Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 16

Prosopagnosia is a medical condition that stops people from recognizing people’s faces, but how common is it and why does it happen? It was Jacob Hodes’s first day at college. He can still recall spending an enjoyable afternoon being shown around campus by a second-year student named Daniel Byrne, who happened to be from his home town. Jacob then spent the rest of the year ignoring him. ‘I never saw him again,’ he says. ‘Well, I’m sure I walked past him plenty of times, but I just didn’t see him.’ This behaviour wasn’t intentional. Jacob just couldn’t recollect what his fellow student looked like. He had had the same trouble all his life. Friends and relatives would greet him and he would have no idea who they were. It wasn’t until five years ago that it all made sense. That was when Hodes was diagnosed with prosopagnosia, a condition that means he is unable to recognise faces. According to researchers, he is far from alone. In fact, the condition is not that uncommon, but until a few years ago only a few dozen cases had ever been described, and all of these had been caused by brain injury. Recently, though, researchers identified a second form of face blindness, developmental prosopagnosia, which is either present from birth or develops very early in life. In May a team from Harvard University in the US and University College London (UCL) announced the results of a web survey of 1,600 people, suggesting that up to 2 per cent of people have some degree of face blindness. Then in August, Martina Gruter and colleagues at the Institute for Human Genetics in Munster, Germany, similarly reported that 2.5 per cent of 700 secondary-school pupils they had tested had trouble recognising faces. The results of the surveys took everyone by surprise. It seems that if you have never known what it is to recognise a face, you don’t necessarily know that you are supposed to be able to. Prosopagnosics almost always know that they have trouble recognising people, but they often don’t realise that other people have better recognition skills than they do, says Brad Duchaine, a researcher at UCL. Despite these issues, the majority of developmental prosopagnosics possess strategies that allow them to get around their difficulty—for instance, by recognising hair, clothing, or a person’s way of speaking—so, unless they see a familiar person out of context, with a new hairstyle or in different clothes, they can recognise people just fine. Even so, the discovery of developmental prosopagnosia has attracted attention from neuroscientists keen to discover what is different about the brain of face-blind people. This difference, they believe, could help solve the problem of how the brain deals with information in general, not just visual data. In other words, it may show whether the brain has specialised parts for specific tasks or is more of a general-purpose information processor. One issue, however, that will present challenges for researchers is that no two prosopagnosics are the same. Some have problems only with faces, while others have trouble with ordinary everyday objects and, so it turns out, animals which would normally be familiar as well. Some prosopagnosics can train themselves to recognise specific faces; others can’t even recognise their own in a mirror. When some have been tested they could identify the emotion that was conveyed on another’s face, even though the face itself seemed unfamiliar, while for other subjects this was an impossibility. Some cannot recognise the faces of old friends or fellow students but have no trouble telling whether a particular face from such groups would be attractive to most people. Because of this diversity, working out the cause of prosopagnosia will not be easy. In Martina Gruter’s study, the prosopagnosics who agreed to have their parents and relatives tested reported at least one relative with the condition. Having looked at 38 cases in seven families, the German team believe they have good evidence that a single gene could be responsible. Duchaine also has some evidence that face blindness could be inherited but thinks other factors might be more significant. He refers to studies of babies born with a condition which means the eye’s lens is not clear, and when it’s the left one, being unable to see through this eye during the first two months of life is a major risk factor for prosopagnosia. Whatever the cause, what most prosopagnosics want to know is whether they can do anything to improve their face-recognition skills. Joseph DeGutis, a graduate student at the University of California, recently reported successfully training a severe developmental prosopagnosic to recognise faces during tests carried out in the laboratory. The subject also reported that recognising faces in everyday life became easier due to the training. Duchaine now plans to attempt to train sufferers to recognise the five people they most need to know—maybe their immediate family, for example, and essential colleagues. Thomas Gruter, Martina Gruter’s husband, who also works on her team, however, is not convinced it will work. ‘I don’t know how you can have more training than you have already had,’ he says. ‘Humans already spend all day looking at faces.’ He also points out that cheating is a possibility during tests and provides an example. One person we studied said that when she was doing the face-recognition test, she memorised the distance between nose and upper lip. She wasn’t the only one. So you can perform well in the test and not do so well in real life.

