I think I have this, now everything makes sense. I moved to this little town where everybody knows everybody. That’s when I started to notice something was wrong. I entered a church group where I met many teenagers we got along so well but when I saw them around town I could never recognize them. They would say you passed by me and you didn’t say hi. I would tell them that they where new faces and that everybody looked the same. Time passed and I still had trouble recognizing them they just gave up and didn’t talk to me because they thought I did it on purpose. That’s why the anxiety of going out. People have said that I am self centered. I have always felt ashamed because of this. 😔
Sounds a lot like my experience! Ugh, I hope your friends are a bit more understanding when you explain to them that you're not being rude on purpose, but you can't help it.
This is a good reason to join a support group. I feel better knowing that I am not the only person experiencing these problems. Sometimes, I don’t think people understand when I explain it to them....
"i won't recognize you the next five times we meet" - "i know, you already told me this the last five times we met" - "ouh. i confess five is laaaargely understated"
@@SpinstersLibrary and i do have a few face translators either. on every critical mass there's people greeting me and asking surprisingly specific questions about details of my own life - and i know of no suspects who could have told all that to those strangers. after trying to steer smalltalk towards hobbies or jobs to maybe get a clue but failing in that, and after people ride along saying "see you later!", i just turn around to my face interpreters and ask "who was that?!" - "that was mathias, with whom you had talked about keeping rabbits on that party" - "oooh!! he shaved his beard!!" - "yes, he did" - "what an asshole."
Lived with this condition for as long as I can remember. If my wife changes her hair I won't recognize her. I try to be friendly with everyone I meet and If someone seems to know me I'll just ask how we know one and other. It's a very strange way to go through life with everyone being a stranger.
I have begun to study someone’s face while they aren’t looking at me. I piece together their face. It helps me recognize them out of context if I had been able to study them long enough. It creeps people out when they catch me studying their face. After another embarrassing incident of not recognizing someone because the light was different, although she was in context, I went Googling and found your video. This has been so helpful. People just think I am spacey, or getting senile. I am going to start telling people I have face blindness. Thank you!
You're lovely and I like your accent. It slowly dawned on me that I have problems with recognizing faces a few years ago. I remember being shocked to find out that I'd gone to school with a set of twins, Matt and Mark, for over ten years and thought they were the same person. I was super-embarrassed when a customer I had sold a $40,000 product to dropped by my office unexpectedly and I failed to recognize him. The first couple of visits he had his arm in a sling, and the last time it had healed. I saw a RUclips video about prosopagnosia, and all these memories came flooding back to me. So now I just tell people I meet about my issues right away - it's a whole lot easier. I just say, "I will probably not recognize you if I run into you out in public, so just remind me who you are each time until I tell you to stop."
I'm happy to hear you say it's not a big deal (I've found many videos of folks nearly in tears about having the condition). I have it too and agree that it's not a big deal. But more than that, I feel that it gives those of us who have the condition an exciting intuitive insight into the essence of the human brain, and more appreciation for its awesomeness. Scientists are discovering the brain is composed of many distinct functional entities that work together, rather than being a bag of random memory as we would intuit. I feel that having this condition, which I view as a memory discontinuity, makes the brain's composite nature more of a tangible reality.
I have prosopagnosia as well. I don't recognise my own children on toddler photos, I once (as far as I know) walked past my ex on the street without recognising him (we were a couple for two years) a friend that was with me at the time told me about it. I don't recognise my best friend if she put a hat on. Some films are impossible, I saw a movie with Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg but I can't tell the difference between them so the whole film was a complete mystery to me. A also have some of the other problems that sometimes affect people with prosopagnosia, I can't separate left from right without having to think about it for a bit and I have trouble recognising places as well.
I usually collect my son from school everyday. But one day when i failed to recognise my own son just because he was wearing a cap that shattered me. And it was very depressing.
I have been struggling with this for a few years. I think mine is quite mild but in a job that I'm supposed to know people it can be a bit of a hindrance. I do all those tricks. I try being friendly and hope they will say something that would give me a clue. Worst case I come right out and say what I have.
I originally was always told I was an introvert when in fact I was afraid to be around people because I couldn't recognize them. This has caused me lifelong social anxiety. I usually just avoid people and hope that I don't run into someone that knows me. During summer breaks in school I couldn't recognize my previous year's best friends if I didn't see them all summer long. It made it extremely hard to make friends as a child. Now at almost 60 yrs old, I just avoid people as much as possible. I'm always in fear of people saying hi and knowing my name when I have no idea who they are. If I didn't need to shop for food or go to the doctors, I probably wouldn't ever leave my house. I wish there was better access to therapy to learn coping mechanisms.
I completely relate to your story...the awkwardness, the embarrassment, the characterization of being aloof, spacy, or blatantly unfriendly. Face blindness, whether complete or partial, makes it really difficult to develop some social skills. It can be disabling in some situations. I was always afraid that I would not recognize my children when picking them up from school. Fortunately, all the things you mention can help fill in the identity gaps. Hair style, clothing, gait, mannerisms, and other cues and markers can help. I used to "lose" them (and partners or friends) in public spaces where we were not immediately next to each other. Searching a department store if they'd wandered a bit was always a time for panic. I feel I may be better than the average bear at voice recognition. I can't prove it, but I can often tell who someone is remotely by voice timbre and tics. I think of it as analogous to a blind person sharpening their hearing skills for spatial navigation. I got a lewd phone call and thought it was some kind of prank. They had supposedly disguised their voice, but it was clearly a chiropractor friend of my ex. "What the heck are you doing, Frank?" I know this isn't about facial blindness, but it is an associated phenomenon I believe to be linked to it. I can consciously memorize distinctive characteristics of people I know really well. But out of context, I have no idea who most people are. Apparently trauma will register a face on some unconscious level, but only partially. I once ran into a person that I was sure I knew but had no idea from where. I did the usual, "Oh, how have you been, etc., etc." When recognition finally flooded in, I almost fell backward in shock, trying to get away from them. This had been a former, extremely toxic supervisor who had said horrible and inappropriate things to me and left me in a puddle of tears and quitting my job. I would have steered completely clear of them had I known who it was. The conflating of multiple people into one is an interesting and sometimes amusing phenomenon. I watched many episodes of "Grey's Anatomy," completely flummoxed at the aberrant script writing because the protagonist was acting opposite to her character in different scenes. "What committee wrote these episodes?!" I would shout at the screen. I did not realize there were TWO blonde women in the ensemble cast until someone brought that to my attention. People can think I'm racist if I don't explain carefully about prosopagnosia and make an off-hand remark about a bunch of people all looking the same to me. (Asian, African-American, etc.,) It's not really racism. The closest I can get is grouping some people by extraneous features, like people with dreadlocks, people with nose rings, people with color streaks in their hair...or with ethic similarities. The same is true for tall blondes in running togs. I depend on the location, the dreadlocks, or the orange streak in their hair to recognize them. If someone at the coffee shop ties their hair back and their name tag is not visible, they are a new person, even though I see them several times a week. If I were ever to meet aliens like the Na'avi, you wouldn't want me on the diplomatic team. I do have the ability to memorize a few distinctive celebrity faces that I associate with a particular facial feature that is uncommon. Johnny Depp's mouth is peculiar to him. So is Fred Astaire's jaw line and hair line. I have to see them repeatedly to train myself. It's not reliable, though. In general, actors ARE the people they are playing. I now introduce myself with a cheerful disclaimer, saying, "The next time you see me, I may not recognize you because I have partial facial blindness. Plus I'm horrible with names," (which may have a causal link), "so please don't be offended." It's possible that this came from a head injury, since one of my parents used to throw me down the stairs with some frequency. I also attribute it partially to extreme, uncorrected nearsightedness in early childhood. There may be some crucial time at which brain development occurs that allows facial recognition. I was not able to properly see until the fourth grade. My world changed because of corrective lenses, but by that time, there was no hope for normal facial recognition. Or, baby, I was born this way!
This is exactly what it's like. I have hurt people's feelings when I haven't recognized them. I didn't recognize the woman who lives next door to me when she got rid of the streak in her hair. I didn't recognize myself on zoom when I first started using it
Just yesterday I found an old apology message on my phone that I sent to someone after I didn't recognise her in the street. So awkward and embarrassing when that happens.
Zoom is what made me realize something was up. I thought I was just inattentive and too distracted to notice people's faces, and then I started video calling close friends. I recognize everyone on the call except for one lady, and that lady is me. I thought everyone else had a very nebulous, mutable idea of what they looked like. Apparently I was wrong. Apparently I've got a brain thing.
I definitely have this. For most of my life I just assumed that everyone had the same difficulty with recognizing people and got characters confused in movies just like I did. For me, I’m more likely to think that one person is 4 different people than I am to think that 4 different people are the same one. It’s frustrating to know that others don’t even need to expend any conscious effort to recognize someone, while I’m over here constantly working at 110% brain power to pick out every distinct detail and then I still fail to recognize someone 9 times out of 10. And then people wonder why I avoid social situations and am so exhausted by them. LOL
Thank you so much for sharing your experience... I also y with face blindness & I feel so difficult to deal with it. Feeling better after listening you. Thank you.. stay blessed 🙏
Thank you very much for sharing this video with us! I am writing an Essay about Developmental Prosopagnosia and listening to how you feel and how you dealt with prosopagnosia makes me understand better what I am reading in papers, also I like it so much how you adress this with such humor :) it is very important for people to know about this so we all can understand that people with prosopagnosia do not want to offend anyone or be rude!
