The neurological disorder that prevents you from recognizing faces, how is this possible? What would it look like?
In: Biology
I have this. Imagine looking at different dogs of the same species. Unless one has a unique pattern or distinguishing feature, you cant tell them apart by looking at them, much less would you recognize a dog you’ve seen before if you saw it somewhere unexpected.
I recognize people by voice. If I hear a voice once on tv, I’ll remember it if I hear that same actor again 20 years later. But if I see my neighbor somewhere besides her house… no clue. Or like if I saw my therapist at the grocery store I wouldnt recognize her unless she spoke to me. If she approached me, I could use context clues but it wouldnt click until I heard her speak.
I have this, and I compensate, like most people with the condition, by using other clues to identify people. Tall lanky guy in blue jeans in my office building? Must be Tom. Redhead with baseball cap an a beard at the club? Must be John.
This makes for a jarring experience if I meet people where I don’t expect to meet them or if they change their usual attire or change hairstyle.
It’s not that I can’t *see* faces, it’s just that to me a face is a collection of details with no overarching meaning. Kind of how text would look to someone who can’t read: they can make out the individual letters in perfect detail, and see the order they appear in, but still be unable to tell if they’ve seen a piece of text before.
The condition is a continuum, and I am fortunate enough that I only have a mild form. The only negative impact it had on my life is that people sometimes think I’m aloof or rude when I don’t recognize them.
hi! i’m really sorry that i can’t give you an in depth explanation of the neuro functioning that would go on, but there is an artist called chuck close who has this. he’s very famous for portraiture. this article gives a lot of information that you might like to read: [https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/dyslexia-paralysis-face-blindness-nothing-comes-between-legendary-artist-chuck/](https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/dyslexia-paralysis-face-blindness-nothing-comes-between-legendary-artist-chuck/)
An amusing anecdote, I wouldn’t have thought this was a thing either till i tried helping hand out id photo cards. Normally when they’re pre-printed its pretty easy someone comes in gives you their name and you pull it out of the alphabetized box. But when you grab them straight out the printer after a 2-3 min delay in between and you have 5 of them in hand its surprisingly hard to quickly pick the right person out of a crowd of 10-15 people you’ve never met. I don’t consider myself bad at remembering people’s though seeing someone in an unexpected place does trip me up from time to time. But that scenario left me feeling a bit overwhelmed and embarrassed when i couldn’t get it right. Luckly i only goofed once or twice and it was no big deal just hand them the other card that looks very similar but after hundreds of faces they really all start to look the same if there aren’t some really unique features. Too many people wear the same hair style and when they put on a coat or something in the mean time shirt style doesn’t help.
I think I have a mild version of this and my son a bit worse.
For example, when my son was young (starting school in kindergarten) I asked him if he played with his female friend that day. He said no, she was absent. I knew she was there that day, but he didn’t recognise her because she wasn’t wearing her usual necklace.
He would get confused because this boy that normally bullied him (let’s call him Chris) sometimes was nice. It turns out he could not recognize him and thought any black child wearing a gray shirt was Chris.
For me personally, I don’t do well with faces I haven’t met in person often and I’m not great with voices either. Movies/television are a challenge. Esp subtitles (bc I can’t read and look at the characters at the same time, so I get lost on who is who).
Many times there is a type in casting and I can’t tell people apart. There’s just a sea of pretty people and they all look alike. I have a hard time following movies unless the characters are very memorable or the actors have some very distinct feature.
I’m trying to watch Dark on Netflix now. I’m having a very hard time keeping the characters straight. I was watching it for a lot of episodes before I realized it was 2 different dark haired ladies, I thought it was the same one.
Checkout r/prosopagnosia, some was just asking if they have it, and there’s a bunch of different people describing how it works for them including me.
If you look at a bunch of monkeys, or sparrows, they probably all look alike. You might be able to recognize a few of them due to distinctive features, but otherwise they don’t look obviously different in the way humans do. This isn’t actually because humans’ faces are more distinct, you just learned (when you were an infant!) to pay more attention to human faces.
In fact, very young babies (before they’ve learned to focus on just human faces) can tell monkey faces apart better than adult humans can.
So for a person with prosopagnosia, it’s probably like looking at a bunch of crows, and they all pretty much look alike. The same phenomenon occurs in humans who didn’t have any exposure to certain ethnic groups while growing up.. it’s harder to tell the faces of people with those facial features apart.
Latest Answers