captioning funded by cbs and ford-- built for the road ahead. >> gupta: new research coming out of america's most respected institutions is starting to find that sugar could be a driving force behind some of this country's leading killers. is sugar toxic? >> i believe it is. >> gupta: do you ever worry that just sounds a little bit over the top? >> sure. all the time. but it is the truth. >> gupta: and it turns out sugar is becoming major focus in cancer research, too. louis cantley is looking at the connection. >> if you limit your sugar, you decrease your chances of developing cancer, absolutely.

>> 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 couldn't. >> no idea. >> don't have a clue. >> stahl: couldn't recognize yourself in a mirror. >> this is a problem i have been having. >> stahl: faces. >> yes, faces. >> stahl: that's 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. >> i'm steve kroft. >> i'm lesley stahl. >> i'm morley safer. >> i'm bob simon. >> i'm sanjay gupta. >> i'm scott pelley. those stories tonight on "60 minutes." (in audible chatter, laughing) wow,

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>> pelley: now, cnn's sanjay gupta on assignment for "60 minutes." >> gupta: the chances are good that sugar is a bigger part of your daily diet than you may realize, which is why our story is so important. as we first reported last

spring, new research coming out of some of america's most respected institutions is starting to find that sugar, the way many people are eating it today, is a toxin and could be a driving force behind some of this country's leading killers, including heart disease. as a result of these findings, an anti-sugar campaign has sprung up, led by dr. robert lustig, a california endocrinologist, who believes the consumption of added sugars has plunged america into a public health crisis. is sugar toxic? >> dr. robert lustig: i believe it is. >> gupta: do you ever worry that that's... it just sounds a little bit over the top? >> lustig: sure, all the time. but it's the truth. >> gupta: dr. robert lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at the university of california, san francisco, and a pioneer in what is becoming a war against sugar. >> lustig: deep breaths. >> gupta: motivated by his own patients-- too many sick and obese children-- dr. lustig has concluded that sugar, more than any other substance, is to blame. what are all these various diseases that you say are linked to sugar? >> lustig: obesity, type ii diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease itself. >> gupta: lustig says the

american lifestyle is killing us. and most of it, you say, is preventable? >> lustig: 75% of it is preventable. >> gupta: while dr. lustig has published a dozen scientific articles on the evils of sugar, it was his lecture on youtube, called "sugar: the bitter truth," that brought his message to the masses. >> lustig: i'm standing here today to recruit you in the war against bad food. >> gupta: by "bad food," dr. lustig means the obvious things such as table sugar, honey, syrup, sugary drinks, and desserts, but also just about every processed food you can imagine, where sugar is often hidden-- yogurts and sauces, bread, even peanut butter. and what about the man-made, often vilified sweetener, high fructose corn syrup? is it worse than just table sugar? >> lustig: no, because it's the exact same.

they are basically equivalent. the problem is they're both bad. they're both equally toxic. >> gupta: since the 1970s, sugar consumption has gone down nearly 40%, but high fructose corn syrup has more than made up the difference. dr. lustig says they are both toxic because they both contain fructose-- that's what makes them sweet and irresistible. >> lustig: we love it. we go out of our way to find it. i think one of the reasons evolutionarily is because there is no foodstuff on the planet that has fructose that is poisonous to you. it is all good. so, when you taste something that's sweet, it's an evolutionary darwinian signal that this is a safe food. >> gupta: we were born this way? >> lustig: we were born this way. >> gupta: central to dr. lustig's theory is that we used to get our fructose mostly in small amounts of fruit, which came loaded with fiber that slows absorption and consumption.

after all, who can eat ten oranges at a time? but as sugar and high fructose corn syrup became cheaper to refine and produce, we started gorging on them. americans now consume 130 pounds per person a year, that's a third of a pound every day. dr. lustig believes those sweeteners are helping fuel an increase in the most deadly disease in america, heart disease. for years, he's been a controversial voice. >> kimber stanhope: here is our oral isotope. >> gupta: but now, studies done by kimber stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the university of california, davis, are starting to back him up. she's in the middle of a groundbreaking five-year study which has already shown strong evidence linking excess high fructose corn syrup consumption to an increase in risk factors for heart disease and stroke. that suggests calories from added sugars are different than calories from other foods. the mantra that you hear from most nutritionists is that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

