Whereas people can readily describe the differences between two highly similar objects (such as birds on the same page in a bird guide), they are at a loss in describing the difference between the faces of Tom Cruise and John Travolta.  A remarkably simple account, based on early cortical spatial filtering, may be able to explain the ineffability of faces and a wide variety of other phenomena distinguishing face from object recognition, such as why the recognition of faces, but not objects, is so severely disrupted by contrast negation (as when viewing a photographic negative) and orientation inversion, why faces, but not objects, are represented “configurally,” and the nature of the deficit in prosopagnosia whereby the afflicted individual complains not that faces look blurry or otherwise degraded but that they all look the same.