Recognise anyone?

Probably not unless you have a 'past life' in Roman times. These are all shots that I took through the glass cases in the Classical Archaeology section of the Ashmolean Museum when I made my statutory visit there during my recent stay in Oxford.
I'm fascinated by the way ancient faces gaze out of history, so distant and yet so humanly familiar. They're almost recognizable yet forever unknowable, trapped within their painted or moulded images.

Face recognition is a very curious thing. Most of us (and computers too) are reasonably adept at spotting the faces of friends, acquaintances and celebrities but at either end of the bell curve of recognition lie  peculiar extremes, each representing about 2% of the population.The inability to recognize familiar faces is called prosopagnosia and here you can listen to the late, great Oliver Sacks talking about the condition, from which he himself suffered. He suggests that shyer people are probably more likely to have difficulty with faces (which would fit with myself) while extroverts usually have a wide circle of people they recognise.
By contrast here's  an article about a man who is at the other end of the scale from prosopagnosics: he's a so-called 'super--recognizer ' whose extreme ability to identify faces only glimpsed once makes him a something of a heat-seeking missile in the Metropolitan Police.