You can recognise around 5000 faces, from family to celebrities

Jordi Boixareu / Alamy

By Chelsea Whyte

You can probably recall more faces than you might think. Most people can remember about 5000, according to a new study.

“It’s surprising, in that it seems to be overkill,” says Rob Jenkins at the University of York in the UK. He points out that some people argue humans lived in groups of around 150 people for most of hominin evolutionary history, so it might make sense for us to recall about this number of faces. “It turns out that whatever mental equipment …