cialization of brain function is to observe the deficits that result from various lesions. Obviously, this technique is limited because the lesions caused by injury or disease

  often affect multiple functional areas. By contrast, neu-

  rostat can be activated in the tiniest portion of the brain, in effect simulating a lesion so localized that it would

  never occur naturally. And when you deactivate the neu-

  rostat, the “lesion” disappears and brain function returns to normal.

  In this way neurologists were able to induce a wide

  variety of agnosias. The one most relevant here is

  prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize people by their faces. A prosopagnosic can’t recognize friends or family

  members unless they say something; he can’t even iden-

  tify his own face in a photograph. It’s not a cognitive or perceptual problem; prosopagnosics can identify people

  by their hairstyle, clothing, perfume, even the way they

  walk. The deficit is restricted purely to faces.

  Prosopagnosia has always been the most dramatic in-

  dication that our brains have a special “circuit” devoted to the visual processing of faces; we look at faces in a

  different way than we look at anything else. And recog-

  nizing someone’s face is just one of the face-processing

  tasks we do; there are also related circuits devoted to

  identifying facial expressions, and even detecting

  changes in the direction of another person’s gaze.

  One of the interesting things about prosopagnosics is

  that while they can’t recognize a face, they still have an opinion as to whether it’s attractive or not. When asked

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  to sort photos of faces in order of attractiveness,

  prosopagnosics sorted the photos in pretty much the

  same way as anyone else. Experiments using neurostat

  allowed researchers to identify the neurological circuit

  responsible for perceiving beauty in faces, and thus es-

  sentially invent calliagnosia.

  Maria deSouza:

  SEE has had extra neurostat programming helmets set

  up in the Student Health Office, and made arrangements

  so they can offer calliagnosia to anyone who wants it.

  You don’t even have to make an appointment, you can

  just walk in. We’re encouraging all the students to try it, at least for a day, to see what it’s like. At first it seems a little odd, not seeing anyone as either good-looking or

  ugly, but over time you realize how positively it affects your interactions with other people.

  A lot of people worry that calli might make them

  asexual or something, but actually physical beauty is

  only a small part of what makes a person attractive. No

  matter what a person looks like, it’s much more important how the person acts; what he says and how he says it, his behavior and body language. And how does he react to

  you? For me, one of the things that attracts me to a guy

  is if he seems interested in me. It’s like a feedback loop; you notice him looking at you, then he sees you looking

  at him, and things snowball from there. Calli doesn’t

  change that. Plus there’s that whole pheromone chem-

  istry going on too; obviously calli doesn’t affect that.

  Another worry that people have is that calli will make

  everyone’s face look the same, but that’s not true either.

  A person’s face always reflects their personality, and if anything, calli makes that clearer. You know that saying, 1 0 7

  T E D C H I A N G

  that after a certain age, you’re responsible for your face?

  With calli, you really appreciate how true that is. Some

  faces just look really bland, especially young, conven-

  tionally pretty ones. Without their physical beauty, those faces are just boring. But faces that are full of personality look as good as they ever did, maybe even better. It’s like you’re seeing something more essential about them.

  Some people also ask about enforcement. We don’t

  plan on doing anything like that. It’s true, there’s software that’s pretty good at guessing if a person has calli or not, by analyzing eye gaze patterns. But it requires a lot of data, and the campus security cams don’t zoom in

  close enough. Everyone would have to wear personal

  cams, and share the data. It’s possible, but that’s not what we’re after. We think that once people try calli, they’ll see the benefits themselves.

  Tamera Lyons:

  Check it out, I’m pretty!

  What a day. When I woke up this morning I immedi-

  ately went to the mirror; it was like I was a little kid on Christmas or something. But still, nothing; my face still looked plain. Later on I even ( laughs) I tried to catch myself by surprise, by sneaking up on a mirror, but that

  didn’t work. So I was kind of disappointed, and feeling

  just, you know, resigned to my fate.

  But then this afternoon, I went out with my roommate

  Ina and a couple other girls from the dorm. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d gotten my calli turned off, because I

  wanted to get used to it first. So we went to this snack bar on the other side of campus, one I hadn’t been to before.

  We were sitting at this table, talking, and I was looking 1 0 8

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  around, just seeing what people looked like without calli.

  And I saw this girl looking at me, and I thought, “She’s

  really pretty.” And then, ( laughs) this’ll sound really stupid, then I realized that this wall in the snack bar was a mirror, and I was looking at myself!

