#prospagnosia

[thingsonmydragon]

Adventures in mild face blindness

I changed offices (again), to the main branch, and there are so many people here, and all so friendly, and now I have to learn all their faces oh god this is going to take months

I have no clue who that woman was yesterday that greeted me by name, I don't even know what department she's in. I started to recognize the woman that sits across from me after I saw her all day 4 days in a row

(Changing makeup, hair, etc is as effective as wearing a mask. Straightened your hair? New person with same voice, help, who this????)

I'll memorize everybody, it'll just take a while. I still don't know who that guy-who-looks-like-Jordan-but-isn't is. Fortunately everybody in my new department is easy to tell apart.

[autism-asks]

Iiaat to not remember where you met people/their names? Prime example: I was at a building and when got in the elevator a saw someone I knew and he said Hi and we chatted a bit, “how are you” etc, then he got out on his floor. It took me about 5 min later I realized that he’s my across-the-street neighbor, then another min to connect that his name was John. I do this a lot with people I don’t know super well, but still have met, talked to, and even live next to but not close friends with.

Based on anecdotal evidence, it seems that autistic people can have difficulty recognising people if they are encountered in a different context than they are used to, i.e. seeing a teacher around town instead of at school, running into a colleague while grocery shopping etc. In your case, this would be meeting your neighbour at work.

If this is due to difficulty recognising people in general, this could be linked to prosopagnosia (face blindness). Prospagnosia is not an autistic thing, although it seems to occur in autistics more than the general population.

-Kath

[autism-asks]

Is it a part of face-blindness to not recognize people unless you interact with them? I'm often in situations where people will recognize me and mention that we have several classes together, but it seems like I've never seen them before! And then after that interaction, I'll see them everywhere, and I feel really bad for not recognizing them the first time. But once I know people or recognize them, I can pretty easily picture their face in my head.

No, that would not be face-blindness. Most likely, you just don’t pay much attention to people in these situations until they interact with you. 

-Sabrina

[fivedollarradio]

Thus, though I may be unable to recognize a particular face at a glance, I can recognize various things about a face: that there is a large nose, a pointed chin, tufted eyebrows, or protruding ears. Such features become identifying markers by which I recognize people. (I think for similar reasons, I find it easier to recognize a caricature than a straightforward portrait or photograph.) I am reasonably good at judging age and gender, though I have made a few embarrassing blunders here. I am far better at recognizing people by the way they move, their 'motor' style.

Oliver Sacks on his prospagnosia or “face blindness”

Until I read this, I thought everyone recognized people by hairstyles, eyeglasses, distinctive features like a mole or a big nose. I’m not too terrible -- at least, unlike Dr. Sacks, I can recognize my own house. (His “face blindness” extends to non-human “faces” of sorts.) I have trouble recognizing people out of context -- my neighbor, whom I see on a daily basis almost, I didn’t recognize in the drug store. Certain actors and actresses who look very similar are hard. (Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, for example. I know them by their roles. I can’t visual their faces outside the characters they’ve played.) I didn’t know this was even a thing until recently. 

[fivedollarradio]

I have done a little reading on prosopagnosia and apparently it is a brain wiring thing. Therefore it is not something I can change or improve because those connections just aren’t there in my brain. Apparently someone with prosopagnosia processes facial information in a similar way tat most people see inanimate objects, Could you imagine discerning one table from a mental store of hundreds of tables? You might remember a particularly distinctive one but most of them would seem similar to each other. That is what it is like for me with people.

I used to try and work out who someone was by engaging them in conversation and working out their identity through context and what they said. This worked well for much of the time but even when I was doing this I felt I was doing myself a bit of a disservice. Prosopagnosia is part of me and I am much more comfortable if I can be up front with people and explain I have issues recognising faces rather than agonise my way through a conversation trying to remember who they might be ad not make it obvious I have no clue who they are.

I sometimes don’t recognize people out of context, like my neighbor said “hi” to me in the drugstore and I didn’t know who he was, but I have no problem with “That’s ‘R’ who lives next door” when I see him in the building. Although another man moved in who is of similar age, size, and style, and I’ve confused the two of them handful of times. (I live in the midwest where the “slightly overweight, middle-aged white guy with a brush cut and short pants” is a common template. I’m not totally at fault here.) I never thought this was unusual, though, and chalked it up to not paying attention or just not being a “people person.” My mom is noticeably face-blind, and is a people person, as was her father, I suspect. This seems particularly hellish.

[roolph]

thesis 2015

oil

[queerestmo]

Autism comes with a variety of things, both good and bad. I love my autism. There’s a couple of things that I’m fucking tired of explaining to people, though.

I have facial blindness (prosopagnosia) and a big problem with learning and remembering names of people and things (aphasia). This affects both my interactions with people and my engagement with popular culture.

When I meet a new person, unless their appearance is really really unique, it’s going to take me a few times of really meeting them (not in passing, but decent conversations) to semi-confidently be able to recognize them. If they are “average” in appearance (which, admittedly, is a large percentage of the population), it’s going to take me considerably longer, because my brain has to sort through all the “average” things to find the unique ones that I can use to recognize them.

Additionally, unless they really stand out in my mind (which, tbch, is usually when I find them really fucking attractive), it’s going to take me even longer to learn their name than it does to learn to recognize them. Me not knowing someone’s name doesn’t mean I don’t care, it means I didn’t catch it the first few times I heard it and I’ve been too fucking embarrassed to ask them over and over again.

When it comes to popular culture, especially film, this means that I can’t watch 99% of old black and white film because they weren’t hiring unique actors at the time. Everybody looks, sounds, and moves exactly the fuck the same to me, which means I can’t follow the plot well enough to enjoy it. It also means that when I watch more current media, 90% of the time I have no idea what the names of the actors are and I probably only know the names of *most* of the main characters.

Names of people and things sound like the Charlie Brown trombone voice to me. No, I do not in fact know if I’ve seen “Wahwahwah” where Wahwah Wah plays Wahwah and Wah Wah plays Wahwah. On the other hand, I can tell you if I’ve seen the movie where [quick explanation of lead-up and outline of plot].

My frustration with this came up because the subject of the actors who played Zach and Cody in the uncreatively named show “Zach and Cody” came up. I commented as a sort of solidarity with another commenter that I didn’t know who was who, either, and the OP spent several back and forth comments making me feel like shit about it. My only exposure to them was when they were on that show, at which point they looked like two identical young blonde kids to me. That’s it. I couldn’t tell their characters apart most of the time, let alone tell you who played who.

In my entire life, there has only been one set of same-gender twins I could ever tell apart, and those were two girls I went to elementary school with who had radically different styles of dress. One girl was very femme and the other was very butch. Other than them, no same-gender twins I’ve ever met or seen in popular media have been discernible for me. Ever.

So, no, I don’t fucking know who played Cody and who played Zach. But I also can’t tell you the name of the actress from that movie I also can’t remember the name of. People tell me it’s a specific actor and I believe them because most people remember that shit a million times better than I do. So get off my fucking back.

[frozenoverknight]

prospagnosia