Face blindness
While searching for information about my problems remembering faces (my students are pretty familiar with that), I found information about prosopagnosia, or face blindness. If you have this condition, you are unable to easily recognize or remember faces — the face-recognition center of the brain doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I wrote up a MetaFilter post on the topic, with a bunch of links to prosopagnosia sites, and they are well worth checking out. One of the sites even allows you to take online tests to assess your face recognition ability. Whether I have full-fledged face blindness, I don’t know, but I do seem to have some amount of it. I have trouble recognizing most people “out of context.”
thank you so much for introducing me to ‘face blindedness’. i will not get anything done today trying to discover the different reasons behind it for individuals.
some it seems, failto simply internalise the visual imprint of the face poorly.
for me it is more , shall we say, emperical, as i have no internal visual processing function at all. i’m 53 and i don’t recall ever have being able to see an ‘artificial image’, even as a child. well, there was 1970, on lsd…
but i only discovered three years ago that the rest of the world has good ‘running videos and still’going on inside their heads….i’d always wondered why they say to ‘relax and visualise your favourite setting’….now it made sense all of a sudden.
i started asking my friends..”do you think in pictures?” and got weird looks and responses when explaining why i was asking about it. i immediately stopped and only mention as habit, with my companion. he’s used to anything coming from me.
now i’m hoping i’ll find some more people like myself! what a wonderful prospect.
so thanks…and i’m going to read your site next…
oh and yes…i’m perpetually losing things and losing myself….even when in the small village of 800 people where i first grew up. i learned early in life the compass directions and the principles of sun and shade and wind and cloud etc so i can never get lost in the grand scale! such as walkind the dogs in the country…..otherwise, turn me around in a circle and i’m totally disoriented.
oh yes, i tracked you, quick as a bunny, as they say here, from me-fi.
Thanks for the comments. It really is fascinating how differently the brain can work in different people.
Someone on the MeFi thread mentioned that the topic of face blindness made him think of this page. Very neat.