People with face blindness can typically understand facially expressed emotions — they know whether a face is happy or sad, angry or puzzled. They can detect subtle facial cues, determine gender and even agree with everyone else about which faces are attractive and which are not. In other words, they see the face clearly, they just do not know whose face they are looking at, and cannot remember it once they stop looking.How strange. A person with this problem must have many painful social encounters, especially before being diagnosed. On the other hand, many of us are just lazy about noticing and remembering people. We could make casual claims of prosopagnosia, the way we make casual claims of attention deficit disorder.
July 18, 2006
Prosopagnosia.
The inability to recognize faces.
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14 comments:
With plastic surgeons making everyone look all alike....it's no wonder.
One generic look for all.
Society becoming less distinctive, less original. Nothing unique.
Of course, this disease is on the rise.
Peace, Maxine
Yeah, I was just looking at a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and thinking: today, they'd never leave her nose like that.
What's really amazing is the normal brain's ability to remember and recognize thousands of faces (even if the names that go with them escape us). It's on a par with dogs' ability to remember and recognize individual smells.
Here's more on face blindness from a first-person point of view -- utterly fascinating.
I saw something on TV about this recently. A VERY common occurence is for a person to tell someone that they have this disorder and for the other person to say "Oh, yeah, I have that too"... meaning of course that they have trouble remembering names... not understanding that this is a serious neurological condition. One person was able to function at work because all of her co-workers voluntarily wore name tags. I thought that was great.
I am the opposite- I never forget a face. I forget names but never faces. Could be 20 years and I remember your face.
Tom Hanks' SNL skit a few years back--he had zero short-term memory, and was snacking at a cocktail party, and in addition to the conversational difficulties of immediately forgetting what the other person had just said, he kept forgetting he was chewing. Crack-up--
I have the opposite problem. I remember virtually every face I've seen for longer than a few seconds. I see faces all the time that I know I've seen before, but can't remember who, where or when. When watching a movie or TV show, the effort to try to remember is distracting. When I used to work in downtown Los Angeles, I became anxious whenever I saw a face down the sidewalk that I'd seen before, worrying that it would be embarassing if they came up and started talking to me, and I wouldn't remember who they were. Living in LA, you see minor celebrities all the time, and I get confused as to whether I've seen them on TV or in real life.
Hmmm. Maybe I have prospagnosia. Then again, it's probably just ADD.
Are there varying degrees?
I usually recognize people by their style, manurisms, voice, posture, gait, etc.
If you get a different hair-cut, I might not recognize you until you get my attention. Same if we meet outside of an unexpected context.
Marghlar: That's the subject of Oliver Sack's book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" -- one of my favorite books.
Fascinating. I've never heard of anything like that. Great post, thanks.
Topher --
I'm not sure if we've met before or not.
On the other hand, if you had déjà vécu, you'd think you'd met them ALL before!
I have prosopagnosia, I can recognize the people in front of me when I know who they are on on an intimate level, and when I see them I do see their face very clearly. I'd like to think that I can tell who is beautiful, but personality is what I'm attracted to.
But It's when they walk away... They become a memory that I can't recall the fine details of. But I will remember the way they walk, the sound of their voice and the way they carry themselves.
Today I started back to college and after the class, one of the students said hi to me in a very friendly, open way. Of course I responded to him in like kind because I'm friendly, too, but I wondered if he was just friendly & welcoming this non-traditional (older, ahem, 60 yr old) student, or if maybe I knew him from the class I took last semester, or from the community. I get frustrated about these things, even after all these years. I do recognize faces of those I know well, but I can't usually picture them in my mind when I'm not with them. If I don't see my kids for awhile, then when I see them again, I feel like, "Oh! THAT'S what you look like!" Even though I recognize them, it's still like a happy surprise. I like to say I fall in love with people all over again each time I see them.
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