Calorie restriction, or ‘semi-starvation’ as some refer to it, has been proven to extend lifespan in many living organisms from yeast to mice, but the picture for primates, including humans, is not so clear. Research published by a team at the University of Wisconsin in the United States shows that rhesus monkeys also live longer on a calorie-restricted diet. But those findings disagree with research by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Maryland, also in the United States. Rozalyn Anderson, of the Wisconsin team, says the research is not intended as a recommendation of calorie restriction. ‘I find the idea monumentally unattractive!’ she says. ‘We study it because it is so effective at delaying ageing and the onset of age-related disease. It’s a way to tease out what it is that creates increased disease vulnerability as a function of age.’ Both groups started long-term trials on rhesus monkeys in the late 1980s to determine whether calorie restriction would extend the lifespan of primates. In mice, many experiments had come to the same finding: feed them a diet with 30% fewer calories and see a lifespan extension of 40%. The monkey trials were set up in a similar way: researchers took the calorie content of a standard monkey diet, cut it by 30% (while continuing to supply all essential nutrients) and monitored whether those monkeys lived longer, healthier lives than those on the standard diet. In 2009, with the monkeys approaching old age, preliminary findings of the two trials started coming in. For the Wisconsin monkeys, calorie restriction seemed to be working. Compared to well-fed control animals, the lean monkeys were living longer and suffering less from the diseases of ageing: diabetes, heart disease and brain diseases. However, in 2012 the NIA results emerged with a dramatically different conclusion: their monkeys were not living any longer than the controls, although they were healthier. The Wisconsin group’s latest results confirm that their calorie-restricted monkeys are living longer than the controls. They also offer a possible explanation of why the two groups’ findings don’t agree, and that lies in the treatment of the control group. The Wisconsin study began with monkeys in early adulthood. Initially, all the monkeys were allowed to eat as much as they liked. A few months into the trial, the monkeys were placed into one of two groups: the controls (who continued to be fed as much as they wished) and the calorie-restricted monkeys (who were given an individualised diet of 30% less than they were previously eating). The NIA study differed in two ways. First, the control group of monkeys were not allowed to eat as much as they wished. They were given a diet considered to represent a normal calorie count, while the calorie-restricted monkeys were fed 30% less than that. Second, whereas the Wisconsin monkeys were given highly processed food high in sucrose, making it easy to standardise, the NIA diet was based on whole grains, fish oils, and was very low in sugar. These different settings for the normal control diet may provide an explanation of why the two groups showed different results. The Wisconsin group may in effect have studied the effects of ‘overeating’. Their control animals weighed up to 10% more than average for their age and gender. Compared to them, the calorie-restricted animals not only suffered fewer diseases, they lived longer. Julie Mattison, head of the NIA study, observes that an overweight person who goes to a fast food restaurant every day will obviously benefit if their calories are cut back by 30%. The NIA study fed their control monkeys what they considered a ‘standard’ caloric intake and saw that longevity for monkeys that were fed 30% less was the same. But in Anderson’s view, the NIA control monkeys were not fed enough; the NIA was calorie restricting both groups of animals. Their older female control monkeys, for example, weighed nearly 20% less than the national average. Indeed, Anderson points out that several of the NIA control monkeys have lived past the age of 40, far exceeding the 27-year average lifespan for captive rhesus monkeys. ‘That’s the maximum lifespan ever detected for the species, so the idea that their intervention is doing nothing is really at odds with the data,’ says Anderson. However, neither group had the right notion of a standard diet according to Leonie Heilbronn, who researches calorie restriction and healthy ageing at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Heilbronn points out that the NIA controls were a very healthy set of monkeys and leaner than a control monkey should be. On the other hand, she notes, the Wisconsin controls were a little bigger than they had to be. On balance, Heilbronn agrees with the Wisconsin researcher’s argument. ‘I think these studies suggest calorie restriction definitely will increase lifespan,’ she says. Both studies agree that cutting calories is beneficial to health — in both cases the calorie-restricted monkeys had fewer diseases related to ageing. As to the question of whether calorie restriction extends lifespan in primates, Anderson and Mattison are currently working together to compare the two studies’ raw data. They plan to co-publish a joint analysis. The current data conflict will ultimately provide deeper insights into ageing, Anderson predicts. ‘The fact the two studies were set up differently, asking the same question in different ways — I think we will gain maximally from that.’

