments to people standing in for the departed. And then, there are those who are on the death master file who are very surprised to hear that theyre dead. How many of you have been declared dead by the federal government . All of you. Youre looking pretty well to me. This would be a se ance, except these are living, breathing americans that we conjured up from around the country, all declared dead by the Social Security administration. Don pilger passed away when he tried to report the death of his wife. This is a form from the Social Security administration. The idea was you were going to call this number and essentially report that your wife had passed. Don pilger exactly. And thats what i did on the following monday. Access my bank account and it was. They kept saying, invalid pin. So i went to the bank and i give the lady the problem i was having. She typed my numbers into the computer and she grabbed my hand, she says, mr. Pilger, i dont believe this. They reported you deceased and not your wife. Pelley kristina paces life was cut short at an early age. Kristina pace i was in college, i walked into the bank to open up an account, and same thing. We cant help you. Well, why . Youre coming up as deceased. You need to go to Social Security office. And i did. But just randomly, years later, it would come up. Id want to get a car or something. Oh, no. Oh, let me guess. Im dead . So. Pelley Betty Denault was summoned to her Social Security office where the computer read Betty Denault and she pointed on the screen up in the corner and it said, d. O. D. And i said, what does d. O. D. Mean . And she said, date of death. And i said, well, how did you come up with this . And she said, all it takes is somebody to input on the computer the wrong numbers. And it just makes a big difference, of course. Pelley most people never find out how it happens, but when the federal computer says youre dead, you might as well be. The terrible news is relayed by the government to banks and credit agencies. Judy rivers told us she had 80,000 in her accounts, but when she tried to use a bank card at a store, they assumed she was an identity thief. You couldnt get access to your bank accounts. You couldnt get a credit card. How did you live . Judy rivers well, for a time, i lived in my car. And i couldnt get an apartment. I had my debit cards, which were, of course, no good. Consequences, and was actually taken to jail and questioned because they thought i was an identity thief. Pelley you ended up arrested . Ended up living in your car because of all of this. Rivers for six months. Pelley you had been eliminated from the human race. Rivers cyber ghost. Pelley cyber ghost. Pilger cyber ghost. Pelley judy rivers now haunts a borrowed camper in alabama, and while her finances were ruined, she found that the government makes a tidy profit selling the death master file to credit agencies. So, word of her death was nearly immortal in dozens of databases, and it came back again and again. She protested to a Credit Agency called chexsystems for what seemed like an eternity. Rivers finally, chexsystems responded to me and told me to send my information in and they would consider it, after i had sent it to them over 20 times. Rivers correct. Pelley we looked in the Alabama Vital Records Office for rivers death notice, but its not there. No one seems to know how she got in the federal death master file. God may judge the quick and the dead, but its the states that collect the data. They pass it along to Social Security, and there is plenty of room for error. Record bureaus get death notices from doctors, hospitals, funeral homes, or families, and every state has its own rules. Perhaps because the dead dont vote, many of the states dont spend much keeping tabs on them. This is the state of alabama vital records vault. It is a place so secure that you need a key and a fingerprint to get inside. But once in here, the Technology Becomes pretty 19th century. These are death certificates from 1912, for example. All in all, there are 17 million now, the state of alabama is system, and its about 60 of the way there. But theres so little funding around the country for that kind of transition that there are about a dozen states in america that do not have a statewide Electronic Filing system for death records. How accurate is the death master file . Patrick ocarroll i guess, the best way to say it is as accurate as it can be. Pelley Patrick Ocarroll is the Social Security administrations Inspector General. His Office Investigates how the death master file is used and abused. Ocarroll right now, the death master file has in it about 86 million records in it, and it gets about two million records every year from the states. And were probably, as with everything else, as strong as the weakest link, in terms that some states are reporting electronically, have very good data. And then with other states, its done on a more haphazard level. So again, theres going to be there. Pelley but ocarroll told us that live people falling through the cracks isnt what keeps him up at night. The much more costly problem is in the millions of americans who do die and are not recorded. Your office found that Social Security had no death data for six and a half Million People over the age of 111. Do you really believe that there are six and a half Million People over the age of 111 in this country . Thats why we did the audit on it. What we were finding is that people that were over 112 years of age were opening up bank accounts, and it got us suspicious. And we found that 6. 