I used to have a lot of trouble seeing faces in both books and dreams, and I can only guess why I got better. To better visualize the faces of characters in books I consciously “cast” friends, actors, and mostly generic ethnic looks. And I also mentally design faces—I can choose brachycephaly or dolichocephaly, a concave or convex nose and anything in between, recessed eyes or bug eyes, jaw curvature and slope, etc. I can also classify anyone from Iran to Ireland with relative accuracy, and East Asians/Sub-Saharan Africans by broad geography. My guess is that my former interest in anthropology (e.g. looking at portraits with the nationality of the person captioned underneath)and real-life practice have trained my brain to make these distinctions, as well as the crowd I keep, but there’s surely some heritable component to this ability.
I used to have a lot of trouble seeing faces in both books and dreams, and I can only guess why I got better. To better visualize the faces of characters in books I consciously “cast” friends, actors, and mostly generic ethnic looks. And I also mentally design faces—I can choose brachycephaly or dolichocephaly, a concave or convex nose and anything in between, recessed eyes or bug eyes, jaw curvature and slope, etc. I can also classify anyone from Iran to Ireland with relative accuracy, and East Asians/Sub-Saharan Africans by broad geography. My guess is that my former interest in anthropology (e.g. looking at portraits with the nationality of the person captioned underneath)and real-life practice have trained my brain to make these distinctions, as well as the crowd I keep, but there’s surely some heritable component to this ability.