Mark Strizic, who passed away in December last year, was the last representative of a remarkable generation of European émigré photographers who settled in Australia after the Second World War. Alongside Wolfgang Sievers and Henry Talbot, Strizic contributed significantly to the visual culture of his adopted country. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, whose reputations were largely based on industrial or commercial photography, Strizic developed a career that was unusually complex. Over a span of five decades, he explored multiple photographic styles, experimented with new printing processes, engaged in book design, produced large-scale murals, and participated actively in teaching the next generation of photographers. After his arrival in Melbourne from Zagreb in 1950, Strizic initially studied science, but soon turned to photography. From the mid-1950s he began to establish himself, not only through individual works but also through collaborations. One of his most enduring achievements was his partnership with the critic and historian David Saunders, with whom he produced Melbourne: A Portrait in 1960. The book was distinctive for its use of offset printing, a relatively new process at the time, which allowed photographs and text to be integrated seamlessly on the page. Strizic, as both photographer and designer, arranged his images so that one composition flowed into the next, often leaving areas of blank space or floating lines of text to balance the spreads. The result was a visually coherent book, which also carried an ambitious cultural agenda: Saunders’ text was printed in Italian and German as well as English, suggesting an international readership. The book’s bright and cheerful cover, designed by Leonard French, contributed to its appeal. In 1961 it was awarded Book of the Year, recognition not only of the photographs themselves but of the integrated design of the whole publication. Strizic later admitted that the idea for Melbourne: A Portrait had been shaped by his father’s earlier work. His father, an architect in Zagreb, had published Light and Shade in 1955, a reflective “city book” in the European style, which contrasted sharply with the more commercial boosterism of contemporary Australian publications. Strizic deliberately sought to emulate this contemplative approach, presenting Melbourne as a modern yet cultured metropolis. During the 1960s and 70s, Strizic continued to photograph the rapid transformation of Melbourne. His distinctive technique often involved pointing the camera directly into the sunlight, creating stark contrasts in which buildings and figures were reduced to silhouettes. Many of his images juxtapose old Victorian facades with newly constructed skyscrapers, capturing a city in the midst of radical expansion. Cars, highways and office towers dominate the frame, while human figures are frequently marginalised, squeezed into the bottom corners or overshadowed by the built environment. By the late 1970s, Strizic’s vision of Melbourne had grown darker. Using experimental methods, such as printing black-and-white negatives on colour paper or duplicating them onto high-contrast lithographic film, he produced cityscapes that glowed with intense, sometimes psychedelic colours, giving Melbourne an almost hallucinatory quality. Collaboration remained central to Strizic’s career. In 1967 he worked with Sun Books, a small but ambitious publishing house, on several innovative projects. For Tim Burstall’s film 2000 Weeks he created a photo-roman, a paperback-sized publication in which his stills from the film were combined with dialogue. Although the film was produced in a European art-house style and tackled existential themes, it failed at the box office, and Strizic’s book met a similar fate. Nevertheless, the project demonstrated his willingness to experiment with new formats. A more prestigious venture was Involvement (1968), a limited-edition art book edited by Andrew Grimwade. The concept was to pair Strizic’s photographic portraits with paintings by the artist Clifton Pugh. The accompanying text, written by Geoffrey Dutton, sought to place the collaboration in a grand cultural framework. Yet the book was widely regarded as unsatisfactory, largely because of its design. Unlike Melbourne: A Portrait, Strizic did not design the volume himself, and the layout by Les Gray failed to balance the colour plates of Pugh’s paintings with the black-and-white photographs. Despite this, Strizic’s portraits attracted attention for their originality. He employed experimental methods such as “pushing” his 35mm film to increase contrast and grain, and often shot his sitters against dominant backgrounds or with objects intruding into the foreground. The effect was to highlight their individuality and resistance to their surroundings. His portrait of Sir Charles Moses, head of the ABC, shows him through a haze of cigar smoke, while Barry Humphries appears surrounded by eccentric antiques in his London flat. These images were exhibited in 1968 at the National Gallery of Victoria under the title Some Australian Personalities, marking the institution’s first solo exhibition devoted to photography. Strizic’s collaborative spirit extended into many other areas. He documented the sculptor John Davis and the furniture designer Schulim Krimper for monographs commissioned in the 1980s, but his connection with Krimper went back to 1959. He also worked with avant-garde artists such as Asher Bilu, producing the only surviving photographic record of Bilu’s interactive electronic work Sculptron (1967). This task required considerable technical skill, since Strizic had to balance the exposure for glowing cathode-ray tubes with the surrounding sculptural elements. In the field of murals, he developed large-scale photographic works for government buildings and corporate headquarters, sometimes combining his “photochromes” with paintings. A notable example was his collaboration with Stanislav Ostoja-Kotkowski in 1970 on a twelve-metre mural for the Ciba-Geigy building in Preston, which merged infrared photography with Strizic’s experimental prints. That same year, Strizic worked with the influential architect Robin Boyd on Living in Australia, a book which sought to articulate Boyd’s design philosophy. Strizic’s photography reinforced Boyd’s arguments, presenting domestic architecture through dramatic diagonal compositions and sharp contrasts. The book was recently republished, confirming its continuing relevance. In later years, Strizic combined his artistic practice with teaching in Melbourne’s new photography departments during the boom of the 1970s. In 1988 he returned to his earliest negatives of Melbourne, staging an exhibition that highlighted his long-standing interest in the city’s changing urban landscape. Since then, he has often been remembered as a nostalgic chronicler of “old Melbourne” or “disappearing Melbourne.” Yet such a label oversimplifies his contribution. His career was marked by continuous experimentation, by fruitful collaborations with artists, writers and designers, and by a willingness to engage with both traditional and avant-garde practices. In this sense, he occupies a significant though sometimes underrecognised position in the development of Australian visual culture.