Recently I took a quiz on the BBC website, which supposedly tells you the ’sex’ of your brain. As a premise that is a bit ridiculous, but it turned out to be an enlightening quiz anyway. It is broken into different sections which test different things. To get the good out of the way, I am wicked awesome at mental rotation tasks. Give me some sort of Lego-like blocky shape and I can imagine it from whatever arbitrary viewpoint you like. Nice.

Now the bad news. I am totally incompetent at interpreting facial expressions. The quiz section in question presents a series of faces, cropped tightly around the eyes, and asks you to interpret the emotions of the owner of the face (e.g. happy, sad, angry, jealous). Going through this section I was convinced the test makers had messed up. There was simply no way anybody could interpret these expressions. They are cropped too tightly around the eyes, and the eyes themselves can’t possibly tell you anything. Nevertheless I did my best, and ended up getting 3/10, which is pretty much what somebody would get picking randomly. I didn’t feel too bad, until my rationalization that the test was flawed was shattered when my friend T independently sent out an email about the test, announcing that the “eyes” section was “so easy!” that he had scored 9/10, and only missed the one because he didn’t think the emotion was genuine.

So, what did I learn? Well, I’ve got skillz pretty much where I knew I had them. However, I am totally incompetent in a pretty darned important area. Mentally rotating objects is nice and all, but isn’t communicating with other people one of the more important and rewarding aspects of life? But I suck at this (or at least one component of it), and now I shudder to think. I must have messed up so many times over the years. Remember that one time you were glaring at me because I was being an idiot? Yeah, I had no idea. Maybe I thought you were flirting with me. And that time you were flirting with me? I was probably distracted by the thought of the sandwich I was going to make later. Oh well.

Come to think of it, maybe there’s a product here. I could mount a little camera on my shoulder which interprets people’s moods and lets me know so that I have an idea what’s going on.