I have aphantasia and I struggle a lot with faces it took me a long time to remember my grandma also talked to a random person for an hour I had mistaken them for a friend that I had for over two years.
Here's my embarassing story: I was working in Customer Service and someone walked into the office. Immediately I recognized him as my boss' friend so I rushed to my boss' office and said to him that his friend was waiting for him. The man waited patiently while my boss kept looking at me silently asking where was his friend. I directed him to the friend but my boss kept asking what was going on while the 'friend' looked at us in confusion. My other coworker bursted out laughing seeing us because they noticed the similarities (glasses n teeth style) but never thought that I wouldn't recognize the obvious differences (different face) to the point that I'd disturb my boss. I couldn't stop laughing after that and had to apologize to the confused guy for my stupidity. Thank God both my boss and the guy was cool about it though. 🤣🤣
This is so spot on! Thank you for posting this video. I also participated in the same study you mentioned. Whenever I try to explain to people the problem they look at me as if I'm making it up. I will try your method of simply saying I have problems recognizing faces so I apologize in advance if I don't recognize you. I do have a few embarrassing stories but I will share this one that happened before I ever heard of face blindness. I was sitting in my office at work one day when a woman I did not know came to my office door and just stood in front of me. She stared at me with a funny look on her face. I just stared back awkwardly and waited, neither of us speaking. I was about to ask if I could I help her when she smiled and laughed. That was when I finally recognized her. She was my co-worker. She was someone who I saw and spoke to every day. But on this particular day, she was wearing a wig. Normally her hair was dark brown and very curly. This wig was a blond pixie cut! Sometimes I cannot believe how easy it would be for someone to hide from me in plain sight if they wanted.
Oh no, I can picture that expectant look on her face, the raised eyebrows... been there so many times 😂 Glad that she found it funny and didn't get offended!
Thanks for the tips. I've been working at my local library, and some of the regular patrons have similar hairstyles, and their voices are almost identical. And many women will change their hairstyle quite frequently. Usually, right when I think I can remember. When I first started, I mistook a coworker for a patron and then noticed the differed t style of dress. I joked, saying I'll never be able to pick you out of a lineup. It is challenging.
I don't have an injury either- but I have it to some degree. I haven't gotten an official diagnosis, but I think it's why I like extreme styles- something to remember as everyone's faces look so similar. Once I met a boy in the evening when out with my friends as a teenager. We talked for hours that night and got along smashingly- he was wearing a baseball cap covering his hair- he wanted to meet me at the bowling alley a few days later. When I went to meet him with my friends, I told them to let him & his friends come to us- just have fun and wait at the arcade. It wasn't a "hard to get" thing- it was that I could not have picked him out of that bowling alley full of groups of boys of that same age if my life had depended on it.
I don't have this (I think), but I often need to talk with ppl more than once before I recognize them. I also have a hard time remembering names or connecting them to the faces, so even though I might know who someone is, I still can't remember their name 🙈. Especially if a name is foreign to me, I really struggle to remember it if I don't see it written down. I think it's great you talk about this, and we should all be more forgiving if someone doesn't remember our face/name. From my experience, it's mostly not because they're rude, but because their memory just fails them. Obviously some struggle with it more than others, but I think most of us have experienced it to various degrees ourselves, too. If I notice someone I've said hello to doesn't recognize me, I tend to say "I'm so&so, from here&there" & when they usually apologize, I tell them not to worry b/c I often struggle with the same thing.
That's a good one. You can always say, "Oh, what have you done to your hair?' or "You look different" A woman ran up to me in a shopping centre one day with her arms wide open about to give me a big hug screaming "I haven't seen you in ages" and I just gave her a blank stare. Of course she stopped dead, said "you don't recognize me" and backed away in fright. To this day, I have no idea who she was. That was my first horror story. Now I hide away and stay home incase it happens again.
Very relatable, as I'm some degree face blind, too. Just a free association: "I can stand the pain And the blinding heat 'Cause I won't remember you The next time we meet You'll be making the arrangements You'll be trying to set me free Not a moment for the meeting I'll be busy as a bee You'll be talking to me But I just won't understand I'll be falling by the wayside You'll be holding out your hand" (I'm Going In - Lhasa de Sela)
I never knew what it was called, I've never been diagnosed as I suffer from anomic aphasia as well which leaves me really in trouble. I don't remember names either. Utterly stuffed. I have both, so thank you for tell me story, I now know I'm not alone.
I watched an interview with Jeremy Paxman one night where he was attacking an executive of Coca cola. I couldn't remember where the heck I knew that face from. I'd watched University Challenge hundreds of times, but because the face was out of his local, I couldn't put the face with the place. Being an Australian only made matters worse as I couldn't even work out if it was in Australia or in England until the hammer hit me on the head next time I saw Uni Challenge. It nearly drove me crazy. When I see my doctor I only recognize one of the staff by the fact that she has every colour of the rainbow in her hair. So I understand how you feel. When I go to the chemist, I'm sure the staff has changed every time I walk in there. It's frightening. My damage is from an epileptic fit but that decades ago.
One other thing - I've noticed that I gravitate towards unusual looking people. Facial scars or birthmarks, very tall or short, prosthetic limbs.... If I'm ever tricked into attending a large party, you can be sure I'll end up talking to the girl in a wheelchair or the 6'4" Mexican dude. Generic looking people give me fits!
Being a person of color I ALWAYS identified white people by the color or style of their hair.. I mean ALL white people, co workers, church members. It was terrible until I started doing it with black people to!!.. LOL I had a job with a lot of black women, and twice I thought I was talking to an entirely different person when this one black girl had a short blonde wig or weave, and CHANGED IT to a long curly black wig. ... I didn't know who she was and started talking about her right in front of her FACE!.. 😂😂😂 .. I said, "I don't think Mary likes me" .. to a group of people, and she said, "well it's not that I don't like you. I'm sorry you feel that way" .. I was like oh shit, that's her??. 😂😂
That IS awkward! As a white person in a town with relatively few black folks, I have to be careful with my face blindness issues. I know all black people don't look the same! I'll tell you what though, to me all old white people look the same.
One of the most embarrassing moments of my life was not recognizing a black guy on the street who I used to worked with 30 hours a week for multiple years. He took it so personally. I'd never seen him not wearing his work clothes, he'd changed his hair cut and put on about 50lbs. I know I'm generally not as good at recognizing black people which I do feel guilty about but I wouldn't have recognized a white person in that situation either.
Thanks for sharing - I have heard of this condition but not in any detail. I think this is definitely something people who have it should talk about more. Most of us just assume we will be recognized but we could easily provide more info to help identify ourselves when we speak if we knew it was needed. I know I don't have it myself but I definitely experience a situational thing where I just don't notice people if I see them out of the usual context. Like running into a coworker at a store or running into friends at a restaurant - my eyes pass right over them if I am not expecting them to be there. The difference of course is that if they wave/speak to get my attention then I will see and recognize them. I have been told many times that I have my 'head in the clouds' because I just don't notice (see/hear) things happening around me. Not the same thing at all I know but I can imagine it at least.
I had been going to contemporary dance classes for about a term and didn't recognise my dance teacher when she started talking to me in town, for the entire 5-minute or so conversation I didn't work out who she was! It clicked a few days later, I'm not sure how! Nowadays I also warn people in advance when I meet them that I probably won't recognise them the next time and please would they tell me who they are! :D
Wow, you are forced to put so much extra energy into your social life! I listened to a program several years ago, about a man who didn't recognize his own girlfriend, time after time. I didn't realize it's actually a physical impairment.
I have, on occasion, not recognised my husband in public. But really it's mostly just an inconvenience and an embarrassment rather than an actual impairment
Story time! Sooo… usually my problem is that I assume everyone knows me so I usually respond to every wave, every hey there that’s ever given in public. The worst that ever happened to me was in college. I was in a group project and working with this girl for last few days. She left class a bit early but I caught up with her just outside or so I thought. She initiated the conversation with a “hey” so I was pretty confident she was my classmate. I talked to her for over a half an hour as we walked from one side of the campus to the other. And right when I was about to say farewell, she turned around to face me directly. And I did a literal double take. I didn’t know this girl at all. And yet she had the same voice, same walk, same laugh, same hairdo. Her face was very different when I looked at her head on and she wore glasses which my classmate didn’t. It turned out that this girl was the younger sister of my classmate and she also had face blindness so she was afraid I was someone that she just couldn’t recognize either. We had a good laugh about it but I couldn’t believe I chatted this girl’s ear off so long and she didn’t even know who I was.
I used to joke that I was a little face blind at my last job, because I'd have to meet people several times before I'd recognize them, and even then, I'd have to rely on hair color and style, or a distinct voice or laugh, or the way they styled their clothes. I just assumed it was laziness on my account somehow. Then I started reading about prosopagnosia, and I realized it wasn't a joke and I have it to some degree. The big tip off came with the rise of video chat over COVID. Every time I'm on a video call, I end up staring at myself a lot because I don't recognize me at all. I'll see myself, and I'll think "wow, that lady looks like my son!" I'm fairly certain this is about half of the reason I hate The Godfather, by the way. Everyone talks about it like it's the greatest movie of ever, that it's very emotional. Everyone in that movie has the same hair, voice, suit, and mannerisms. When somebody gets shot and dies, I have no idea who he was or why I should care. I can tell Al Pacino and Marlon Brando apart from everyone else, but I cannot for the life of me tell who anyone else is supposed to be in that movie. Please, casting directors! Make casts more diverse so I know who the characters are and what's happening in movies! Fifty greasy Italian dudes wearing the same suit doesn't work for some of us!