  I can’t describe it, I felt this incredible sense of relief. I just couldn’t stop smiling! Ina asked me what I was so

  happy about, and I just shook my head. I went to the

  bathroom so I could stare at myself in the mirror for a bit.

  So it’s been a good day. I really like the way I look! It’s been a good day.

  From a student debate held at Pembleton:

  Jeff Winthrop, third-year student:

  Of course it’s wrong to judge people by their appear-

  ance, but this “blindness” isn’t the answer. Education is.

  Calli takes away the good as well as the bad. It doesn’t

  just work when there’s a possibility of discrimination, it keeps you from recognizing beauty altogether. There are

  plenty of times when looking at an attractive face doesn’t hurt anyone. Calli won’t let you make those distinctions, but education will.

  And I know someone will say, what about when the

  technology gets better? Maybe one day they’ll be able to

  insert an expert system into your brain, one that goes, “Is this an appropriate situation to apprehend beauty? If so, enjoy it; else, ignore it.” Would that be okay? Would that be the “assisted maturity” you hear people talking about?

  No, it wouldn’t. That wouldn’t be maturity; it’d be let-

  ting an expert system make your decisions for you. Ma-

  turity means seeing the differences, but realizing they

  don’t matter. There’s no technological shortcut.

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  T E D C H I A N G

  Adesh Singh, third-year student:

  No one’s talking about letting an expert system make

  your decisions. What makes calli ideal is precisely that

  it’s such a minimal change. Calli doesn’t decide for you; it doesn’t prevent you from doing anything. And as for

  maturity, you demonstrate maturity by choosing calli in

  the first place.

  Everyone knows physical beauty has nothing to do

  with merit; that’s what education’s accomplished. But

  even with the best intentions in the world, people haven’t stopped practicing lookism. We try to be impartial, we try not to let a person’s appearance affect us, but we can’t

  suppress our autonomic responses, and anyone who

  claims they can is engaged in wishful thinking. Ask your-

  self: don’t you react differently when you meet an attractive person and when you meet an unattractive one?

  Every study on this issue turns up the same results:

  looks help people get ahead. We can’t help but think of

  good-looking people as more competent, more honest,

  more deserving than others. None of it’s true, but their

  looks still give us that impression.

  Calli doesn’t blind you to anything; beauty is what

  blinds you. Calli lets you see.

  Tamera Lyons:

  So, I’ve been looking at good-looking guys around

  campus. It’s fun; weird, but fun. Like, I was in the cafeteria the other day, and I saw this guy a couple tables away, I didn’t know his name, but I kept turning to look at him.

  I can’t describe anything specific about his face, but it just seemed much more noticeable than other people’s. It

  was like his face was a magnet, and my eyes were com-

  pass needles being pulled toward it.

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  And after I looked at him for a while, I found it really

  easy to imagine that he was a nice guy! I didn’t know

  anything about him, I couldn’t even hear what he was

  talking about, but I wanted to get to know him. It was

  kind of odd, but definitely not in a bad way.

  From a broadcast of EduNews, on the American College

  Network:

  In the latest on the Pembleton University calliagnosia

  initiative: EduNews has received evidence that public-

  relations firm Wyatt/Hayes paid four Pembleton students

  to dissuade classmates from voting for the initiative,

  without having them register their affiliations. Evidence includes an internal memo from Wyatt/Hayes, proposing

  that “good-looking students with high reputation rat-

  ings” be sought, and records of payments from the

  agency to Pembleton students.

  The files were sent by the SemioTech Warriors, a

  culture-jamming group responsible for many numerous

  of media vandalism.

  When contacted about this story, Wyatt/Hayes issued

  a statement decrying this violation of their internal computer systems.

  Jeff Winthrop:

  Yes, it’s true, Wyatt/Hayes paid me, but it wasn’t an en-

  dorsement deal; they never told me what to say. They just made it possible for me to devote more time to the anti-calli campaign, which is what I would’ve done anyway if I hadn’t needed to make money tutoring. All I’ve been doing is expressing my honest opinion: I think calli’s a bad idea.

  A couple of people in the anti-calli campaign have

  asked that I not speak publicly about the issue anymore,

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  T E D C H I A N G

  because they think it would hurt the cause. I’m sorry they feel that way, because this is just an ad hominem attack.

  If you thought my arguments made sense before, this

  shouldn’t change anything. But I realize that some people can’t make those distinctions, and I’ll do what’s best for the cause.

  Maria deSouza:

  Those students really should have registered their af-

  filiations; we all know people who are walking endorse-

  ments. But now, whenever someone criticizes the

  initiative, people ask them if they’re being paid. The

  backlash is definitely hurting the anti-calli campaign.

  I consider it a compliment that someone is taking

  enough interest in the initiative to hire a PR firm. We’ve always hoped that its passing might influence people at

  other schools, and this means that corporations are

  thinking the same thing.

  We’ve invited the president of the National Calliag-

  nosia Association to speak on campus. Before we weren’t

  sure if we wanted to bring the national group in, because they have a different emphasis than we do; they’re more

  focused on the media uses of beauty, while here at SEE

  we’re more interested in the social equality issue. But

  given the way students reacted to what Wyatt/Hayes did,

  it’s clear that the media manipulation issue has the power to get us where we need to go. Our best shot at getting the initiative passed is to take advantage of the anger against advertisers. The social equality will follow afterwards.

  From the speech given at Pembleton by Walter Lambert, president of the National Calliagnosia Association:

  Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves,

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  it’s appealing, but not to an extent that it usually be-

  comes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a

  compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an un-

  natural intensity. That’s when it becomes addictive.

  Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to ad-

  vertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks—call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex—

  and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you’re

  no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You’ve got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

  Biologists call this “supernormal stimulus”; show a

  mother bird a giant plastic egg, and she’ll incubate it instead of her own real eggs. Madison Avenue has satu-

  rated our environment with this kind of stimuli, this

  visual drug. Our beauty receptors receive more stimula-

  tion than they were evolved to handle; we’re seeing more

  beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime.

  And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

  How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by inter-

  fering with our relationships with other people. We be-

  come dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look

  because they can’t compare to supermodels. Two-

  dimensional images are bad enough, but now with spex,

  advertisers can put a supermodel right in front of you,

  making eye contact. Software companies offer goddesses

  who’ll remind you of your appointments. We’ve all heard

  about men who prefer virtual girlfriends over actual ones, but they’re not the only ones who’ve been affected. The

  more time any of us spend with gorgeous digital appari-

  tions around, the more our relationships with real human

  beings are going to suffer.

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  T E D C H I A N G

  We can’t avoid these images and still live in the mod-

  ern world. And that means we can’t kick this habit, be-

  cause beauty is a drug you can’t abstain from unless you

  literally keep your eyes closed all the time.

  Until now. Now you can get another set of eyelids, one

  that blocks out this drug, but still lets you see. And that’s calliagnosia. Some people call it excessive, but I call it just enough. Technology is being used to manipulate us

  through our emotional reactions, so it’s only fair that we use it to protect ourselves too.

  Right now you have an opportunity to make an enor-

  mous impact. The Pembleton student body has always

  been at the vanguard of every progressive movement;

  what you decide here will set an example for students

  across the country. By passing this initiative, by adopt-

  ing calliagnosia, you’ll be sending a message to advertisers that young people are no longer willing to be

  manipulated.

  From a broadcast of EduNews:

  Following NCA president Walter Lambert’s speech,

  polls show that 54% of Pembleton students support the

  calliagnosia initiative. Polls across the country show that an average of 28% of students would support a similar

  initiative at their school, an increase of 8% in the past month.

  Tamera Lyons:

  I thought he went overboard with that cocaine anal-

  ogy. Do you know anyone who steals stuff and sells it so

  he can get his fix of advertising?

  But I guess he has a point about how good-looking

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  they look better than people in real life, but they look

  good in a different way.

  Like, I was at the campus store the other today, and I

  needed to check my e-mail, and when I put on my spex I

  saw this poster running a commercial. It was for some

  shampoo, Jouissance I think. I’d seen it before, but it was different without calli. The model was so—I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I don’t mean I felt the same as that time I saw the good-looking guy in the cafeteria; it wasn’t like I wanted to get to know her. It was more like . . . watching a sunset, or a fireworks display.

  I just stood there and watched the commercial like five

  times, just so I could look at her some more. I didn’t think a human being could look so, you know, spectacular.

  But it’s not like I’m going to quit talking to people so I can watch commercials through my spex all the time.

  Watching them is very intense, but it’s a totally different experience than looking at a real person. And it’s not even like I immediately want to go out and buy everything

  they’re selling, either. I’m not even really paying attention to the products. I just think they’re amazing to watch.