I was in line at a potluck picnic when the woman about my age, came up to me, smiling.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said last meeting, and you are so right! I want to hear more.”
“Oh no,” I thought. I had no idea who this person was, except that she maybe looked vaguely familiar. I decided to do something I had never done before.
I told her the truth.
“I am so sorry, but I have face blindness, and I won’t know who you are until you remind me, and what we talked about. I normally just try to figure people out by context but it sounds like I need to know who you are before we can talk meaningfully...” I petered off because her face was rapidly changing expressions: embarrassment, disbelief, shock and then anger. I stopped trying to explain because she had angrily walked away.
I looked down at my half-full plate, and thought, “Ok, now I know why I never tried that strategy before,” and sighed. While my prosopagnosia is not severe, it does hinder me in face to face social situations.
The woman behind me in line said,”I’ve never heard of face blindness. I’m fascinated. Tell me all about it.“ So I did.
As we ate, I told her that it was fairly recently that I found out. My sister was diagnosed, and she told me about it. Probably our mother had it, and my other sister too. I have it and so does at least one of my daughters.
“So, can you tell that I’m black?” she asked.
“Yes. I can see people’s faces, and their features, but they just don’t ‘stick’ as a whole. I tend to recognize people more for their voices, accents, mannerisms, rather than how they look. Sometimes I’ll think, ‘Oh, I know this person really well, and I’ll be able to recognize them next time.’ and they change hair color, or shave a mustache and I have no idea who they are.”
“Is it like in Autism, where you have trouble reading social cues and expressions?”
I told her that no, I’m very good at reading even micro-expressions. In college, I learned to do fake psychic cold readings as part of a class project, and I was so good I had other students ask me to do readings for them, even though they knew it wasn’t really me being psychic. I was just very good at picking up clues to make it seem real.
“I just don’t recognize specific faces as being familiar to me,” I said.
She shook her head. “I just don’t understand. If you can tell someone is tall, skinny, has brown hair and brown eyes, when you see them again you would know, ‘Oh, this is that guy who is tall, skinny, with brown hair and brown eyes. You would be able to know him.”
“Unfortunately, ‘tall, skinny, brown hair and brown eyes’ not only describes my son, it also describes most of his friends, a lot of the men at church, and most of the guys here. And just tell me that all middle-aged white women don’t look the same.” She laughed, but shook her head.
“They look similar, but not the same. If I can tell them apart, you should be able to, too.” She smiled, and I thought of a way that might explain it to her.
“Imagine you are walking down the street, and you are attacked by a pancake. It knocks you down, yells in your face, and steals your purse. You call the police. You give them a detailed description of the pancake. ‘It was round, but not perfectly round. One side had holes, and around each hole was a slight brown ring. The other side was smoother, and it was browner in the middle. Toward the edge it was a bit paler, but there was a thin brown ring around the outside edge.” You are taken to the police station where they have a line-up of 10 pancakes meeting your description. You are told to pick out the one that attacked you. Could you do it?
No, because, while you can describe a pancake perfectly, your brain isn’t wired to see each pancake as an individual.
Just like you can describe a squirrel or a duck, but you probably wouldn’t recognize the squirrel you feed peanuts to and lives in your maple tree at home from a lineup of 10 squirrels, even though you see that specific squirrel pretty often. Or the duck that lands in your pond every year from some other duck. That’s how it is for me.”
She looked thoughtful. “So, you won’t recognize me next time?”
“Maybe I will. If I see you in this setting, and you haven’t changed your hair, its likely I will recognize you, since there are only a couple of other black women in this group. Thank god you aren’t a middle aged white woman. Then I would have to ask you who you were each time.”
She promised to remind me who she was next time, to make it easy for me. I can’t wait to see her again. It will be so stress-free to have a friend who just tells me right off who she is, without the who-are-you song and dance.
I have prosopagnosia. Its not too severe. I recognize my family, though when my ex-husband shaved his beard and his head all at once, it took me weeks to recognize him again. I tend to not tell people, and instead wait for cues during conversations to let me know who I’m talking to.
For years I just thought I was lazy or self centered since I didn’t recognize people who liked me. I felt ashamed at my selfishness, and tried harder to remember people. I learned coping skills, and now pretty much just smile and treat every single person I meet with warmth and like an old friend, just to be on the safe side.
Unfortunately, face blindness goes both ways. I don't recognize people I do like and I don't recognize people that I dislike. I can have a heated argument with someone and the next time I meet them I'll just smile like they are an old friend, as part of my coping skills. It makes it really hard to avoid people that should be avoided.
At work, there is this guy who is bald, and almost 7 feet tall, and is missing a thumb. He is rude and annoying, and I sort of love seeing him, because I know right off that I don’t have to smile or be nice to him since he’s an asshole. I recognize him every time because of his unusual look. Its quite a relief to know, "That's an asshole." each time I see him, even if it is just that specific one.
Some articles that describe other peoples’ experiences with face blindness (the first one is especially interesting, I think):
fivedials.com/...
www.newyorker.com/...