That's exactly me you're describing. I've felt bad about it all my life. The strategies I've developed are like yours and I've recently started to outright tell my colleagues and some new friends that I probably won't recognize them if I saw them on the street. I don't know if they believe me, don't know if explaining helps or if I still look like an arrogant person who cannot bother herself to recognize anyone. Life is really difficult for us. I've had neighbors who grabbed my arm on the road to face me because I didn't return their greetings, I've had friends and ex-colleagues confused about the way I treat them outside. I don't recognize any of my university professors. My worst moment has to be me not recognizing my own father after he had been away for a couple of years, though. When I watch movies with my kids, I don't remember that guy who also acted in that, that and that movie. That is a total no go. In each movie, they appear in another character, another context. I believe I would go right past many celebrities even if they walked right on to me.
I feel your pain. My wife is very sympathetic, but she gets a real kick out of watching TV with me. I had a coworker show up at the office on his day off after shaving his beard, and I greeted him like a customer.
HI , I HAVE SAME FACE BLINDNESS PROBLEM OCCURED SINCE 2010..... NOBODY CAN UNDERSTAND ME ... SUDDENLY I FOUND THIS VIDEO AND I THINK I SHOULD TALK TO YOU
I HADNT IT FRM BIRTH.... IT GENERATED BY STROKE ON HIND BRAIN AREA DUE TO EXTREME EMOTIONAL STRESS AND I THINK IT CAN BE CURE BY CONTINEOUS ACCUPRESSURE/ACCUPUNCTURE THERAPY AS PER MY OBSERVATIONS ON MY SELF.
I had to quit a job because of This condition I just am coming to terms that I have it. The signs are all there. I had to quit my job because I couldn't distinguish one girl in a red lifeguarding suit from another girl and the red lifeguarding suit after 2 months of working there and I got ridiculed and mocked in front of everyone like a child by the manager for not knowing a random girls name after 2 months just where she was and what she wanted. The description of the place that someone is at is not good enough you need to know their name. Now to the more embarrassing less life impacting reasons. I used people with unique characteristics to identify if I was in the right classroom because I can't tell unless I have a friend. I don't recognize anyone. So i when to gym class. I thought and assumed that 1 person with a unique characteristic was sick. so I got on a school bus for a field trip. turns out my friend wasn't sick, she stayed at school and went to the class. My teacher was so mad. She's like couldn't you tell that none of your classmates were here. I'm just like I have one friend I thought she was sick. how do you only have 1 friend and only recognize 1 person. Yeahhhh. The last one was very embarrassing I was in 2 art classes. In the morning there was this really nice guy who would joke around with me we'd kinda of talk. Then, I would go to my evening class and hang out with completely different people from the morning people. yes there's a lot of overlap of people in our art program from small University didn't think about that. So my 2nd class, a guy says sorry about earlier a guy I never met in my life so I was confused cause I bumped his chair like oh no it's fine that was an accident and he looked at me confused. I'm like oh was it something else. hes like the joke i made. Me still confusedand that's when it hit me that he was the same person Just a 3 hours of time separation.
I don't think I have this, unless there's a mild, reading glasses version of it. I do get confused if I meet someone out of context. My Dad may have had it. Often when I walked with him and we saw someone we both knew, I'd have to remind him who they were. Thanks for explaining this!
Taking Tea With Catherine I am the same - milder form of it I think - and it’s been a real problem for most of my life but I never knew there was a condition associated which gets as bad as Claudia’s condition! I really struggle with recognising people out of context if they are acquaintances and my partner has always found it difficult to understand why, for instance, I don’t recognise my next door neighbour of two years in the local pub. The most embarrassing occasions have been asking a guest at my own wedding about themselves as if they were another person completely (how is so and so? Oh that’s you 😑) and serving a neighbour of my parents, who I had known my whole life, in a shop I was working at when I was 17 and wondering why this man was staring at me in disbelief (because I was acting like he was a stranger - which he was to me at that point!) and then he told my parents how rude I was. I never knew there was an actual condition but mine sounds like yours rather than Claudia’s because I do eventually imprint faces once I’ve known someone a long time or if they are particularly visually striking or unique. Coupled with my increasing short-sightedness, I live in constant fear of bumping into people I have met before in random places! I am going to research it to see if there are degrees of it because I’ve always thought it was just a skill I lacked!
Jacqueline, it sounds like you might have it too! As far as I know (and again, I'm not speaking as an expert, definitely look into the science of it), there are different degrees and individuals experience it differently.
Spinster's Library I will research further into the degrees of it. I have to say when I saw the first few minutes of your video, it really was one of those moments of absolute recognition and relief that someone was describing a phenomenon I’ve experienced, albeit to a lesser extent, since I was young! You may have cleared up a lifelong mystery for me!
Claudia, this is fascinating and I really identify with this because I’ve really struggled my whole life with faces of people out of context (see my reply to Taking Tea With Catherine for my embarrassing examples!) but in a much milder way than your condition I because I remember people I know well or striking people but struggle with acquaintances! Is there a spectrum for this perhaps? It’s something I’ve just kept quiet about for years because it’s so awkward and people often don’t believe I’m not just being rude or socially lazy! When you talked about your tactics for randomly bumping into people who know you, I could really relate!
I do believe there is a spectrum and that different people experience it to different extents but I'm really not an expert on the science! Check out the links I posted in the description box for more info. You can also find various face recognition tests online that you can try out
Spinster's Library Update: I just checked the prosopagnosia website - I couldn’t see anything on there being a spectrum so it may well be that I’m just crap with faces! I found the test puzzling for most of the faces initially but managed quite well though it didn’t give me an overall result I would say I definitely don’t have prosopagnosia. I knew who all the people were but there were a couple I just couldn’t recognise with their hair missing. But this has happened to me when people I’ve met before change their hair if that is the feature I’ve relied on to know it is them!
I'm not sure about having face blindness, but I definitely have troubles with faces. If I've seen them enough times it's not really a problem (like my parents and my husband), but otherwise it can be rough. One time I was assigned to a group in university, and I didn't know anyone in the group prior to this project. First day working with them in class was fine (cause it was the same day I was assigned to them), but the second day I sat with a completely different group. I think they were maybe sitting in the same seats that my group was sitting in last time, so that threw me off. The random guy I thought was a group member was chill about it, but it was still pretty embarrassing. Also my husband has three cousins (who are brothers), and they mind as well be identical triplets cause I can't tell them apart at all. My husband says that they shouldn't be that difficult to tell apart, but none of them have any super significant differences for me to tell them apart. My husband descripes them so simply too like X is the tall one (they're all similar height imo), Y has longer hair (they all have fairly short hair), and Z is the other one (doesn't help if I can figure any of them out). I don't see any of them very often either, so I think I'm doomed to forever not being able to tell them apart lol.
Honestly it sounds like you might have it too! I can sympathise with the cousin situation - family parties are just a nightmare for me. Check out the resources I linked in the description box if you want to figure it out and maybe take a test.
@@SpinstersLibrary Maybe! I kind of assumed I didn't cause I didn't know there was a range. I'll check out your links :) Also yeah, now that you mention it, family gatherings can be tricky for me too. Family gatherings are almost always only my husband's side of the family (my side doesn't really do gatherings), so it tends to be a whole bunch of people who I don't know very well and often don't immediately recognise. It's also fun when someone brings their newish partner, cause it will take me a long while to figure out if I've met the partner before and just don't recognize them, or if I just haven't met them before.
I was looking through different neurological disorders out of curiosity and i came across prosopagnosia and this was really insightful. I don't have prosopagnosia but it was really interesting to hear how different people view the world and move in it, helps to be better understanding each other. Thank you for the informative video. Question: Are you able to tell if someone is attractive or unattractive?
Yes, my problem isn't with seeing faces, but with remembering them. So I perceive faces just fine, but if I see the face again, irrespective of my subjective opinion on their attractiveness, I probably won't recognise it.
I'm terrible with unfamiliar faces and i thought it's just because I'm not paying attention to them. It wasn't a great issue since I can recognise the familiar once from their vibes ( idk, this might sound crazy but i was happy about this coz i thought l'm kinda smart to identify people in a different way). I can even recognise my identical twin cousins, never from their face, but from their different tone & habits. But it was not the same with unfamiliar faces and that creat a lot of weird situations & i play guessing. Then i come to know about prosopagnosia and after listening to you I'm really surprised how similar we're and i really think I've a lil bit of this syndrome and it's obviously from my mom coz she face the same terrible issue.
The kitten story cracked me up. I’ve done things like that so many times! I used to work at a bookshop, and I would go fetch a book for a customer, and hand it to the wrong person all the time. 😂
I had the same issues when I worked in a shoe shop. Customers just insisted on moving and then when I came out of the stock room I just wouldn't recognise them. So embarrassing...
@@SpinstersLibrary Did you know you had face blindness at the time you worked in the shoe shop? I didn’t know until much later, and then it all made sense! :) I realized I had it while reading a mystery novel which featured a character with face blindness.
@@heatheredwards7158 Yes, at that point I was already aware of it, so that helped because my colleagues could point me towards the right person if they happened to stand near by and knew which customer was waiting for me.
