WHAT THE RESEARCH on prosopagnosia implies, says Farah, is that "the systems that you need to do face recognition are separate from what you need to do object recognition." That "flies in the face of the last 20 years of vision research," she notes; partly because all scientists are "lovers of parsimony," cognitive psychologists have been searching for a single processing mechanism for visual recognition. As she puts it, "It doesn't feel like you're doing anything differently when you look at a face or at a chair ... We feel like we're one whole seamless self; and yet, when you study the effects of brain damage, you realize that that feeling has got to be in some sense illusory. What we really are is a collection of various specialized processors." When all of them are working together smoothly, one doesn't notice the diversity of agents. Usually, our minds are integrated -- but we are also, in Farah's words, "distinct and separable."
   Todd Feinberg makes a similar point when he speaks about the structure of the self. Normally, he says, we believe our selves are secure: "We maintain our ego boundaries." But in some ways, he adds, "It's an illusion -- we're much more fragile than we could care to believe."

Dr. John R. Shea, Gr'84, is the editor of Penn Health, a magazine for the employees of the Penn Health System.
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