>> dr. kimber stanhope: and i think the results of the study showed clearly that is not true. >> gupta: stanhope's conclusions weren't easy to come by. nutrition studies are expensive and difficult. stanhope has paid groups of research subjects to live in this hospital wing for weeks at a time under a sort of 24-hour lockdown. they undergo scans and blood tests, every calorie they ingest meticulously weighed and prepared. >> stanhope: they're never out of our sight. so we do know that they are consuming exactly what we need them to consume. >> gupta: and they're not sneaking any candy bars on the side. >> stanhope: yeah, right, exactly. >> gupta: for the first few days, participants eat a diet low in added sugars, so baseline blood levels can be measured. >> so remember you guys have to finish all of your kool-aid. >> gupta: then, 25% of their calories are replaced with sweetened drinks, and stanhope's team starts drawing blood every 30 minutes around the clock.

and those blood samples? they revealed something disturbing. and what are you starting to see? >> stanhope: we found that the subjects who consumed high fructose corn syrup had increased blood levels of l.d.l. cholesterol and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease. >> gupta: how quickly did these changes occur? >> stanhope: within two weeks. >> gupta: kimber stanhope's study suggests that when a person consumes too much sweet stuff, the liver gets overloaded with fructose and converts some of it into fat. some of that fat ends up in the bloodstream and helps generate a dangerous kind of cholesterol called small dense l.d.l. these particles are known to lodge in blood vessels, form plaque, and are associated with heart attacks. did it surprise you when you first got these results back? >> stanhope: i would have to say i was surprised because, when i saw our data, i started drinking and eating a whole lot less sugar. ( laughter ) i would say our data surprised me. >> gupta: so, imagine, for these

healthy young people, drinking a sweetened drink might be just as bad for their hearts as the fatty cheeseburgers we've all been warned about since the 1970s. that's when a government commission mandated that we lower fat consumption to try and reduce heart disease. >> ...major coronary risk factors. >> gupta: so, with the best of intentions, they say, "time to reduce fat in the american diet"? >> lustig: exactly. and we did. and guess what? heart disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and death are skyrocketing. >> gupta: dr. lustig believes that's primarily because we replaced a lot of that fat with added sugars. >> lustig: when you take the fat out of food, it tastes like cardboard, and the food industry knew that. so they replaced it with sugar. >> gupta: this idea that sugar increases this particularly bad ldl, the small dense particles that are associated with heart disease, do... do most doctors, do they know this? >> lustig: no, they do not know this. this is new. >> gupta: and it turns out sugar has become a major focus in

cancer research, too. lewis cantley is looking at the connection. if you limit your sugar, you decrease your chances of developing cancer. >> lewis cantley: absolutely. >> gupta: cantley, a harvard professor and the head of the beth israel deaconess cancer center, says when we eat or drink sugar, it causes a sudden spike in the hormone insulin, which can serve as a catalyst to fuel certain types of cancers. >> cantley: what we're beginning to learn is that insulin can cause adverse effects in the various tissues, and of particular concern is cancer. >> gupta: why? nearly a third of some common cancers, including breast and colon cancers, have something called insulin receptors on their surface. insulin binds to these receptors and signals the tumor to start consuming glucose. >> cantley: this is your body. >> gupta: every cell in our body needs glucose to survive. but the trouble is, these cancer cells also use it to grow. >> cantley: so, if you happen to