Usually, I'm not bad at identifying faces but I've noticed that, in certain situations, perhaps if I'm nervous or concentrated on something else, my brain doesn't "save" the data of the face, no matter how many times I see the person: In my first job, a colleague of my parents had to introduce himself to me three times within two weeks. And there's this woman that kept telling my friends to "say hi" to me which I don't remember, even after she told them she had worked next door from me in a previous job for two years... I think I've inherited it from my father. He has a gift with faces and recognises someone after 40 years of not seeing them without any problem, but then he won't recognise his mechanic if he sees him in the street. When in doubt, he always greets the person, so he once ended greeting a tv presenter in a restaurant because he looked familiar.
I have partial face blindness. I can recognize people I know very well, or people whose faces are unusually distinctive. Otherwise, good luck. :-( Even trying to describe faces on TV, where I can freeze an image and stare at it for awhile (describing details such as "left eyebrow goes down at outer corner") doesn't necessarily help; a different angle or different lighting or different makeup or who knows what else makes then look different to me. Part of it is that all the face features exist on a continuum; there is no such thing as distinctive separate types of eyebrows, mouths, noses, etc. It makes the appearance of one face blend into the appearance of another similar one. Speaking of TV, all too often whoever does the casting has a particular mental image of good-looking men or good-looking women or both, and all the continuing characters fit that image -- so the show might as well be cast with identical twins or triplets. It's made worse by the fact that when I notice someone's hair at all (often I don't), the way I would describe it is usually different from the way other people describe it. I was once in a meeting where the chair called on a woman to speak by saying, "The redhead over there." I thought, "I could have sworn her hair was black" -- and when I next saw her, sure enough she had black hair. Not dyed, either; her hair didn't look any different than it had before. I can only guess that it may have been black with a red highlight that showed up in some lights, and the chair saw that and mentioned it as, I suppose, the thing he found most distinctive (or he had a thing for redhaired women). I also have a lot of trouble remembering names, unless the names "fit" the person's personality somehow. Repeating the name doesn't help much, plus I can't really do that if I'm concentrating on what's being said. Names people have chosen for themselves usually do fit, and that makes it so much easier for me to remember them.
I've heard about it in groups i'm in for aphantasia, which is completely different but some people do have both, some just one or the other. Aphantasia is not being able to visualize (while awake anyway, many of us still dream, apparently mental imagery when awake and asleep are in different parts of the brain). I had no idea until I was 29 and heard about aphantasia people were being literal about visualizing and sayings like "reading is like a movie in your head" make zero sense to me. But I have no issue recognizing faces (which just makes me confused thinking about it, like...I can't visualize...so where is the info being stored and how am I accessing it? Brains are complicated). Thank you for sharing this. It's very informative and not something you hear much about.
Haha yes, brains are complicated! I don't have aphantasia, my imagination is very visual, which I think is why I prefer books to films. At least in books I can tell the characters apart 😂 Period dramas are the worst with everyone wearing bonnets, hats and wigs, and I'm having to constantly ask whoever I'm watching a film with about who this character is again.
@@SpinstersLibrary I think aphantasia is why I can actually get scared from a horror movie and really immersed in it but not from a horror novel (and I love horror). I also never have a problem of "but the characters in the film don't look like how I pictured them from the book!". That was another thing I heard people say a lot that made no sense to me. Even though I grew to love reading I tend to forget descriptions, including what a character looked like. I've even felt like I must be a bad person because I'll even forget stuff like a character's race. I'll remember what I thought of their personality, how I felt about them. But how they looked? Not a chance i'll remember that. Now I get why I forget those details, because with a book I don't see any of those details. Emotions stick with me most.
Everyone who explains this condition explains it like memory loss , so in my opinion it’s just a case of extreme memory loss instead of being blind to a face.
I think you're on to something. I've seen memory loss in others (unfortunately) that tends to be specific to things.. like dates, conversions, or places, so maybe it's like that, pretty specific /acute memory loss
If you look away from someone for a second, but you know it's them because you just saw them a second ago, do you feel like you recognize the face then after looking at them again right away, or do you just know because of context?
Yes, I find it very difficult to distinguish between them, but in particular male characters who tend to look more alike in terms of hair and fashion. It's particularly bad in period pieces where everyone wears suits and hats. My husband is very used to me constantly asking things like "wait, is this the guy from the earlier scene in the shop?" and "is this a new character or did she just put her hair up?"
I think that sounds a bil like when Europeans say that all asians look the same. Also, when I was in Kenya, my friend's boyfriend said that she and I looked exactly the same (she is blond, straight hair and blue eyes, I have crazy curly redish hair and dark brown eyes, completely different noses and face shapes as well). And it took him 2 months to realize that his girlfriend had blue eyes... I just find it funny, I guess each of us use different markers to recognize people, and that is why confusion comes about.
I recognise people by their voice as much as the average person does. like when you hear someone famous on the radio, sometimes you recognise them, sometimes you don't.
I cannot tell people apart. Especially with face masks. People I literally know for years. see them daily. Until they say something, I have no idea who they are.
Thank you for this video. I think my 6 year old daughter has this. When she was 2 or 3 she could not recognise me and would go to a different lady with similar build and hairstyle. The mayor of our city visited them at school and wore a long fur coat and even spoke to my daughter - my daughter thought she was a real bear ("but with nails like ours instead of claws Mummy"). I wonder if this is also why she is always asking "is this real life?" when she looks at photos vs illustrations or cartoons vs programmes with real people in. Do you know if it may be linked to autism? Did you have similar struggles as a child? I am really interested in your experience - thanks!
Oh and she saw me watching this and misheard and thought you said you were a scientist. She said "that lady at school is a scientist, the one with the dark pink coat and bicycle". She is talking about her teacher last year who has similar hair colour and style to you on this video!
Unfortunately I am not a scientist, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I do believe there is a higher chance of developmental prosopagnosia in people with autism compared to the general population. I'm not on the spectrum myself, though. My mother and brother both have face blindness too, though they have not been formally tested, but we three all struggle with faces. I definitely had it during childhood too, though my parents did not pick up on it as sharply as you did with your own daughter - I remember being very confused both in school and especially at family gatherings, when aunts I hadn't seen in months were angry with me for not recognising/hugging them. It was only as an adult that I realised that not everyone was as bad with faces as I was, and then I started developing coping mechanisms such as explaining to people that I'm "bad with faces" and actively memorising aspects of them to lower the chances of embarrassing encounters. If you know or suspect that your daughter struggles with faces too, she will have a much easier time of it growing up since you can teach her those things! If you're in the UK, check out the NHS page on face blindness for lots more information: www.nhs.uk/conditions/face-blindness/ And if you have any other questions, feel free to email me at spinsterslibrary (at) gmail . com. All the best to you and your daughter!
there is a show on youtube. 60 minutes face blindness pt 1,2. it has interviews with people. i learned of this in a book by dr oliver sachs. he is so far to the right he does not recognize himself in a mirror. some never forget a face even 50trs later. i am to the right but can recognize actors i like or others usually, not always. when iron maidens bruce dickinson cut his waist length short for his other career as an airline pilot i did not at first. but context is all, the interview, role etc. walking down the street maybe not. coworker desk next to me for 10yrs. pulls up next to me in parking, starts talking to me, gets a call. i sit there. whose is this person, why is she talking to me is this a scam. it must be a con women. a ...it was my coworker. hairstyle change, no hat, even at work i wiill not recognize them. arrives everyday, same time, place. go get his stuff. now in line, talking to me. seems familiar. yes it was him. shown upside down pic of 2 people in test. he looks kind of...maybe jim carrey? it was mel gibson. day before had just watched him in 2 pics. another. guy has round glasses. john lennon? no some guy named colbert. have spent my life feeling stupid. at least now i know.
Thats unfortunate. I can tell faces but i just dont remember who the hell you are man and i dont care.. oh yes i remember you john how could i not remember you.
I have the total opposite problem. I can see someone's face and 9 out of 10 times I will remember the face even going 10 years without seeing them. Now names on the other hand like don't even tell me your name lol I will have NO idea in 10 seconds
I think I have this, now everything makes sense. I moved to this little town where everybody knows everybody. That’s when I started to notice something was wrong. I entered a church group where I met many teenagers we got along so well but when I saw them around town I could never recognize them. They would say you passed by me and you didn’t say hi. I would tell them that they where new faces and that everybody looked the same. Time passed and I still had trouble recognizing them they just gave up and didn’t talk to me because they thought I did it on purpose. That’s why the anxiety of going out. People have said that I am self centered. I have always felt ashamed because of this. 😔
Sounds a lot like my experience! Ugh, I hope your friends are a bit more understanding when you explain to them that you're not being rude on purpose, but you can't help it.
Faby, I'm so sorry that you have struggled socially with this. Do you also have trouble recognizing your family (close family)?
This is a good reason to join a support group. I feel better knowing that I am not the only person experiencing these problems. Sometimes, I don’t think people understand when I explain it to them....
This is more common problem whit face blindness
"i won't recognize you the next five times we meet" - "i know, you already told me this the last five times we met" - "ouh. i confess five is laaaargely understated"
Relatable 🤣
@@SpinstersLibrary and i do have a few face translators either. on every critical mass there's people greeting me and asking surprisingly specific questions about details of my own life - and i know of no suspects who could have told all that to those strangers. after trying to steer smalltalk towards hobbies or jobs to maybe get a clue but failing in that, and after people ride along saying "see you later!", i just turn around to my face interpreters and ask "who was that?!" - "that was mathias, with whom you had talked about keeping rabbits on that party" - "oooh!! he shaved his beard!!" - "yes, he did" - "what an asshole."