5 million was not recorded as being deceased in ssas records. Pelley how many people are over the age of 111 in this country . Ocarroll im thinking ten. Pelley most federal agencies depend on the death master file, federal payments just keep coming. Up to during the course of a year, but it turns out, no one in the federal government is keeping an overall count. The best we could come up with was a few reports from individual agencies. For example, the department of agriculture paid farm subsidies and Disaster Assistance to more than 170,000 dead people over six years. That came to 1. 1 billion. The office of Personnel Management paid dead federal retirees a little over a billion. And in 2010 alone, the i. R. S. Paid more than 400 million in refunds to the dead. Social security doesnt know how many retirement and disability checks are cashed by the relatives of the dead, like Sandra Kimbro. Sandra kimbro im a. A wife, a mother, a grandmother, and now a felon. Pelley like a lot of people, mother, and had a joint bank account with her. When her mother died, the disability benefits kept coming. When did she die . Kimbro she died. 1984. Pelley when she died, did you report her death to Social Security . Kimbro i did not. Pelley why not . Kimbro i thought perhaps it would have been taken care of by the funeral director at some point. Pelley were you surprised that these benefits kept coming to you . Kimbro no, not initially, because i had had a conversation with my mom prior to her death that i would be entitled to the benefits. So i had just assumed and went along with that, thinking that i was entitled. Pelley and what did it come to . Kimbro over a 30year period, 160,000. Pelley though she took the checks for three decades, otherwise, Sandra Kimbro is no ones idea of a thief. She and her husband had good fulltime jobs through life, and raised two children. But then came an unexpected call from Social Security. The investigator from Social Security mustve asked where your mother was . Kimbro oh, well, i explained to him immediately. I didnt try to say that she was alive. I said that she was deceased. Pelley Social Security suspected as much because it is using a clever new tool. Ocarroll so, we go to medicare and see if anybody hasnt been to medicare for three years. And if they havent been, we then, you know, try to go out and make a phone call to them, see if theyre, you know, still here. Also, we look at people that reach 100 years of age, and try to reach out and see if theyre, you know, doing well. Pelley Sandra Kimbros mother would have been 93 and hadnt used medicare in 30 years. Kimbro was charged with theft, pled guilty, and is now looking at at least a year in prison. She spoke with us, she said, to warn others. Kimbro ive spent 66 years, no criminal history. Lived a good life, did everything i was supposed to do, be a lawabiding citizen, and succumbed to this human error. And this is where i am. And obviously, felon is not compatible with the other three things that i said, but it is my reality. Pelley Inspector General Patrick Ocarroll says that Social Security is managing about 150 convictions a year, a fraction of the total. But it adds up to about 55 million in fraud. Ocarroll what were trying to do is get the word out there, is, if you do take it and youre not supposed to do it, were going to find you, were going to arrest you, and were going to get the money back. Pelley over the last decade, ocarroll has made 70 recommendations to Social Security to reform the death master file. But he says theres little sense of urgency. Is part of the problem here that, in washington, 50 million or 100 million a year just isnt a very big number . Ocarroll its interesting you bring that up, because i day. So, when you start taking a look at percentages of 2 billion, thats what to you, me, to a general taxpayer is going to be extremely large amounts of money really, percentagewise, is small compared to whats going out every day. Pelley as for the living whove been declared dead, Social Security told us we work very hard to correct errors when we learn of them. The agency said that its error rate is only one third of 1 . But that still adds up to about 9,000 americans killed off by the government each year. For them, it can be a long road to resurrection. It took judy rivers five years. And today, she