***

It’s a Sunday evening and it’s Hodes’s turn to cook dinner at home. His roommate Heidi Chua Schwa is in the kitchen making tea.

Hodes has lived in his Brooklyn apartment for five years. Because he doesn’t like to talk about his condition, he initially confused his roommates when he didn’t acknowledge them.

“He completely ignored me on the street one day and I was like ‘what?’” says Schwa, laughing.

Hodes smiles shyly. “Yeah, but then I told you about it and it was okay.”

He believes he needs to meet someone at least 30 times before he can recognize him or her. Social networking, however, is helping him cope. “Facebook actually really helps a lot, because I can see what the person looks like if I haven’t met them in a few months.”

Doctors and researchers say there’s no cure for the disorder, but they’ve made progress in identifying the areas of the brain that could be responsible for face blindness. In October 2012, doctors at Stanford performed a clinical procedure on a patient with electrodes temporarily implanted in his brain. They were able to find two nerve clusters that were critical for face perception. “We stimulated the region of the brain responsible for seizures,” says Josef Parvizi, assistant professor of neurology at Stanford. “It caused the patient’s vision of faces to distort, leaving the perception of inanimate objects and other body parts the same.”

While the study doesn’t provide any options for treatment, it helps distinguish the part of the brain responsible for face recognition. “I wouldn’t call it groundbreaking, but it is important because causelogy has been established for prosopagnosia, which other studies have not been able to do,” Parvizi says. Connecticut Muffin at Lafayette and Fulton in Brooklyn is one of Hodes’ regular haunts. He sits with one leg propped against the armrest of the chair, sipping chai.

“I like traveling,” he says. “I went to Sri Lanka to visit this girl I was dating, it was really beautiful.”

Does it ever scare him, traveling and maintaining a relationship given his disorder? He smiles “No, it doesn’t. But this girl that I was dating, she kept changing her hairstyle and it drove me nuts. It was like waking up with a different person every day.”

It does cause him problems as a journalist sometimes, though. He describes an interview he did while reporting on factory workers in the Bronx. “I’m taking really detailed notes and everything—suddenly his brother comes over. I look at them, same features, same hair and I think, ‘I’m totally screwed.’”

When he returned for a follow-up interview he asked the family members their names again, checking them against his notes. If he doesn’t recognize a source, he asks for the spelling of her name.

Like other prosopagnosics, Hodes complains that following the plot of a movie or television show is difficult. He watched Amour recently and didn’t find it difficult to follow because there were so few characters. But back on his favorite spot on the couch, James Cameron’s Avatar confounds him within the first two minutes when an actor morphs into a cartoonish character.

“Wait, is this the same guy that was looking at the dead body?” he asks baffled. He pauses and rewinds, starting the movie over three times.

He throws his hands in the air, exasperated, “How can you tell if he was the same guy in the wheelchair? Can you tell them apart? Man, you have some superpower.”

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