This brings me to tears, thank you. It’s an incredible comfort to know I’m not alone. It’s quite exhausting actually.
Lived with this condition for as long as I can remember. If my wife changes her hair I won't recognize her. I try to be friendly with everyone I meet and If someone seems to know me I'll just ask how we know one and other. It's a very strange way to go through life with everyone being a stranger.
You’re not alone :) I struggle to remember friends at school and teachers’ faces, and most celebrities’ get mixed up easily
I have begun to study someone’s face while they aren’t looking at me. I piece together their face. It helps me recognize them out of context if I had been able to study them long enough. It creeps people out when they catch me studying their face. After another embarrassing incident of not recognizing someone because the light was different, although she was in context, I went Googling and found your video. This has been so helpful. People just think I am spacey, or getting senile. I am going to start telling people I have face blindness. Thank you!
You're lovely and I like your accent.
It slowly dawned on me that I have problems with recognizing faces a few years ago. I remember being shocked to find out that I'd gone to school with a set of twins, Matt and Mark, for over ten years and thought they were the same person.
I was super-embarrassed when a customer I had sold a $40,000 product to dropped by my office unexpectedly and I failed to recognize him. The first couple of visits he had his arm in a sling, and the last time it had healed.
I saw a RUclips video about prosopagnosia, and all these memories came flooding back to me. So now I just tell people I meet about my issues right away - it's a whole lot easier. I just say, "I will probably not recognize you if I run into you out in public, so just remind me who you are each time until I tell you to stop."
I'm happy to hear you say it's not a big deal (I've found many videos of folks nearly in tears about having the condition). I have it too and agree that it's not a big deal. But more than that, I feel that it gives those of us who have the condition an exciting intuitive insight into the essence of the human brain, and more appreciation for its awesomeness. Scientists are discovering the brain is composed of many distinct functional entities that work together, rather than being a bag of random memory as we would intuit. I feel that having this condition, which I view as a memory discontinuity, makes the brain's composite nature more of a tangible reality.
I have prosopagnosia as well. I don't recognise my own children on toddler photos, I once (as far as I know) walked past my ex on the street without recognising him (we were a couple for two years) a friend that was with me at the time told me about it. I don't recognise my best friend if she put a hat on. Some films are impossible, I saw a movie with Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Wahlberg but I can't tell the difference between them so the whole film was a complete mystery to me. A also have some of the other problems that sometimes affect people with prosopagnosia, I can't separate left from right without having to think about it for a bit and I have trouble recognising places as well.
I usually collect my son from school everyday. But one day when i failed to recognise my own son just because he was wearing a cap that shattered me. And it was very depressing.
I have been struggling with this for a few years. I think mine is quite mild but in a job that I'm supposed to know people it can be a bit of a hindrance. I do all those tricks. I try being friendly and hope they will say something that would give me a clue. Worst case I come right out and say what I have.
I originally was always told I was an introvert when in fact I was afraid to be around people because I couldn't recognize them. This has caused me lifelong social anxiety. I usually just avoid people and hope that I don't run into someone that knows me. During summer breaks in school I couldn't recognize my previous year's best friends if I didn't see them all summer long. It made it extremely hard to make friends as a child. Now at almost 60 yrs old, I just avoid people as much as possible. I'm always in fear of people saying hi and knowing my name when I have no idea who they are. If I didn't need to shop for food or go to the doctors, I probably wouldn't ever leave my house. I wish there was better access to therapy to learn coping mechanisms.
I completely relate to your story...the awkwardness, the embarrassment, the characterization of being aloof, spacy, or blatantly unfriendly. Face blindness, whether complete or partial, makes it really difficult to develop some social skills. It can be disabling in some situations.
I was always afraid that I would not recognize my children when picking them up from school. Fortunately, all the things you mention can help fill in the identity gaps. Hair style, clothing, gait, mannerisms, and other cues and markers can help. I used to "lose" them (and partners or friends) in public spaces where we were not immediately next to each other. Searching a department store if they'd wandered a bit was always a time for panic.
I feel I may be better than the average bear at voice recognition. I can't prove it, but I can often tell who someone is remotely by voice timbre and tics. I think of it as analogous to a blind person sharpening their hearing skills for spatial navigation. I got a lewd phone call and thought it was some kind of prank. They had supposedly disguised their voice, but it was clearly a chiropractor friend of my ex. "What the heck are you doing, Frank?" I know this isn't about facial blindness, but it is an associated phenomenon I believe to be linked to it.
I can consciously memorize distinctive characteristics of people I know really well. But out of context, I have no idea who most people are. Apparently trauma will register a face on some unconscious level, but only partially. I once ran into a person that I was sure I knew but had no idea from where. I did the usual, "Oh, how have you been, etc., etc." When recognition finally flooded in, I almost fell backward in shock, trying to get away from them. This had been a former, extremely toxic supervisor who had said horrible and inappropriate things to me and left me in a puddle of tears and quitting my job. I would have steered completely clear of them had I known who it was.
The conflating of multiple people into one is an interesting and sometimes amusing phenomenon. I watched many episodes of "Grey's Anatomy," completely flummoxed at the aberrant script writing because the protagonist was acting opposite to her character in different scenes. "What committee wrote these episodes?!" I would shout at the screen. I did not realize there were TWO blonde women in the ensemble cast until someone brought that to my attention.
People can think I'm racist if I don't explain carefully about prosopagnosia and make an off-hand remark about a bunch of people all looking the same to me. (Asian, African-American, etc.,) It's not really racism. The closest I can get is grouping some people by extraneous features, like people with dreadlocks, people with nose rings, people with color streaks in their hair...or with ethic similarities. The same is true for tall blondes in running togs. I depend on the location, the dreadlocks, or the orange streak in their hair to recognize them. If someone at the coffee shop ties their hair back and their name tag is not visible, they are a new person, even though I see them several times a week. If I were ever to meet aliens like the Na'avi, you wouldn't want me on the diplomatic team.
I do have the ability to memorize a few distinctive celebrity faces that I associate with a particular facial feature that is uncommon. Johnny Depp's mouth is peculiar to him. So is Fred Astaire's jaw line and hair line. I have to see them repeatedly to train myself. It's not reliable, though. In general, actors ARE the people they are playing.
I now introduce myself with a cheerful disclaimer, saying, "The next time you see me, I may not recognize you because I have partial facial blindness. Plus I'm horrible with names," (which may have a causal link), "so please don't be offended."
It's possible that this came from a head injury, since one of my parents used to throw me down the stairs with some frequency. I also attribute it partially to extreme, uncorrected nearsightedness in early childhood. There may be some crucial time at which brain development occurs that allows facial recognition. I was not able to properly see until the fourth grade. My world changed because of corrective lenses, but by that time, there was no hope for normal facial recognition. Or, baby, I was born this way!
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I resonated with a lot of it.
I love hearing you talk about this with such humor and grace!
Well it is a pretty funny problem to have 😉
This is exactly what it's like. I have hurt people's feelings when I haven't recognized them. I didn't recognize the woman who lives next door to me when she got rid of the streak in her hair. I didn't recognize myself on zoom when I first started using it
Just yesterday I found an old apology message on my phone that I sent to someone after I didn't recognise her in the street. So awkward and embarrassing when that happens.
Zoom is what made me realize something was up. I thought I was just inattentive and too distracted to notice people's faces, and then I started video calling close friends. I recognize everyone on the call except for one lady, and that lady is me. I thought everyone else had a very nebulous, mutable idea of what they looked like. Apparently I was wrong. Apparently I've got a brain thing.
I definitely have this. For most of my life I just assumed that everyone had the same difficulty with recognizing people and got characters confused in movies just like I did. For me, I’m more likely to think that one person is 4 different people than I am to think that 4 different people are the same one. It’s frustrating to know that others don’t even need to expend any conscious effort to recognize someone, while I’m over here constantly working at 110% brain power to pick out every distinct detail and then I still fail to recognize someone 9 times out of 10. And then people wonder why I avoid social situations and am so exhausted by them. LOL
Thank you so much for sharing your experience... I also y with face blindness & I feel so difficult to deal with it. Feeling better after listening you. Thank you.. stay blessed 🙏
Thank you very much for sharing this video with us! I am writing an Essay about Developmental Prosopagnosia and listening to how you feel and how you dealt with prosopagnosia makes me understand better what I am reading in papers, also I like it so much how you adress this with such humor :) it is very important for people to know about this so we all can understand that people with prosopagnosia do not want to offend anyone or be rude!
Thank you! I'm glad this personal perspective was useful for your essay 😊
I have aphantasia and I struggle a lot with faces it took me a long time to remember my grandma also talked to a random person for an hour I had mistaken them for a friend that I had for over two years.
