Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/28/face-blindness-more-widespread-than-we-thought.html
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My favorite example of a well-known figure with severe face blindness is the late Chuck Close, because he was an artist who specialized in a unique style of large-format portraiture. In addition to his neurological condition he also had to overcome severe physical disability to continue painting after a 1988 car accident that left him mostly paralyzed. Now that’s dedication to craft.
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I’ve often wondered if introverts do worse at face recall and recognition because whenever we’re introduced to someone, we look at them for a fraction of a second, then go back to staring at our shoes.
I suspect that the way you respond to visual stimuli – and form visual memories generally – may also play a part.
If it’s related to attention – rather than innate visual recall abilities – people with prosopagnosia might be able to do better by consciously studying facial features of people that they’re introduced to. Instead of glancing at the person and looking away, deliberately scan their eyes/nose/mouth or other salient areas for a little longer than you usually would (but not so long that it becomes creepy) and see if it makes a difference?
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In severe cases of face blindess a person may not recognize their own spouse if they change their hairstyle unexpectedly, so I don’t think it’s really about being too shy to look another person in the face.
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I feel like I may be part way on the spectrum for this and it’s been getting worse as I get older (early 50s now). I can recognize co-workers and close family members, but not all of my wife’s cousins and sometimes if I see someone who works in my building but not directly with me day-to-day I might not recognize them, especially if it’s out of context (one time I saw a kind of close co-worker at the mall and didn’t recognize her). Usually I’m okay once they talk.
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I think we sometimes identify a deficiency and jump to a disorder, if that makes sense. So there’s a difference between prosopagnosia and being bad with faces. The former is related to dysfunction in specific brain regions, while the latter, which I share with you, is probably related in some ways to attention like you suggest. I’m definitely not good with faces because of a pattern of watching mouths due to auditory processing issues and a discomfort with eye contact due to general purpose introversion. As @Brainspore pointed out though, the prosopagnosia can reach pretty extreme levels.
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Same, and i fear it could get worse too as i age (about ten years behind you).
Do you ever also mistake strangers (briefly) for people that you do know? Happens to me sometimes but maybe I’m just trying to compensate so that i don’t rudely ignore an acquaintance.
I’m also kind of bad at even recognizing actors across different films, unless they have a very distinctive appearance.
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I am the opposite – if I think I might recognize someone but I’m not sure, I don’t say anything in case I’m wrong. (Happened to me briefly on the train today, saw someone who I thought might be a friend of my daughters but after a couple more looks I realized it wasn’t them.)
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For a while I thought I was somewhat face blind, but was confused when I did internet tests and scored quite well. I realized that I wasn’t looking at people’s faces to begin with. And I needed glasses. Another part of what made me think I was face blind was that I often mixed up characters in tv shows, but I think that was about having a bunch of actors that conformed to narrow beauty standards, had identical haircuts, and it wouldn’t help if the show was ethnically homogeneous in its casting (e.g. 1980s British television). I’d be mixing up the two blond guys because, yeah, they did look alike. Also I needed glasses.
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That’s me too. I have been wrong before, and it was not pleasant.
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this is so me. today, i saw someone who may have been an old co-worker with whom i’ve had… hundreds?.. of conversations with over many years. but without the context of the workplace i had zero confidence.
they smiled at me while i was trying to figure it out. but not a “i know you” smile. i tend to rely on other people knowing, so… i guess it wasn’t them? ( i nodded, rather wave. it seems a good middle ground. )
i have failed to recognize people i’m dating, while we’ve been dating, if i’m not expecting to see them. 
it’s a conspiracy. i swear.
sometimes with mystery movies i get confused because i swear person a was person b. nope. they’re just similar. apparently.
honestly tho, british ones seem to be better ( for me ) because the characters so often conform to specific archetypes
that said, i don’t think i have true prosopagnosia. i do see and recognize people. it’s only that i often need more clues than just a person’s face for recognition to fully click in
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The part about it being a spectrum is a bit reassuring. I’d always heard this described in the most extreme terms, like being unable to identify family members or friends, and that’s not me, but I cannot always recognize my coworkers until I’ve worked with them for months, or unless they have some unique feature besides facial features, like blue hair or an unusual voice or style of dressing.
Currently there are two dark-haired women with glasses working side by side in my department and I’m continually terrified I’m going to get them mixed up because they look exactly the same to me at this stage. I assume this is not normal, but it’s also not so serious it needs some sort of medical treatment- given enough time with people, I eventually can distinguish them, and for some of them it’s never even a problem to begin with, as long as they’ve got some obvious unique trait.
I’m also very bad at remembering names, though I’ve gradually improved at that over the years through practice. Often I’ll have a complete list of names successfully memorized in my head, but be less than 100% certain which name goes with which person because of the face thing.
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Yeah, I’d get that, too. Though the funniest was watching something where I was shocked that the movie was apparently so blasé about a character having a sexual relationship with his sister, only to realize it was actually two different characters.
That’s where I most often get jammed up - two different character that fit the same archetype, have identical styling (hair, clothes), played by actors of the same age and with looks that conform to expectations. It’s worse when I have to read subtitles (so I’m looking less at faces, and paying less attention to voices).
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What I find very interesting(not that I’m complaining) is that having almost total Aphantasia does not appear to impair facial/person recognition.
I suspect that I’m absolutely no better than “average-ish”; but, despite not being able to picture people; or even give more than suspiciously cursory descriptions of people I ought to be very familiar with; I can still recognize them without incident. Couldn’t tell you what, exactly, I’m picking up; or give you a description that wouldn’t match so many people as to be effectively useless for someone else trying to recognize them; but the recognition that ‘that is a photo of x’/‘there’s y in the crowd over there’/‘the person seeking my attention in the hallway is z’ occurs without incident.
I have this! In my case there’s not much suggestion of autism. Rather, I had very poor vision growing up and rely on other characteristics like gait and voice to recognise others.
I have failed to recognise my neighbours of some years or people I’ve met and had lengthy conversations with the day before. School reunion was a challenge!
People keep saying that, and I wish I had the data to conclusively call bullshit on it, but all the data is collected by the sort of people who start with that as a reasonable hypothesis and don’t care if it’s not disprovable.
Just because I’m not staring directly into your Neurotypical pupils at all times, that doesn’t mean I’m not seeing, or even looking at your face. Aversion to gaze-meeting doesn’t put a goddamn mask over your face, and you know something else autists are typically good at? Seeing and noticing details outside the visual focus. Besides, where does this “they aren’t meeting my gaze” blindness end? The cheeks and jaw? The hair? The entire torso from the ribs up? So why do so many people with prospagnosia not realise it for so long because they’re so good at recognising people by their glasses, facial hair, haircut, hat, clothes, carriage, gait, etc.?
Besides which: I have a form of prosopagnosia: I can’t visualise faces in my mind’s eye. I can recognise people fairly well by their faces, although I am notably bad at it. I have difficulty putting faces to names. But what I cannot do is call up “a face” in my mental imagery. Any face.
I look deeply into my wife’s eyes all the time. I look at her face, I study it in detail. It is a beautiful thing to me, and I want to keep looking at it for the rest of my life.
But she’s not here right now, and I can’t tell you what she looks like. She has a nose and a mouth and eyes (which are brown) and cheeks and lips and all the bits that make up a human face, but I can’t call them to mind to be able to describe them in relation to each other. I can visualise the four-dimensional construction of a tesseract more easily than I can call to mind my own wife’s face.
But sure, “I don’t make eye contact” is why. Cool story sciencebro.
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