carries a few credit cards, and something else. You carry a letter around with you. Rivers all the time. Pelley . Everywhere you go. What does it say . Rivers its from the Social Security office, and i have it and it says that. Who i am, what my Social Security number is, that i have been mistakenly declared as deceased in the past, and that that is not correct, and im alive and well, or at least alive. Pelley and you have that updated every month . Rivers every month. Pelley why . Rivers because when you get to about three months, people look at the date and say, well, this is old. You know, you couldve died since then. Pelley after we first broadcast this story, senators ron johnson and tom carper introduced a bill to ensure that improper payments to the dead stop, and the living stay off the death master file. The bill passed the committee and is waiting to move to the senate floor. As for Sandra Kimbro, she is a free woman now after serving six shopping for an suv . Well, this is the time. And your ford dealer is the place, to get 0 financing for 60 months on a ford suv. Thats right. Just announced. Ford explorer. Edge. Escape. 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Go antiviral with tamiflu. Yeah. Oh nooooo no not my limitedtime only, handprepared, spicy, smoky, crispy kfc Nashville Hot chicken with delightful pickles on top switch on your light, dear. My Nashville Hot chickens boy, i sure do have a lot of nightmares about chicken. Its Finger Lickin good Althea Gibson was the first africanamerican to win a grand slam tennis tournament, not to mention ten more. Celebrate her and learn more leslie stahl most of us take for granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. Its so automatic, it almost sounds silly to even say it. Friends can put on a hat, cut their hair, and still we know them by their face. And we can do this for thousands upon thousands of faces, without ever giving it a moments thought. But imagine for a second what life would be like if you husband looked like a stranger; you couldnt tell your kids apart; you couldnt recognize yourself in a mirror. As we first reported a few years back, thats what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, that can make it nearly impossible to recognize or identify faces. If youve never heard of face blindness, youre not alone. Chances are your doctor hasnt either. Its been unknown to most of the medical world until recently. Hearing about it can feel a little like entering the twilight zone. But for people who are face blind, the condition is very real. Jacob hodes is one of them. Hes 31 years old, he has a college degree, has had great jobs, and he seems perfectly normal. Just dont ask him to identify any faces. One. Even very famous ones. Jacob hodes no idea. Stahl we showed jacob faces without hair, a pure test of facial recognition. Hodes no. Nope. I cant say if ive ever seen that person. Stahl hes seen jimmy carter plenty of times. And knows michael jordan, too. Hodes oh, lord. Stahl he just cant recognize their faces. Hodes now, thats just impossible. Stahl can you describe my face . Youre staring right at it. Hodes high cheekbones, light eyes. Stahl clearly, jacob could see my face, but he says if we happened to run into each other me from any other woman with short blonde hair. Brad duchaine they meet with them, they have a nice then, a week later, they walk past them. Stahl Brad Duchaine is a professor at Dartmouth College who has been studying face he says the hardest thing to understand is how people can see a familiar face but not recognize it. So he created a demonstration to give me a little taste faces turned upside down. Duchaine so here are some famous faces. Youre going to be tempted to twist your head, but dont do it. Stahl okay. Duchaine you know, can you. Stahl boy, that is hard. Duchaine . Can you identify any of these people . Stahl i was completely at a loss. You think id know all of these people . Duchaine youve seen them all a lot. Stahl i dont know any of these people. I really dont. Duchaine you want to see stahl sure. It was astonishing. With just that click, they became recognizable people i know john travolta. I know morley. And there was denzel washington, jennifer aniston, sandra bullock. But the one that really got me was the young woman on the lower right my daughter. I didnt know my own daughter . Daughter. There she is. Wow. So is this. Am i getting a feeling for what people with face blindness have . Duchaine this is. When you look at that, theres clearly. Theres a face there. Stahl oh, yeah. Duchaine there are parts. There are eyes. Theres mouth. But you just cant put it together. Stahl wow. Thats stunning. I feel terrible for them now. Duchaine yeah. Its really difficult. Stahl and largely unknown. Prosopagnosia only got its name in the 1940s, when a couple of soldiers came back from world war ii with head injuries and couldnt recognize their wife or parents. And it