Here's my embarassing story: I was working in Customer Service and someone walked into the office. Immediately I recognized him as my boss' friend so I rushed to my boss' office and said to him that his friend was waiting for him. The man waited patiently while my boss kept looking at me silently asking where was his friend. I directed him to the friend but my boss kept asking what was going on while the 'friend' looked at us in confusion. My other coworker bursted out laughing seeing us because they noticed the similarities (glasses n teeth style) but never thought that I wouldn't recognize the obvious differences (different face) to the point that I'd disturb my boss. I couldn't stop laughing after that and had to apologize to the confused guy for my stupidity. Thank God both my boss and the guy was cool about it though. 🤣🤣
This is so spot on! Thank you for posting this video. I also participated in the same study you mentioned. Whenever I try to explain to people the problem they look at me as if I'm making it up. I will try your method of simply saying I have problems recognizing faces so I apologize in advance if I don't recognize you. I do have a few embarrassing stories but I will share this one that happened before I ever heard of face blindness. I was sitting in my office at work one day when a woman I did not know came to my office door and just stood in front of me. She stared at me with a funny look on her face. I just stared back awkwardly and waited, neither of us speaking. I was about to ask if I could I help her when she smiled and laughed. That was when I finally recognized her. She was my co-worker. She was someone who I saw and spoke to every day. But on this particular day, she was wearing a wig. Normally her hair was dark brown and very curly. This wig was a blond pixie cut! Sometimes I cannot believe how easy it would be for someone to hide from me in plain sight if they wanted.
Oh no, I can picture that expectant look on her face, the raised eyebrows... been there so many times 😂 Glad that she found it funny and didn't get offended!
Thank you fir helping me deal with a close friend..we appreciate your honesty
Thanks for the tips. I've been working at my local library, and some of the regular patrons have similar hairstyles, and their voices are almost identical. And many women will change their hairstyle quite frequently. Usually, right when I think I can remember.
When I first started, I mistook a coworker for a patron and then noticed the differed t style of dress. I joked, saying I'll never be able to pick you out of a lineup.
It is challenging.
I totally agree when it comes to identical twins, I felt that I differentiated them much easier than others.
I don't have an injury either- but I have it to some degree. I haven't gotten an official diagnosis, but I think it's why I like extreme styles- something to remember as everyone's faces look so similar.
Once I met a boy in the evening when out with my friends as a teenager. We talked for hours that night and got along smashingly- he was wearing a baseball cap covering his hair- he wanted to meet me at the bowling alley a few days later. When I went to meet him with my friends, I told them to let him & his friends come to us- just have fun and wait at the arcade. It wasn't a "hard to get" thing- it was that I could not have picked him out of that bowling alley full of groups of boys of that same age if my life had depended on it.
I don't have this (I think), but I often need to talk with ppl more than once before I recognize them. I also have a hard time remembering names or connecting them to the faces, so even though I might know who someone is, I still can't remember their name 🙈. Especially if a name is foreign to me, I really struggle to remember it if I don't see it written down.
I think it's great you talk about this, and we should all be more forgiving if someone doesn't remember our face/name. From my experience, it's mostly not because they're rude, but because their memory just fails them. Obviously some struggle with it more than others, but I think most of us have experienced it to various degrees ourselves, too. If I notice someone I've said hello to doesn't recognize me, I tend to say "I'm so&so, from here&there" & when they usually apologize, I tell them not to worry b/c I often struggle with the same thing.
That's a good one. You can always say, "Oh, what have you done to your hair?' or "You look different"
A woman ran up to me in a shopping centre one day with her arms wide open about to give me a big hug screaming "I haven't seen you in ages" and I just gave her a blank stare. Of course she stopped dead, said "you don't recognize me" and backed away in fright. To this day, I have no idea who she was. That was my first horror story. Now I hide away and stay home incase it happens again.
Very relatable, as I'm some degree face blind, too.
Just a free association:
"I can stand the pain
And the blinding heat
'Cause I won't remember you
The next time we meet
You'll be making the arrangements
You'll be trying to set me free
Not a moment for the meeting
I'll be busy as a bee
You'll be talking to me
But I just won't understand
I'll be falling by the wayside
You'll be holding out your hand"
(I'm Going In - Lhasa de Sela)
I never knew what it was called, I've never been diagnosed as I suffer from anomic aphasia as well which leaves me really in trouble. I don't remember names either. Utterly stuffed. I have both, so thank you for tell me story, I now know I'm not alone.
Thanks for sharing! This was fascinating!
Thanks for sharing your story with us. It was a great and informative video about something you don’t hear much about 🙂
Glad it was helpful!
I watched an interview with Jeremy Paxman one night where he was attacking an executive of Coca cola. I couldn't remember where the heck I knew that face from. I'd watched University Challenge hundreds of times, but because the face was out of his local, I couldn't put the face with the place. Being an Australian only made matters worse as I couldn't even work out if it was in Australia or in England until the hammer hit me on the head next time I saw Uni Challenge. It nearly drove me crazy.
When I see my doctor I only recognize one of the staff by the fact that she has every colour of the rainbow in her hair. So I understand how you feel. When I go to the chemist, I'm sure the staff has changed every time I walk in there. It's frightening. My damage is from an epileptic fit but that decades ago.
Your milkmaid braids are 👌
You should actually read Holding up the universe, its soo good and you might find it relatable
One other thing - I've noticed that I gravitate towards unusual looking people. Facial scars or birthmarks, very tall or short, prosthetic limbs....
If I'm ever tricked into attending a large party, you can be sure I'll end up talking to the girl in a wheelchair or the 6'4" Mexican dude. Generic looking people give me fits!
Agreed.
Being a person of color I ALWAYS identified white people by the color or style of their hair.. I mean ALL white people, co workers, church members. It was terrible until I started doing it with black people to!!.. LOL I had a job with a lot of black women, and twice I thought I was talking to an entirely different person when this one black girl had a short blonde wig or weave, and CHANGED IT to a long curly black wig. ... I didn't know who she was and started talking about her right in front of her FACE!.. 😂😂😂 .. I said, "I don't think Mary likes me" .. to a group of people, and she said, "well it's not that I don't like you. I'm sorry you feel that way" .. I was like oh shit, that's her??. 😂😂
That IS awkward! As a white person in a town with relatively few black folks, I have to be careful with my face blindness issues. I know all black people don't look the same! I'll tell you what though, to me all old white people look the same.
One of the most embarrassing moments of my life was not recognizing a black guy on the street who I used to worked with 30 hours a week for multiple years. He took it so personally. I'd never seen him not wearing his work clothes, he'd changed his hair cut and put on about 50lbs. I know I'm generally not as good at recognizing black people which I do feel guilty about but I wouldn't have recognized a white person in that situation either.
It is great that you can have a good sense of humor about this.
It is a pretty funny problem to have
Thanks for sharing - I have heard of this condition but not in any detail. I think this is definitely something people who have it should talk about more. Most of us just assume we will be recognized but we could easily provide more info to help identify ourselves when we speak if we knew it was needed. I know I don't have it myself but I definitely experience a situational thing where I just don't notice people if I see them out of the usual context. Like running into a coworker at a store or running into friends at a restaurant - my eyes pass right over them if I am not expecting them to be there. The difference of course is that if they wave/speak to get my attention then I will see and recognize them. I have been told many times that I have my 'head in the clouds' because I just don't notice (see/hear) things happening around me. Not the same thing at all I know but I can imagine it at least.
Yeah, it definitely doesn't help that I also don't pay attention to the world when I'm out and about!
I had been going to contemporary dance classes for about a term and didn't recognise my dance teacher when she started talking to me in town, for the entire 5-minute or so conversation I didn't work out who she was! It clicked a few days later, I'm not sure how! Nowadays I also warn people in advance when I meet them that I probably won't recognise them the next time and please would they tell me who they are! :D
Wow, you are forced to put so much extra energy into your social life! I listened to a program several years ago, about a man who didn't recognize his own girlfriend, time after time. I didn't realize it's actually a physical impairment.
I have, on occasion, not recognised my husband in public. But really it's mostly just an inconvenience and an embarrassment rather than an actual impairment
recognsing face ability is getting better
just pay attention to the faces really good. i have the same thing and that what worked for me. analyzing the face. hope this helps.
Story time! Sooo… usually my problem is that I assume everyone knows me so I usually respond to every wave, every hey there that’s ever given in public. The worst that ever happened to me was in college.
I was in a group project and working with this girl for last few days. She left class a bit early but I caught up with her just outside or so I thought. She initiated the conversation with a “hey” so I was pretty confident she was my classmate. I talked to her for over a half an hour as we walked from one side of the campus to the other. And right when I was about to say farewell, she turned around to face me directly. And I did a literal double take.
I didn’t know this girl at all. And yet she had the same voice, same walk, same laugh, same hairdo. Her face was very different when I looked at her head on and she wore glasses which my classmate didn’t. It turned out that this girl was the younger sister of my classmate and she also had face blindness so she was afraid I was someone that she just couldn’t recognize either. We had a good laugh about it but I couldn’t believe I chatted this girl’s ear off so long and she didn’t even know who I was.
haha, love that! Sounds like the start of a romcom.
I have also this problem,
I am just crying from inner when it happens.😭😭
I used to joke that I was a little face blind at my last job, because I'd have to meet people several times before I'd recognize them, and even then, I'd have to rely on hair color and style, or a distinct voice or laugh, or the way they styled their clothes. I just assumed it was laziness on my account somehow. Then I started reading about prosopagnosia, and I realized it wasn't a joke and I have it to some degree. The big tip off came with the rise of video chat over COVID. Every time I'm on a video call, I end up staring at myself a lot because I don't recognize me at all. I'll see myself, and I'll think "wow, that lady looks like my son!"
I'm fairly certain this is about half of the reason I hate The Godfather, by the way. Everyone talks about it like it's the greatest movie of ever, that it's very emotional. Everyone in that movie has the same hair, voice, suit, and mannerisms. When somebody gets shot and dies, I have no idea who he was or why I should care. I can tell Al Pacino and Marlon Brando apart from everyone else, but I cannot for the life of me tell who anyone else is supposed to be in that movie. Please, casting directors! Make casts more diverse so I know who the characters are and what's happening in movies! Fifty greasy Italian dudes wearing the same suit doesn't work for some of us!