have the tumor that has insulin receptors on it, then it will get stimulated to take up the glucose that's in the bloodstream. rather than go into fat or muscle, the glucose goes into the tumor, and the tumor uses it to grow. >> gupta: so you've just seen that tumor turn blue, which is essentially reflective of glucose going into it. >> cantley: that's right. >> gupta: so these cancers, much in the same way that muscle will say, "hey, i'd like some of that glucose," the fat says, "i would like some of that glucose," the cancers have learned how to do this themselves as well? >> cantley: yes. so they have evolved the ability to hijack that flow of glucose that's going by in the bloodstream into the tumor itself. >> gupta: lewis cantley's research team is working on developing drugs that will cut off the glucose supply to cancer cells and keep them from growing. but until there's a breakthrough, cantley's advice? don't eat sugar. and if you must, keep it to a minimum. >> cantley: in fact, i... you

know, i live my life that way. i rarely eat sugar. >> gupta: when you see a sugary drink or if i were to offer you one, what... with all that you know, what's going through your mind? >> cantley: i probably would turn it down and get a glass of water. ( laughs ) >> gupta: but for most of us, that's easier said than done. >> eric stice: it turns out sugar is much more addictive than i think we had sort of realized early on. >> gupta: eric stice, a neuroscientist at the oregon research institute, is using functional m.r.i. scanners to learn how our brains respond to sweetness. >> stice: sugar activates our brain in a special way that's very reminiscent of... of, you know, drugs like cocaine. >> gupta: that's right, cocaine. let's give it a shot. i climbed into the m.r.i. scanner to see how my brain would respond. that's a straw that's been rigged to deliver a tiny sip of soda into my mouth. >> stice: stay as still as you can, okay? >> gupta: just as it hit my tongue, the scanner detected increased blood rushing to certain regions of my brain.

in these images, the yellow areas show that my reward region is responding to the sweet taste. dopamine, a chemical that controls the brain's pleasure center, is being released, just as it would in response to drugs or alcohol. so dopamine is released. that sort of makes me feel good. i'm experiencing some pleasure from having this coke. >> stice: right, that euphoric effect. >> gupta: so, far be it for people to realize this, because sugar is everywhere, but you're saying this is one of the most addictive substances possibly that we have? >> stice: it certainly is very good at firing the reward regions in our brain. >> gupta: eric stice says, by scanning hundreds of volunteers, he's learned that people who frequently drink sodas or eat ice cream or other sweet foods may be building up a tolerance, much like drug users do. as strange as it sounds, that means the more you eat, the less you feel the reward. the result-- you eat more than ever. >> stice: if you overeat these on a regular basis, it causes changes in the brain that

basically it blunts your reward region response to the food, so then you eat more and more to achieve the same satisfaction you felt originally. >> gupta: with all this new science emerging, we wanted to hear from the sugar industry, so we visited jim simon, who's on the board of the sugar association, at a sugar cane farm in louisiana. would it surprise you that almost every scientist that we talked to in... in researching this story told us they are eliminating all added sugars, they're getting rid of it because they're concerned about the health impacts? >> jim simon: to say that the american consuming public is going to completely omit, eliminate sweeteners out of their diet, i don't think gets us there. >> gupta: simon cautions that eliminating sugar wrongly vilifies one food, rather than working towards the long-term solution of reducing calories and exercising. you know, a lot of people, jim, are saying that sugar is different. that it is bad for your heart and is causing a lot of the problems we're talking about.

it is addictive and, in some cases, might even fuel cancers. what would you... i mean, you've looked at this. you must have looked at some of these studies. what... what do you say about that? >> simon: the science is not completely clear here. >> gupta: but some of that's... but some of these studies exist. i mean, what... what is a consumer... what are they to make of all that? >> simon: well, i would say to them that they've got to approach their diet in balance. >> gupta: dr. robert lustig agrees-- we need a balanced diet, but his idea of balance is a drastic reduction in sugar consumption. to that end, he co-authored an american heart association report recommending men should consume no more than 150 calories of added sugars a day. and women, just 100 calories. that's less than the amount in just one can of soda. >> lustig: ultimately, this is a public health crisis. and when it's a public health crisis, you have to do big things and you have to do them across the board.

tobacco and alcohol are perfect examples. we have made a conscious choice that we're not going to get rid of them, but we are going to limit their consumption. i think sugar belongs in this exact same wastebasket. >> cbs money watch update sponsored by:. >> glor: good evening. mitt romney said today something dramatic is needed to help the economy, but a new federal stimulus package would be the definition of insanity. a meeting is set this week between treasury secretary geithner and his european counterparts over the spreading economic slowdown, and gas prices jumped 12 cents in the last week. i'm jeff glor, cbs news.