took another 50 years for science to discover that people could be born face blind, like jacob hodes, and Jo Livingston, a retired teacher; ben dubrovsky, a Software Products designer; and meg novotny, a doctor. If i were your patient, we. Youd spent a long time with me discussing a problem. No. You walk out to the window at the front and start checking out, and i walk out of the room and i dont know who you are. Stahl come on. She relies on patient charts, she told us. But there arent any of those in bens office, where lunch in the cafeteria can be tricky. Ben dubrovsky i was sitting down at lunch, having a discussion with someone about one of my projects, and the guy across the table gets up from lunch and says, god, thats really interesting. When you have that meeting, can you invite me . Thanks. See you. Who is it . I dont know. Stahl who is it . Dubrovsky i have no idea. Stahl is it a memory issue . Hodes not only. Jo livingston the memory is never created. Stahl the face doesnt get put. Livingston it doesnt get filed. Stahl so they have to rely on other strategies to identify people hair, body shape, the way people walk, their voice, even style of dress. But jacob told us that it can all fall apart when someone changes their hair, like a colleague named sylvia who he couldnt find one day until she her usual ponytail. Hodes and she, like, put it into the ponytail, and once it was in place, that was sylvia. It clicked. Then, she took her hair back out of that ponytail. Stahl right then and there . Hodes yep. She just put it in and then took it out and. Stahl so she went from sylvia, not sylvia, sylvia, not sylvia . Hodes she disappeared. Stahl come on. Hodes yeah. Stahl to him, it was as though her face had changed into someone elses before his eyes. Hodes so now, im confronted with this situation that. That got weird. Because i knew this person was sylvia, but it didnt feel like sylvia. Stahl faces mean so much to us identity, beauty, character, a place to hang all our memories about a person. Faces have captivated artists forever, so it may surprise you to learn that the man who painted these faces, renowned portraitist chuck close, is also face blind, and severely so. Lets say you went out to have dinner with somebody, and then you saw her the next day. Chuck close wouldnt remember her. His career, even after a collapsed spinal artery left him mostly paralyzed, painting, well. Faces. Chuck close has face blindness and he paints faces. Close the reason i think i was driven to it was to. To take images of people that matter to me, and commit them to memory in the best way i can, which is to slow the whole process down, break it down into lots of little memorable pieces. Stahl which is exactly how he creates these works. He cant make sense of a whole face, so he works from a photograph with a grid on it, and translates what he sees, square by square, onto his canvas. Well, guess what weve done . Close i dont know. Stahl we put together a quiz for you. We brought some of our famous faces along to show him. Close from the chin, i think its, um, leno. Stahl and were surprised that he did pretty darn well. Close well, from the lips, i pretty good. But, of course, not perfect. Close i dont have a clue. Stahl thats tom cruise. Close right now, my guts are tied in knots because this very activity is the thing that makes me most nervous. Oh, now, i have to figure out who this person is. Stahl because he isnt recognizing these faces the way most of us do. Every face is a puzzle he has to solve. Close what im thinking . You dont see too many people with just a mustache anymore, so that means its probably somebody whos not alive. So, if its an African American of a certain age with a mustache, it. It might be Martin Luther king. Stahl youre amazing. You deduce, deduce, deduce. Youre like Sherlock Holmes here. Close yeah, this is how i get through life. Stahl of course, he knew we were showing him famous faces. With our group, we threw in a trick one, a photo of jos does anybody know who that is . No way. Stahl jo . Work on it, because its somebody that jo knows. Livingston well, it may be, but nothings coming. Stahl its someone in your family. But still, she didnt get it. Its your daughter. Now, can you see it . Is it clear now . Livingston it is believable now. Stahl we were baffled that a condition so extreme, it could keep people from recognizing their own children, could have been almost completely unknown until very recently. We asked dr. Oliver sacks, the famous chronicler of fascinating neurological conditions, who passed away last summer. He wrote about face blindness in his latest book, the minds eye. Dr. Oliver sacks it is with our faces that we face the world. Stahl how do you explain that the medical world did not sacks it is not usually a complaint of people. People do not bring it up. Many people who are color blind do not know of it until they take an army medical. One sort of assumes that other