That's my problem with period dramas with a cast of identical white women in bonnets 😅
That's exactly me you're describing. I've felt bad about it all my life. The strategies I've developed are like yours and I've recently started to outright tell my colleagues and some new friends that I probably won't recognize them if I saw them on the street. I don't know if they believe me, don't know if explaining helps or if I still look like an arrogant person who cannot bother herself to recognize anyone. Life is really difficult for us. I've had neighbors who grabbed my arm on the road to face me because I didn't return their greetings, I've had friends and ex-colleagues confused about the way I treat them outside. I don't recognize any of my university professors. My worst moment has to be me not recognizing my own father after he had been away for a couple of years, though. When I watch movies with my kids, I don't remember that guy who also acted in that, that and that movie. That is a total no go. In each movie, they appear in another character, another context. I believe I would go right past many celebrities even if they walked right on to me.
I feel your pain. My wife is very sympathetic, but she gets a real kick out of watching TV with me.
I had a coworker show up at the office on his day off after shaving his beard, and I greeted him like a customer.
I have this but I remember the description of the hair, body, outfit, faces can’t have much description to imagine them
HI , I HAVE SAME FACE BLINDNESS PROBLEM OCCURED SINCE 2010..... NOBODY CAN UNDERSTAND ME ... SUDDENLY I FOUND THIS VIDEO AND I THINK I SHOULD TALK TO YOU
I HADNT IT FRM BIRTH.... IT GENERATED BY STROKE ON HIND BRAIN AREA DUE TO EXTREME EMOTIONAL STRESS AND I THINK IT CAN BE CURE BY CONTINEOUS ACCUPRESSURE/ACCUPUNCTURE THERAPY AS PER MY OBSERVATIONS ON MY SELF.
I had to quit a job because of This condition I just am coming to terms that I have it. The signs are all there. I had to quit my job because I couldn't distinguish one girl in a red lifeguarding suit from another girl and the red lifeguarding suit after 2 months of working there and I got ridiculed and mocked in front of everyone like a child by the manager for not knowing a random girls name after 2 months just where she was and what she wanted. The description of the place that someone is at is not good enough you need to know their name. Now to the more embarrassing less life impacting reasons. I used people with unique characteristics to identify if I was in the right classroom because I can't tell unless I have a friend. I don't recognize anyone. So i when to gym class. I thought and assumed that 1 person with a unique characteristic was sick. so I got on a school bus for a field trip. turns out my friend wasn't sick, she stayed at school and went to the class. My teacher was so mad. She's like couldn't you tell that none of your classmates were here. I'm just like I have one friend I thought she was sick. how do you only have 1 friend and only recognize 1 person. Yeahhhh. The last one was very embarrassing I was in 2 art classes. In the morning there was this really nice guy who would joke around with me we'd kinda of talk. Then, I would go to my evening class and hang out with completely different people from the morning people. yes there's a lot of overlap of people in our art program from small University didn't think about that. So my 2nd class, a guy says sorry about earlier a guy I never met in my life so I was confused cause I bumped his chair like oh no it's fine that was an accident and he looked at me confused. I'm like oh was it something else. hes like the joke i made. Me still confusedand that's when it hit me that he was the same person Just a 3 hours of time separation.
I don't think I have this, unless there's a mild, reading glasses version of it. I do get confused if I meet someone out of context. My Dad may have had it. Often when I walked with him and we saw someone we both knew, I'd have to remind him who they were. Thanks for explaining this!
Sounds like your dad might have it too then!
Taking Tea With Catherine I am the same - milder form of it I think - and it’s been a real problem for most of my life but I never knew there was a condition associated which gets as bad as Claudia’s condition! I really struggle with recognising people out of context if they are acquaintances and my partner has always found it difficult to understand why, for instance, I don’t recognise my next door neighbour of two years in the local pub. The most embarrassing occasions have been asking a guest at my own wedding about themselves as if they were another person completely (how is so and so? Oh that’s you 😑) and serving a neighbour of my parents, who I had known my whole life, in a shop I was working at when I was 17 and wondering why this man was staring at me in disbelief (because I was acting like he was a stranger - which he was to me at that point!) and then he told my parents how rude I was. I never knew there was an actual condition but mine sounds like yours rather than Claudia’s because I do eventually imprint faces once I’ve known someone a long time or if they are particularly visually striking or unique. Coupled with my increasing short-sightedness, I live in constant fear of bumping into people I have met before in random places! I am going to research it to see if there are degrees of it because I’ve always thought it was just a skill I lacked!
Jacqueline, it sounds like you might have it too! As far as I know (and again, I'm not speaking as an expert, definitely look into the science of it), there are different degrees and individuals experience it differently.
Spinster's Library I will research further into the degrees of it. I have to say when I saw the first few minutes of your video, it really was one of those moments of absolute recognition and relief that someone was describing a phenomenon I’ve experienced, albeit to a lesser extent, since I was young! You may have cleared up a lifelong mystery for me!
Claudia, this is fascinating and I really identify with this because I’ve really struggled my whole life with faces of people out of context (see my reply to Taking Tea With Catherine for my embarrassing examples!) but in a much milder way than your condition I because I remember people I know well or striking people but struggle with acquaintances! Is there a spectrum for this perhaps? It’s something I’ve just kept quiet about for years because it’s so awkward and people often don’t believe I’m not just being rude or socially lazy! When you talked about your tactics for randomly bumping into people who know you, I could really relate!
I do believe there is a spectrum and that different people experience it to different extents but I'm really not an expert on the science! Check out the links I posted in the description box for more info. You can also find various face recognition tests online that you can try out
Spinster's Library Update: I just checked the prosopagnosia website - I couldn’t see anything on there being a spectrum so it may well be that I’m just crap with faces! I found the test puzzling for most of the faces initially but managed quite well though it didn’t give me an overall result I would say I definitely don’t have prosopagnosia. I knew who all the people were but there were a couple I just couldn’t recognise with their hair missing. But this has happened to me when people I’ve met before change their hair if that is the feature I’ve relied on to know it is them!
Very similar here, except mine was acquired through a TBI back in April 1987.
And yes, I have not recognised friends, family, girlfriend, co-workers, and so on...
I've never heard of this, it's fascinating! Thank you for the video!
I'm not sure about having face blindness, but I definitely have troubles with faces. If I've seen them enough times it's not really a problem (like my parents and my husband), but otherwise it can be rough. One time I was assigned to a group in university, and I didn't know anyone in the group prior to this project. First day working with them in class was fine (cause it was the same day I was assigned to them), but the second day I sat with a completely different group. I think they were maybe sitting in the same seats that my group was sitting in last time, so that threw me off. The random guy I thought was a group member was chill about it, but it was still pretty embarrassing.
Also my husband has three cousins (who are brothers), and they mind as well be identical triplets cause I can't tell them apart at all. My husband says that they shouldn't be that difficult to tell apart, but none of them have any super significant differences for me to tell them apart. My husband descripes them so simply too like X is the tall one (they're all similar height imo), Y has longer hair (they all have fairly short hair), and Z is the other one (doesn't help if I can figure any of them out). I don't see any of them very often either, so I think I'm doomed to forever not being able to tell them apart lol.
Honestly it sounds like you might have it too! I can sympathise with the cousin situation - family parties are just a nightmare for me. Check out the resources I linked in the description box if you want to figure it out and maybe take a test.
@@SpinstersLibrary Maybe! I kind of assumed I didn't cause I didn't know there was a range. I'll check out your links :) Also yeah, now that you mention it, family gatherings can be tricky for me too. Family gatherings are almost always only my husband's side of the family (my side doesn't really do gatherings), so it tends to be a whole bunch of people who I don't know very well and often don't immediately recognise. It's also fun when someone brings their newish partner, cause it will take me a long while to figure out if I've met the partner before and just don't recognize them, or if I just haven't met them before.
I was looking through different neurological disorders out of curiosity and i came across prosopagnosia and this was really insightful. I don't have prosopagnosia but it was really interesting to hear how different people view the world and move in it, helps to be better understanding each other. Thank you for the informative video. Question: Are you able to tell if someone is attractive or unattractive?
Yes, my problem isn't with seeing faces, but with remembering them. So I perceive faces just fine, but if I see the face again, irrespective of my subjective opinion on their attractiveness, I probably won't recognise it.
I'm terrible with unfamiliar faces and i thought it's just because I'm not paying attention to them. It wasn't a great issue since I can recognise the familiar once from their vibes ( idk, this might sound crazy but i was happy about this coz i thought l'm kinda smart to identify people in a different way). I can even recognise my identical twin cousins, never from their face, but from their different tone & habits. But it was not the same with unfamiliar faces and that creat a lot of weird situations & i play guessing. Then i come to know about prosopagnosia and after listening to you I'm really surprised how similar we're and i really think I've a lil bit of this syndrome and it's obviously from my mom coz she face the same terrible issue.
The kitten story cracked me up. I’ve done things like that so many times! I used to work at a bookshop, and I would go fetch a book for a customer, and hand it to the wrong person all the time. 😂
I had the same issues when I worked in a shoe shop. Customers just insisted on moving and then when I came out of the stock room I just wouldn't recognise them. So embarrassing...
@@SpinstersLibrary Did you know you had face blindness at the time you worked in the shoe shop? I didn’t know until much later, and then it all made sense! :) I realized I had it while reading a mystery novel which featured a character with face blindness.
