http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/11/18/1679578.aspxUnable to recognize voices, unless it's Sean Connery
Posted on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 3:11 PM PT
By Brian Alexander
For as long as she could remember a 60-year-old British woman, known only as KH, has been unable to recognize voices, not even the voice of her own daughter. Unless she sees the face of the person speaking, she often has no idea who is talking to her. If her daughter calls on the phone, or an unseen colleague from work says something to her, it’s as if she’s hearing the voice for the first time.
Except when Sean Connery speaks.
KH didn’t know what caused her problem until a few years ago when she read a magazine article about a neurological defect which makes it extremely difficult for people to recognize faces — a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. She wondered if there could be some connection to her experiences. Hoping the doctors might solve her own mystery, she contacted prosopagnosia researcher Dr. Brad Duchaine at University College London.
“She thought she had a vocal prosopagnosia,” Duchaine said in an interview. “But we had never done anything involving voices. So we ran her through some face tests, some voice tests, and we could see she was on the level.”
An MRI showed no obvious structural defects or injuries. So Duchaine and colleague Lucia Garrido of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience created a series of more complex tasks to more thoroughly test KH’s ability to recognize faces, voices, emotions, music and overall perception of speech.(more at link)
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