people are the way one is. Dubrovsky it never, ever, ever in my life occurred to me that people would look at a face and just get it like that. Livingston i believed that i was not good with people. But i had no idea of the reason. I just thought i was stupid. Stahl jo only learned there was such a thing as face blindness when she stumbled across this article, and came in to be tested in duchaines lab. A few hours after her second visit, in a bizarre coincidence, she and duchaine ended up attending the same event. Duchaine i kept placing my face in a position where she could see it. Livingston i realized that one of the group was staring at me in a way that people dont normally. Duchaine and so finally, at one point, i said, do you know who i am . Together. Stahl duchaine had seen face blindness in action; jo had seen the missed connections of her life. Livingston if that had been anybody else, they would have been presumably furious, would not have spoken to me, and would have probably never have spoken to me again. But i would never have known they were there. Stahl yeah. Livingston it made me realize, how many times have i done this . Stahl right. How many friends have you offended . How many people arent talking livingston and well never know. Sacks people do think you may be snubbing them or. Or stupid, or mad, or inattentive. Thats why its so important to recognize what one has, and to. And to admit it. Stahl which is exactly what sacks himself has just done written about the fact that he, too, is face blind. Sacks i have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as i can remember. My problem extends not only to my nearest and dearest, but also to myself. Experience of apologizing to someone, and realizing its a mirror. Stahl no. Sacks i have, indeed. Because you didnt know it was you . Sacks i. I could see that it was a large, clumsy man with a beard. Now, ive now found a way of dealing with this. I have one special feature. I have rather large ears. laughs if the large, clumsy man with a beard has extra large ears, its probably me. Stahl i shouldnt be smiling, but its funny. Sacks well. Well, it is i. I mean, these things are both comic and serious. Stahl and surprisingly common. Recent studies show as many as one in 50 people may be face blind. And the search is on for clues inside their brains. Well show you what the research is finding, plus, would you believe, superrecognizers. I would say mike wallace. Stahl that is mike wallace. Who never forget a face. I dont even know how to get rid of people. For the past 27 days, four men have outlasted authorities by making their getaway in a prius. This game ends now. To catch a prius, youve gotta be a prius. Guys, whats that . Oh, man. Toyota. Lets go places. Look, the wolf was huffing and puffing. Like you do sometimes, grandpa . Well, when you have copd, it can be hard to breathe. It can be hard to get air out, which can make it hard to get air in. So i talked to my doctor. She said. Symbicort could help you breathe better, starting within 5 minutes. Symbicort doesnt replace a rescue inhaler for sudden symptoms. Symbicort helps provide significant improvement of your lung function. Including chronic bronchitis and emphysema. It should not be taken more than twice a day. Symbicort contains formoterol. Medicines like formoterol increase the risk of death from asthma problems. Symbicort may increase your risk of lung infections, osteoporosis, and some eye problems. You should tell your doctor if you have a heart condition or high Blood Pressure before taking it. Symbicort could mean a day with better breathing. Watch out, piggies children giggle symbicort. Breathe better starting within 5 minutes. Call or go online to learn more about a free trial offer. If you cant afford your medication, astrazeneca may be able to help. I didnt really know anything about my family history. Went to ancestry, i put in the names of my grandparents first. I got a leaf right away. A leaf is a hint that is connected to each person in your family tree. I learned that my ten times great grandmother is George Washingtons aunt. Within a few days i went from knowing almost nothing to holy crow, im related to george washington. This is my cousin george. Discover your story. Start searching for e trade is all about seizing opportunity. So i m going to take this opportunity to go off script. So if i wanna go to jersey and check out shotsy tuccerelli s portfolio, what s it to you . Or i m a scottish mason whose assets are made of stone like me heart. Papa you re no son of mine or perhaps it s time to seize the day. Don t just see opportunity, seize it theyre one of the wall street banks that triggered the financial meltdown goldman sachs. Just settled with authorities for their part in the crisis that put seven million out of work and millions out of their homes. How does wall street get away with it . Millions in Campaign Contributions and speaking fees. Our economy