@@heatheredwards7158 Yes, at that point I was already aware of it, so that helped because my colleagues could point me towards the right person if they happened to stand near by and knew which customer was waiting for me.
You would be so good at describing a criminal, but terrible when it came to the line up where you have to point the person out! Hahahah
You've single-handedly gotten me out of so many potential embarrassments 😂
Usually, I'm not bad at identifying faces but I've noticed that, in certain situations, perhaps if I'm nervous or concentrated on something else, my brain doesn't "save" the data of the face, no matter how many times I see the person: In my first job, a colleague of my parents had to introduce himself to me three times within two weeks. And there's this woman that kept telling my friends to "say hi" to me which I don't remember, even after she told them she had worked next door from me in a previous job for two years... I think I've inherited it from my father. He has a gift with faces and recognises someone after 40 years of not seeing them without any problem, but then he won't recognise his mechanic if he sees him in the street. When in doubt, he always greets the person, so he once ended greeting a tv presenter in a restaurant because he looked familiar.
How interesting! A+ for doing so bad in the study lol. I felt it was interesting how you cope with this.
Thanks!
I have partial face blindness. I can recognize people I know very well, or people whose faces are unusually distinctive. Otherwise, good luck. :-( Even trying to describe faces on TV, where I can freeze an image and stare at it for awhile (describing details such as "left eyebrow goes down at outer corner") doesn't necessarily help; a different angle or different lighting or different makeup or who knows what else makes then look different to me. Part of it is that all the face features exist on a continuum; there is no such thing as distinctive separate types of eyebrows, mouths, noses, etc. It makes the appearance of one face blend into the appearance of another similar one.
Speaking of TV, all too often whoever does the casting has a particular mental image of good-looking men or good-looking women or both, and all the continuing characters fit that image -- so the show might as well be cast with identical twins or triplets.
It's made worse by the fact that when I notice someone's hair at all (often I don't), the way I would describe it is usually different from the way other people describe it. I was once in a meeting where the chair called on a woman to speak by saying, "The redhead over there." I thought, "I could have sworn her hair was black" -- and when I next saw her, sure enough she had black hair. Not dyed, either; her hair didn't look any different than it had before. I can only guess that it may have been black with a red highlight that showed up in some lights, and the chair saw that and mentioned it as, I suppose, the thing he found most distinctive (or he had a thing for redhaired women).
I also have a lot of trouble remembering names, unless the names "fit" the person's personality somehow. Repeating the name doesn't help much, plus I can't really do that if I'm concentrating on what's being said. Names people have chosen for themselves usually do fit, and that makes it so much easier for me to remember them.
I have it too, I think 🤔. Very handicapping.
I've heard about it in groups i'm in for aphantasia, which is completely different but some people do have both, some just one or the other. Aphantasia is not being able to visualize (while awake anyway, many of us still dream, apparently mental imagery when awake and asleep are in different parts of the brain). I had no idea until I was 29 and heard about aphantasia people were being literal about visualizing and sayings like "reading is like a movie in your head" make zero sense to me. But I have no issue recognizing faces (which just makes me confused thinking about it, like...I can't visualize...so where is the info being stored and how am I accessing it? Brains are complicated).
Thank you for sharing this. It's very informative and not something you hear much about.
Haha yes, brains are complicated! I don't have aphantasia, my imagination is very visual, which I think is why I prefer books to films. At least in books I can tell the characters apart 😂 Period dramas are the worst with everyone wearing bonnets, hats and wigs, and I'm having to constantly ask whoever I'm watching a film with about who this character is again.
@@SpinstersLibrary I think aphantasia is why I can actually get scared from a horror movie and really immersed in it but not from a horror novel (and I love horror). I also never have a problem of "but the characters in the film don't look like how I pictured them from the book!". That was another thing I heard people say a lot that made no sense to me. Even though I grew to love reading I tend to forget descriptions, including what a character looked like. I've even felt like I must be a bad person because I'll even forget stuff like a character's race. I'll remember what I thought of their personality, how I felt about them. But how they looked? Not a chance i'll remember that. Now I get why I forget those details, because with a book I don't see any of those details. Emotions stick with me most.
I have 8 sisters , imagine if I had this disorder and can’t remember them..that would be interesting LOL .
Everyone who explains this condition explains it like memory loss , so in my opinion it’s just a case of extreme memory loss instead of being blind to a face.
I think you're on to something. I've seen memory loss in others (unfortunately) that tends to be specific to things.. like dates, conversions, or places, so maybe it's like that, pretty specific /acute memory loss
I went to my cousins wedding and introduced Myself to her fiance that I'd met many times....
Tnx this was helpful. Im a new subscriber after the hunger games video 💖
Awesome! Thank you!
If you look away from someone for a second, but you know it's them because you just saw them a second ago, do you feel like you recognize the face then after looking at them again right away, or do you just know because of context?
oh my god, you are hilarious!! 😂
Does this affect watching movies? Distinguishing between the characters?
Yes, I find it very difficult to distinguish between them, but in particular male characters who tend to look more alike in terms of hair and fashion. It's particularly bad in period pieces where everyone wears suits and hats. My husband is very used to me constantly asking things like "wait, is this the guy from the earlier scene in the shop?" and "is this a new character or did she just put her hair up?"
I think that sounds a bil like when Europeans say that all asians look the same. Also, when I was in Kenya, my friend's boyfriend said that she and I looked exactly the same (she is blond, straight hair and blue eyes, I have crazy curly redish hair and dark brown eyes, completely different noses and face shapes as well). And it took him 2 months to realize that his girlfriend had blue eyes... I just find it funny, I guess each of us use different markers to recognize people, and that is why confusion comes about.
Hello , I was wondering can someone recognise a person just from listening their voice ?
I recognise people by their voice as much as the average person does. like when you hear someone famous on the radio, sometimes you recognise them, sometimes you don't.
I cannot tell people apart. Especially with face masks. People I literally know for years. see them daily. Until they say something, I have no idea who they are.
Thank you for this video. I think my 6 year old daughter has this. When she was 2 or 3 she could not recognise me and would go to a different lady with similar build and hairstyle. The mayor of our city visited them at school and wore a long fur coat and even spoke to my daughter - my daughter thought she was a real bear ("but with nails like ours instead of claws Mummy"). I wonder if this is also why she is always asking "is this real life?" when she looks at photos vs illustrations or cartoons vs programmes with real people in. Do you know if it may be linked to autism? Did you have similar struggles as a child? I am really interested in your experience - thanks!
Oh and she saw me watching this and misheard and thought you said you were a scientist. She said "that lady at school is a scientist, the one with the dark pink coat and bicycle". She is talking about her teacher last year who has similar hair colour and style to you on this video!
Unfortunately I am not a scientist, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I do believe there is a higher chance of developmental prosopagnosia in people with autism compared to the general population. I'm not on the spectrum myself, though. My mother and brother both have face blindness too, though they have not been formally tested, but we three all struggle with faces. I definitely had it during childhood too, though my parents did not pick up on it as sharply as you did with your own daughter - I remember being very confused both in school and especially at family gatherings, when aunts I hadn't seen in months were angry with me for not recognising/hugging them. It was only as an adult that I realised that not everyone was as bad with faces as I was, and then I started developing coping mechanisms such as explaining to people that I'm "bad with faces" and actively memorising aspects of them to lower the chances of embarrassing encounters. If you know or suspect that your daughter struggles with faces too, she will have a much easier time of it growing up since you can teach her those things! If you're in the UK, check out the NHS page on face blindness for lots more information: www.nhs.uk/conditions/face-blindness/ And if you have any other questions, feel free to email me at spinsterslibrary (at) gmail . com. All the best to you and your daughter!
there is a show on youtube. 60 minutes face blindness pt 1,2. it has interviews with people. i learned of this in a book by dr oliver sachs. he is so far to the right he does not recognize himself in a mirror. some never forget a face even 50trs later. i am to the right but can recognize actors i like or others usually, not always. when iron maidens bruce dickinson cut his waist length short for his other career as an airline pilot i did not at first. but context is all, the interview, role etc. walking down the street maybe not. coworker desk next to me for 10yrs. pulls up next to me in parking, starts talking to me, gets a call. i sit there. whose is this person, why is she talking to me is this a scam. it must be a con women. a ...it was my coworker. hairstyle change, no hat, even at work i wiill not recognize them. arrives everyday, same time, place. go get his stuff. now in line, talking to me. seems familiar. yes it was him. shown upside down pic of 2 people in test. he looks kind of...maybe jim carrey? it was mel gibson. day before had just watched him in 2 pics. another. guy has round glasses. john lennon? no some guy named colbert. have spent my life feeling stupid. at least now i know.
Look in to autism as well since both are quite connected
Thats unfortunate. I can tell faces but i just dont remember who the hell you are man and i dont care.. oh yes i remember you john how could i not remember you.
Love this video 😂😂
You're the worst with a new hair colour every week 😂
@@SpinstersLibrary hahaha i know! Sometime im afraid to walk around your house without make up cause u might not remember that is me hahaha
I'm going to wear a T-shirt that says, "I'm face-blind. Just tell me your name and the neurons will start firing."
Haha, I love this! I should get one that says "I'm not being creepy, just trying to remember who you are"
I have the total opposite problem. I can see someone's face and 9 out of 10 times I will remember the face even going 10 years without seeing them. Now names on the other hand like don't even tell me your name lol I will have NO idea in 10 seconds