by CarrieVS » Sat Mar 28, 2015 10:29 pm
Putting a hat on is a cunning disguise, but I'll still recognise your build and voice.
Dammit I was going to do a TCS article about faceblindness.
5 [I Can See Faces, but I Can't Remember Them] - yes, that's about it. If I see two faces side by side and concentrate on comparing them then I can see the differences. But if you showed me two faces again the next day I wouldn't be able to say if they were the same two.
4 [The Smallest Changes in Appearance Will Turn Loved Ones Into Strangers] - Let me tell you a story. My older brother and I were working at the same place one summer, and I knew he was working a certain day when I was, so I was looking out for him. He was very easy to recognise, as he had shoulder-length blond ringlets. He would tie his hair back usually when at work, but the shoulder-length blond ponytail was just as distinctive.
He wasn't there. There was no guy with long blond hair. There were several guys I didn't recognise, and there was only one who didn't have dark hair or some other feature that obviously didn't belong to my brother. The exception was a guy with a similar build to Rob and an almost colourless crew cut.
Someone had mentioned to me that he was indeed here, so I decided this must be him, but even now knowing that, I couldn't see my brother in this guy with the crew cut, and in the end I actually had to take him aside and ask 'are you Rob?'
3. [It Can Be Socially Awkward as Hell] - Oooh yes. I've been working at the same place for over a year and there are three people I can recognise and be sure of it. Two are the tallest guys in the building and the other is - I'm sorry - the fattest woman. The other week I couldn't walk over and talk to the guy I've been working with the last two months because I didn't know if it was him. He was sitting at his usual desk but it was a Thursday and he's usually at a different office on Thursdays.
It's a lot better than it was in most of my childhood because I know what faceblindess is and I can explain to people. Until I was about fourteen I just thought I sucked, and did everything I could to hide the fact that I couldn't recognise people.
2 [It Has Made Me a Nicer Person, Against My Will] - For anyone who hasn't read the article, what the author says here is that she avoided the popular crowd at school and so on because they all looked mostly the same, and hung out with anyone who was a little different. Now I went to a school that didn't really have any punk kids with elaborately unique hair, and I tended to just avoid everyone. However it's probably not a coincidence that I ended up best friends with one of the few black children in the school, who was also remarkably small and had the shortest hair of any of the girls. And I also befriended a girl with Down's syndrome, who was also distinctively small but mainly she was recognisable by her behaviour and speech.
The author also says that she became very sensitive to emotional cues because facial expressions and body language give her better clues about how to act towards people when she doesn't know who they are. This is interesting because I suck just as much balls at recognising expressions as the faces they're on, and I've always attributed that to my faceblindness. An alternative explanation might be that people keep suggesting that I might be autistic (and faceblindness is also particularly common in autistic people).
1 [You Can Spend Your Whole Life Not Knowing You Have It] - I was taken to be assessed by someone who I presume was a child psychologist or similar, as a small child, for my inability to recognise people. However at that point faceblindness simply hadn't been discovered, other than as a very rare acquired condition following brain damage. Since it's a problem with perception, if you've had it all your life you have no idea that you're not perceiving things normally.
I was fourteen when I heard that this condition existed, and it was the biggest relief of my life. I didn't suck, I had a problem with a name that wasn't my fault and that I could explain to people. Before that, I used to dread being asked to hand back exercise books by a teacher, because I would have to admit that I didn't know who people were.
Once, our head teacher popped into the changing room just before a PE lesson and gave one-third of the girls in the year a lecture on being more friendly. He was, he said, shocked to learn that there were some people who still couldn't recognise everyone in the year, and we needed to do better. There were around 250 children in my year. I couldn't yet recognise more than about half the 28 or so people in my form, and only a handful of others. I was devastated. I knew I was terrible with faces, and didn't know it wasn't a personal failing, but it had never been suggested to me before that it actually meant I was a bad person.
This is half of the reason I like to tell people about faceblindness, to raise awareness. The other half is that, unlike the author of the article, I don't find that people get offended or call bullsh*t if I tell them I have faceblindness. Well they do, but they generally shut up when I drop the Latin word for it; somehow far fewer people think I could be making up prosopagnosia (Chrome does though) than faceblindness.
A Combustible Lemon wrote:Death is an archaic concept for simpleminded commonfolk, not Victorian scientist whales.