works for wall street because its riggedt by wall street. And thats the problem. As long as washington is bought and paid for, we cant build an economy and i approve this message. Eric fisher on wbz news stahl no one knows what causes lifelong face blindness. It was discovered so recently, scientists are just beginning to unravel its secrets. And some of the clues are coming from people who once had normal face recognition, but lost it after suffering damage to part of the brain. And in an interesting twist, those people are also offering insight into the way the rest of us recognize faces. Imagine waking up after a trauma and not being able to recognize the people closest to you. Thats what happened to colleen castaldo. Up until the fall of 2009, did you have any trouble recognizing all. Stahl like everybody else . Castaldo like everybody else, yeah. Stahl that all changed late one night when colleen had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. Her doctors found a brain tumor, and did surgery to remove it, but as she recovered, she started noticing that something wasnt right. Castaldo the nurses i thought that i was meeting them each for the first time. And then, i would, you know, listen to them and think, i dont know, they. They were acting like they knew me already. Stahl oh, disorienting. She figured it was the medication, until her close friend doreen came to visit wearing white, and colleen assumed she was part of the medical staff. Castaldo i looked at her, i smiled, and i turned back to my husband and started to talk to him, and he stood up and said, doreen. And i looked and thought, doreen . And then, it hit me. I knew right then and there, this is the problem i had been having, that i. Stahl faces. Castaldo yeah, faces. Stahl now, even faces she castaldo no. Stahl okay, well, thats George Clooney. Castaldo oh, wow. No, i wouldnt know that. Stahl . Are a mystery to castaldo no, i dont know who that is. Who is it . Stahl the president. Brad duchaine showed me an mri scan of colleens brain. Is that a hole in her brain . Duchaine thats right. Its in the right temporal lobe. Stahl so back here. Duchaine thats right. Stahl and the location of that hole where the tumor had been was a clue if removing that area caused the loss of face recognition, could that be where all our brains process faces . It turns out that neuroscientists have been trying to figure out how it is that our brains recognize faces for decades. Nancy kanwisher face recognition is a very difficult problem, because all faces are basically the same. Stahl m. I. T. Neuroscientist nancy kanwisher. Kanwisher there are these two roundish things here. Theres this thing there. Theres this thing there. Theyre all the same. And so discriminating one face computationally difficult thing, because its those subtle differences in the same basic structure that distinguish one thing from another. Stahl and it is exactly those subtle differences face blind people like Jo Livingston miss. Livingston i could describe anything that i can put into words eye color, general overall shape, whether your ears stick out. But those things would bring it down perhaps from the population of the world to a few million. Stahl so, she could say this person has dark eyes, high cheekbones, an oval face, which would allow jo to distinguish her from this person. But this face and this face . Impossible. Livingston i can say what i can see. But i cannot say the micro measurements that are what tell a normal person that its you and not somebody of the same specification. Stahl but how is it that the rest of us can perceive these individuals, despite the similarities . What we cant distinguish as we saw earlier, faces upside down, like these two duchaine showed me, which looked very similar. Duchaine maybe you dont even see that theres any difference. Stahl i see Something Different in the lower lip. Eyes are a little different. Duchaine but then, if i show them to you upright. So, heres the one that you saw on the left there. Looked perfectly normal. And then. Stahl oh. Duchaine heres the one you saw on the right, you saw upsidedown. Stahl oh, my goodness. The eyes and mouth in the photo on the right had been turned upsidedown. Duchaine and now, the face looks really grotesque. Stahl wow. Duchaine but. Stahl but upsidedown. Duchaine upsidedown, its really hard to see that. Kanwisher if you look at a face upsidedown, youre very bad at recognizing it. If you look at a word or an object or a scene, you can recognize it fine upsidedown. Stahl so what did that tell you . Kanwisher it tells you that theres something very special about face recognition. It works in a very different way from recognition of everything else. Stahl and that got kanwisher wondering if there might be a part of the brain responsible she started putting people with normal face recognition into m. R. I. Scanners and watching what happens in their brains as they looked at different