Gordon Buchanan is what’s called a super- recogniser. That means the 52-year-old wildlife presenter and cameraman from Scotland has a near-unfathomable recall of faces he has seen only fleetingly. In tests at the University of Greenwich, he has memorised thousands of humans after only having looked at them once. Buchanan also scored well on chimp faces, but drew a blank with pugs. “What I learned from that particular study is that pugs really do all look the same,” he notes drily.
For the most part this isn’t an especially useful – or monetisable – skill. The day before we meet, he was walking down Byres Road in Glasgow’s West End with his wife, Wendy, when he noticed two people who looked familiar. “That’s the couple who are in the Airbnb,” he told Wendy, referring to the property they rent out at the back of their house. Buchanan had never met them; he was just going by the thumbnail photograph that was on the woman’s profile. Wendy knows well enough by now not to question his random spots, but Buchanan scrolled through his phone to prove his point. “Definitely her!” he said.