>> stahl: most of us take for granted that we can instantly recognize people we know by looking at their faces. it's 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 moment's thought. but imagine for a second what life would be like if you couldn't-- if your wife or husband looked like a stranger; you couldn't tell your kids apart; couldn't recognize

yourself in a mirror. as we first reported in march, that's what life is like for people who suffer from a mysterious condition called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, it can make it nearly impossible to recognize or identify faces. if you've never heard of face blindness, you're not alone. chances are your doctor hasn't either. it's been unknown to most of the medical world until very 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. he's 31 years old, he has a college degree, has had great jobs, and he seems perfectly normal. just don't ask him to identify any faces... we're going to put up the first one. ...even very famous ones. >> jacob hodes: no idea. we showed jacob faces without

hair, a pure test of facial recognition. >> hodes: no. nope. i can't say if i've ever seen that person. >> stahl: he's seen jimmy carter plenty of times. and knows michael jordan, too. >> hodes: oh, lord. >> stahl: he just can't recognize their faces. >> hodes: now, that's just impossible. >> stahl: can you describe my face? you're 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 in a few days, he wouldn't know me from any other woman with short blonde hair. >> brad duchaine: they meet somebody, they have a good time with them, they have a nice relationship. then, a week later, they walk past them. >> stahl: brad duchaine is a professor at dartmouth college who has been studying face blindness for nearly 15 years. 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. you're going to be tempted to twist your head, but don't 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 i'd know all of these people? >> duchaine: you've seen them all a lot. >> stahl: i don't know any of these people. i really don't. >> duchaine: you want to see them upright? >> stahl: sure. it was astonishing. with just that click, they became recognizable people before my eyes. ( laughter ) 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 didn't know my own daughter? >> duchaine: yeah. >> stahl: i didn't know my own 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, there's clearly... there's a face there. >> stahl: oh, yeah. >> duchaine: there are parts. there are eyes. there's mouth. but you just can't put it together. >> stahl: wow. that's stunning. i feel terrible for them now. >> duchaine: yeah. it's 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 couldn't 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... you'd spent a long time with me discussing a problem. i come back the next time. >> dr. meg novotny: oh, no, no, no. you walk out to the window at the front and start checking out, and i walk out of the room and i don't know who you are.

>> stahl: come on. she relies on patient charts, she told us. but there aren't any of those in ben's 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, that's really interesting. when you have that meeting, can you invite me? thanks. see you." who is it? i don't 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 doesn't get put... >> livingston: it doesn't 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 couldn't find one day until she started putting her hair into 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 else's before his eyes. >> hodes: so now, i'm confronted with this situation that... that got weird. because i knew this person was sylvia, but it didn't 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. let's say you went out to have dinner with somebody, and then you saw her the next day. >> chuck close: wouldn't remember her. >> stahl: and yet, he has spent 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 can't 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 we've done? >> close: i don't 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 it's, um, leno. >> stahl: and were surprised that he did pretty darn well. >> close: well, from the lips, i think it's tiger woods. >> stahl: yeah, well, you're pretty good. but, of course, not perfect. >> close: i don't have a clue.

>> stahl: that's 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 isn't recognizing these faces the way most of us do. every face is a puzzle he has to solve. >> close: what i'm thinking? you don't see too many people with just a mustache anymore, so that means it's probably somebody who's not alive. so, if it's an african american of a certain age with a mustache, it... it might be martin luther king. >> stahl: you're amazing. you deduce, deduce, deduce. you're 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 jo's daughter. does anybody know who that is? >> no way. >> stahl: jo? work on it, because it's

somebody that jo knows. >> livingston: well, it may be, but nothing's coming. >> stahl: it's someone in your family. but still, she didn't get it. it's 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 and bizarre neurological conditions, who wrote about face blindness in his latest book, "the mind's 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 identify this problem? >> 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 duchaine's 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 don't normally. >> duchaine: and so finally, at one point, i said, "do you know who i am?" >> livingston: ah. >> duchaine: and she put it all 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 aren't talking to you and you don't know why?" >> livingston: and we'll never know. >> sacks: people do think you may be snubbing them or... or stupid, or mad, or inattentive. that's why it's 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. i've sometimes had the experience of apologizing to someone, and realizing it's a mirror. >> stahl: no. >> sacks: i have, indeed.

>> stahl: no. because you didn't know it was you? >> sacks: i... i could see that it was a large, clumsy man with a beard. now, i've 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, it's probably me. >> stahl: i shouldn't be smiling, but it's 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. we'll show you what the research is finding, plus, would you believe, super-recognizers... >> i would say mike wallace. >> stahl: that is mike wallace. ...who never forget a face... >> i don't even know how to get rid of people. >> stahl: ...when we come back. you can never have too much of a good thing.

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these are sandra's "homemade" yummy, scrumptious bars. hmm? maybe. rich chocolate chips... i just wanted you to eat more fiber. chewy, oatie, gooeyness... and, and...and then the awards started coming in, and i became addicted to the fame. topped with chocolaty drizzle... and fraudulence. i'm in deep, babe. you certainly are. [ male announcer ] fiber one. fiber beyond recognition. >> 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. that's what happened to colleen castaldo. up until the fall of 2009, did you have any trouble recognizing faces at all? >> colleen castaldo: no, not at 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 wasn't 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 don't 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 knew well before... >> castaldo: no. >> stahl: okay, well, that's george clooney. >> castaldo: oh, wow. no, i wouldn't know that. >> stahl: ...are a mystery to her. >> castaldo: no, i don't know who that is. who is it? >> stahl: the president. brad duchaine showed me an mri scan of colleen's brain. is that a hole in her brain? >> duchaine: that's right. it's in the right temporal lobe. >> stahl: so back here. >> duchaine: that's 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. there's this thing there. there's this thing there. they're all the same. and so discriminating one face from another is a very computationally difficult thing, because it's 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 it's you and not somebody of the same specification. >> stahl: but how is it that the rest of us can perceive these two people as distinct individuals, despite the similarities? an important clue comes from what we can't distinguish-- as we saw earlier, faces upside down, like these two duchaine showed me, which looked very similar. >> duchaine: maybe you don't even see that there's 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, here's the one that you saw on the left there. looked perfectly normal. and then... >> stahl: oh. >> duchaine: here's the one you saw on the right, you saw upside-down. >> stahl: oh, my goodness. the eyes and mouth in the photo on the right had been turned upside-down. >> duchaine: and now, the face looks really grotesque. >> stahl: wow. >> duchaine: but... >> stahl: but upside-down...

>> duchaine: upside-down, it's really hard to see that. >> kanwisher: if you look at a face upside-down, you're very bad at recognizing it. if you look at a word or an object or a scene, you can recognize it fine upside-down. >> stahl: so what did that tell you? >> kanwisher: it tells you that there's 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 just for seeing faces. 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 she's seeing? >> kanwisher: yeah, this is what she's seeing. >> stahl: she's seeing faces. >> kanwisher: exactly. and now, she's 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 colleen's tumor had been. it's called the fusiform face area.

so could that be what's 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 there'd be nothing there-- like as if instead of having a bullet go through it, he was just born without it. >> kanwisher: that's right. that's right. >> stahl: and? >> kanwisher: and we looked at the data and his face area was beautiful. it's 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 doesn't exist. there it is. but see, that's the fun of science. it's fun to be told you're 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. i'll be walking down the street and i'll see someone, and i'll think, "oh, retail." and then i'll remember, "oh okay, that person works at... as whatever store, and that's where 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, they're... it doesn't matter how far back you saw these people? >> jarett: yes, yes. >> stahl: so, as long as you look at a person and take notice, they're in there. >> jarett: i... i don't even know how to get rid of people. >> stahl: only a handful of super-recognizers 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 you're familiar with. >> stahl: i am? it's called the "before they were famous test," because super-recognizers can also recognize faces as they change through time. >> duchaine: does that help at all? >> stahl: you sure i know that person?

>> duchaine: that's dick cheney. >> stahl: oh, my god. that's dick cheney? he told me the top right was richard gere, and the bottom, nancy pelosi. those three people have changed dramatically. ( laughter ) he even gave me a hint with this one-- he's now an actor. and i'm supposed to know this actor? clearly, i am not a super- recognizer. >> duchaine: that's george clooney. >> stahl: man. and these super-recognizers just know this? >> duchaine: the supers are really good at recognizing these faces. >> jarett: george clooney. >> 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. oh, that's kato kaelin. >> stahl: the o.j. simpson trial. wow, you are good. but we thought we had finally stumped her with this one.

she said she only had a guess. >> jarett: if i were to guess, i would say mike wallace. >> stahl: that is mike wallace. she recognized the late mike wallace as a six-year-old. i don't even understand how you do that. i can't fathom it. >> jarett: as people age, i 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. it's still the same face to me. it's just the adult version. >> stahl: so why is 60 years like a haircut to her, while face-blind people can't recognize someone they just saw? a team of scientists at harvard has begun scanning the brains of super-recognizers, too, to see if they might yield any clues. the science of facial recognition is in its infancy. but new discoveries can't come fast enough for one last person we'd like you to meet-- 13-year- old tim mcdonough from boston, who is severely face blind. so, can you describe what it feels like when someone comes

up? you know you're supposed to know who they are... >> tim mcdonough: i usually just say, you know, "hi, nice to see you." >> stahl: so, you... you sometimes pretend. >> mcdonough: yeah. >> stahl: you fake it. >> mcdonough: i fake it, yeah. >> so, you think it's not your mom? >> mcdonough: yeah. >> okay, so that actually was your mom. >> stahl: tim is working with the harvard team to see if they can help him learn to recognize his mother's 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: it's part of a pilot program to see if face blindness might someday be treatable. >> mcdonough: this one's a little bit harder. >> stahl: so far, it's not. >> mcdonough: i don't know. i just hope that nobody tries to talk to me because, if they do, they... >> stahl: they want to talk about something you've done with them or something. >> mcdonough: yeah, and i don't 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. super-recognizers can seem like stalkers. >> 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 i'd say, "yes." and the other person would say, "no." and i'd say, "no, don't 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 she's now learned to take cues from others, ironically, just as face blind people do. >> hodes: i'll play this eye contact game where i'll wait. i'm not going to really look at you, but i'll wait to see if you look at me. and then, "oh, you look at me. oh, look. oh, hi." >> stahl: so, you're always waiting for a cue from them. >> hodes: yeah. so i'll hang back a little bit, which i don't want to do.

>> stahl: in any social situation, are you always a little anxious? >> sacks: i'm 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: that's what chuck close told us he does. >> close: you have to be really charming. if you are going to insult them by not remembering them, you just have to be extremely charming so that people don't hold this stuff against you. >> stahl: do you feel now that you're 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 it's 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 don't carry their image. does that mean i experience it differently? and how would i ever know? i don't know. >> hodes: there's a long tail of stuff that happens that you're missing, connections you're not making. >> stahl: still? >> hodes: oh, yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah. >> novotny: at least now we understand why. >> hodes: yeah, right. >> novotny: and it's therapeutic, but it doesn't fix it. >> go to 60minutesovertime.com to take a test to see if you're a super-recognizer. [ kristin ] i'm a grazer, i'm definitely a grazer. oranges or just juice the acid that i'm eating could be causing damage to my teeth. the dentist recommended pronamel. he said that pronamel would help protect me from the effects of acid erosion. i feel like i'm doing the right thing for my teeth, and it feels good.

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