images. This is what shes seeing . Kanwisher yeah, this is what shes seeing. Stahl shes seeing faces. Kanwisher exactly. And now, shes seeing objects, because we want to know not just what parts of the brain are active when you see faces, but what parts are more active when you see faces than when you see objects. Stahl kanwisher discovered that there was indeed a place in the brain that becomes very active when we look at faces. Kanwisher in every subject, boom, there was this nice, big response there. It was very exciting. Stahl and it was right in the same area where colleens tumor had been. Its called the fusiform face area. So could that be whats missing in people with lifelong face blindness, like jacob hodes . Kanwisher put him in the scanner to find out. Kanwisher i really did not expect to see a fusiform face area. Stahl so you thought thered be nothing there like as if instead of having a bullet go without it. Kanwisher thats right. Stahl and . Kanwisher and we looked at the data and his face area was beautiful. Its textbook. Stahl she scanned jo, ben, and meg, as well, and they had fusiform face areas, too. So what does that say to you . Kanwisher it tells us that the problem is not that this thing doesnt exist. There it is. But see, thats the fun of science. Its fun to be told youre just completely and totally wrong, because now you have to go back and, you know, think anew. Stahl and one thing she and other researchers are thinking about is a phenomenon as mystifying as face blindness its polar opposite, super recognizers like jennifer jarett, who say they recognize almost every face they have ever seen. Waiters . Jennifer jarett yes. Stahl salespeople . Jarett yes, yes. Stahl oh, like, of course. Jarett yes, absolutely. Yes. Ill be walking down the street and ill see someone, and ill think, oh, retail. And then ill remember, oh okay, that person works at. As i. Or they used to work at that store ten years ago. And then, i remember. Stahl ten years ago . Jarett yes, yes. Stahl so, theyre. It doesnt matter how far back you saw these people . Jarett yes, yes. Stahl so, as long as you look at a person and take notice, theyre in there. Jarett i. I dont even know how to get rid of people. Stahl only a handful of superrecognizers have been discovered so far, and duchaine and his colleagues had to come up with a whole new way to test them. Duchaine so here are three faces here which youre familiar with. Stahl i am . Its called the before they were famous test, because superrecognizers can also recognize faces as they change through time. Duchaine does that help at all . Stahl you sure i know that person . Duchaine thats dick cheney. Stahl oh, my god. Thats dick cheney . He told me the top right was richard gere, and the bottom, nancy pelosi. Those three people have changed dramatically. laughter one hes now an actor. And im supposed to know this actor . Clearly, i am not a super duchaine thats George Clooney. And these superrecognizers just know this . Duchaine the supers are really good at recognizing these faces. Stahl how could you tell that was George Clooney . Jarett it just looked like George Clooney to me. Oh, prince charles. Oh, madonna. Michael jordan. Stahl the o. J. Simpson trial. Wow, you are good. But we thought we had finally stumped her with this one. Jarett if i were to guess, i stahl that is mike wallace. She recognized the late mike i dont even understand how you do that. I cant fathom it. Guess the aging process somehow, in my brain, just seems very sort of superficial. And, you know, as if. If someone gets a haircut, you. You can still recognize them. Its still the same face to me. Its just the adult version. Stahl so why is 60 years like a haircut to her, while faceblind people cant recognize someone they just saw . A team of scientists at harvard has begun scanning the brains of superrecognizers, too, to see if they might yield any clues. The science of facial recognition is in its infancy. But new discoveries cant come fast enough for one last person wed like you to meet 13year old Tim Mcdonough from boston, who is severely face blind. Feels like when someone comes up . You know youre supposed to know who they are. Tim mcdonough i usually just say, you know, hi, nice to see stahl so, you. You sometimes pretend. Mcdonough yeah. Stahl you fake it. Mcdonough i fake it, yeah. So, you think its not your mom . Mcdonough yeah. Okay, so that actually was stahl tim is working with the harvard team to see if they can help him learn to recognize his mothers face. Now, is this one your mom or not . We could start at the top. We could do eyebrows, eyes, nose, we could even use the cheeks there. Stahl its part of a Pilot Program to see if face blindness might someday be treatable. Mcdonough this ones a little bit harder. Stahl so far, its not. Mcdonough i dont know. I just hope that nobody tries to talk to me because, if they do, they. Stahl they want to talk about something youve done with them or something. Mcdonough yeah, and i dont know who they are. Stahl so it must be really hard to make friends. Mcdonough it is, yeah. Takes me a while to make friends. Stahl it turns out making friends can be tricky at both ends of the face recognition spectrum. Superrecognizers can seem like jarett i would see someone, you know, weeks or months later at a party and people would say, oh, do you know each other . And id say, yes. And the other person would say, no. And id say, no, dont you remember the first week of classes, you were walking to english class with someone. laughs and people would look at me really strangely and sort of uncomfortably, i think, a lot. Stahl jennifer says shes now learned to take cues from others, ironically, just as face blind people do. Hodes ill play this eye contact game where ill wait. Im not going to really look at you, but ill wait to see if you look at me. And then, oh, you look at me. Oh, look. Oh, hi. Stahl so, youre always waiting for a cue from them. Hodes yeah. So ill hang back a little bit, which i dont want to do. Stahl in any social situation, are you always a little anxious . Sacks im more than a little anxious. And i. I tend to keep my mouth closed before i make some awful blunder. Of course, another tactic or strategy is to smile at everybody. Stahl thats what chuck close told us he does. Charming. If you are going to insult them by not remembering them, you just have to be extremely charming so that people dont hold this stuff against you. Stahl do you feel now that youre missing out on something . Dubrovsky oh, yeah. Novotny yeah. Dubrovsky definitely, i notice a loss. I understand someone by an abstraction. I put together a set of information that, to me, means mother or means lesley. Stahl but its not a visualization of a face. Dubrovsky and the question. The thing that i wonder next, you know, is how does it affect even things like love . Stahl how does it . Dubrovsky when people talk about love they say, i carry the person with me. I carry their image with me. I dont carry their image. Does that mean i experience it differently . And how would i ever know . I dont know. Hodes theres a long tail of stuff that happens that youre missing, connections youre not making. Stahl still . Hodes oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Understand why. Hodes yeah, right. Novotny and its therapeutic, but it doesnt fix it. Announcer for a look at how 60 minutes reports its stories, along with interviews with correspondents and producers, go to 60minutesovertime. Com cant afford to let heartburn get in the way . Try nexium 24hr, now the 1 selling brand for frequent heartburn. Get complete protection with the new leader thats nexium level protection. Here at persil. The Top Notch Team of stain experts has performed over ten thousand stain evaluations to prove persil delivers a premium clean. Weve made a new stain with wasabi and goji berries. Make that ten thousand persil proclean. Hi. Hey there, can i help you with anything . Hey siri, whats at ts latest offer . Oh, i dont think that siri can. Right now, switch to at t for an iphone and get one free. Wow, is that right . Yes. That is the current offer from at t. Okay siri, you dont know everything. Well, i know you asked me to call you the at t hostess with the mostest. Okay, shut her down. Turn it off. Right now, buy an iphone and get another one free when tt0w tx hi 4 hmm hmm hmmhmmhmmhmm counting the cars on the new jersey turnpike theyve all come to look for america [ cheers and applause ] all come to look for america all come to look for america im bernie sanders, pelley in the mail this week, viewers wrote about the hostage, our story of an american, warren weinstein, who was abducted and held for ransom in pakistan and his wife elaines efforts to free him. Weinstein, an Economic Development worker employed by a government contractor, was accidently killed in an u. S. Drone strike while being held by al qaeda. A florida viewer felt 60 minutes was wrong to report the f. B. I. Advised mrs. Weinstein on how to pay the ransom, while u. S. Law forbids that. The hostage should not have been aired, you did not help other captives broadcasting fbi and u. S. Government positions only aids the terrorists. Robert brands while i fully understand the pain, mourning and loss that mrs. Weinstein feels, i firmly believe that anyone travelling into the most dangerous places on earth must do so of their own free will and with no expectation of rescue. D. Michael johnson new york, ny and then there was this any of us is sad when our citizens die abroad at the hands of a gang of terrorists. But the interview made our government seem to be responsible for his ransom. Katherine nelson brookfield, wi im scott pelley. Well be back next week with a brand new edition of 60 minutes. Tomorrow, be sure to watch cbs this morning, and ill see you by bobby day playing mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm