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United Kingdom Science

One in 50 of Us is Face Blind -- and Many Don't Even Realize (theguardian.com) 202

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ever found yourself confronted by someone who seems to knows you, but you have no idea who they are? You could be suffering from prosopagnosia, a condition that new research shows affects more people in the UK than autism, yet largely goes undetected. Also known as face blindness, the condition makes those who have it -- including Brad Pitt and the late neuroscientist Oliver Sacks -- unable to recognise other people, and sometimes even themselves, by their face alone. It is believed to affect as many as one in 50 Britons. Dr Sarah Bate, an associate professor of psychology at Bournemouth University, is developing face-training programs to help those with face blindness learn management tools. She says many people with the condition go undiagnosed. Its impact can be severe if undetected.
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One in 50 of Us is Face Blind -- and Many Don't Even Realize

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  • by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:24PM (#56027541)
    There's an iPhone X joke in there somewhere...
    • There's an iPhone X joke in there somewhere...

      I'm not paying $1000 to research it...

    • There's an iPhone X joke in there somewhere...

      There's also an iPhone X app in there somewhere. One that would allow someone with this condition to have the phone's back camera, if Face Id were to be implemented on it, look at a possibly-familiar face, and identify the person if found in Contacts.

      • by Sun ( 104778 )

        As a bearer of mild prosopagnosia, such an app would be useless to me.

        First of all, raising the camera to people before approaching them (or, as it more often the case, they approach you) is rude. I much rather tell people I have face blindness and that I'm sorry but they'll have to be specific.

        Even had that not been the case, the people I don't know are people who I rarely meet, which means they won't be in my app's database.

        Today, my coping mechanism is to simply tell new people I meet that I suffer

        • by Troed ( 102527 )

          My prosopagnosia is pretty severe (had a medical event in 1998, applies to everyone I've met after, none I met before) - and while I mostly do the same I still really long for the pretty AR glasses with cameras that will give me back the same capabilities that I had (and others have).

          • by Sun ( 104778 )
            I was born this way. I have to tell that did not make school years any more fun.
  • Confused... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:27PM (#56027561) Journal
    Why would going to the dentist improve facial memory?
  • I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...
    • I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive

      And how often do you hear people describing attractiveness by facial features? Maybe more people are face-blind than you think.

    • by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:34PM (#56027611)
      "HEY!"
      "MY EYES ARE UP HERE!"
      • Like when I'm talking to a woman and I will catch her staring at my belly. I'll be like, "Hello, I'm up here. I'm not some piece of flab for you to ogle at." - Jim Gaffigan

    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:37PM (#56027635)

      Well, the summary mentions Brad Pitt - he's been with Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie, so he sees to be picking quite pretty gray blurs.

      Of course, what the article doesn't mention is this malady is claimed by 92% of married guys who've been caught having an affair. /rimshot

      • by epine ( 68316 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @02:52PM (#56028633)

        Well, the summary mentions Brad Pitt - he's been with Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie, so he sees to be picking quite pretty gray blurs.

        The obvious retort here is that Brad wasn't the one doing the choosing.

        If you knew anything about women, you'd have guessed that the literature reports that women do far more of the choosing than men do.

        Men desire, women decide.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:38PM (#56027641)

      I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...

      It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.

      A better analogy would be pictures of hands.

      You could tell me if you thought a given hand was attractive / not-attractive, but could you identify people based on pictures of their hands (alone)?
      Maybe, especially after some time and practice, but it certainly wouldn't ever be as easy as recognition by face.

      • I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...

        It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.

        A better analogy would be pictures of hands.

        You could tell me if you thought a given hand was attractive / not-attractive, but could you identify people based on pictures of their hands (alone)?
        Maybe, especially after some time and practice, but it certainly wouldn't ever be as easy as recognition by face.

        Agreed. It's rather like everyone else has a dedicated co-processor that takes a set of facial features and returns a person, but mine is broken, or needs much more training. With new people, I find myself unable to re-recognise them when I see them later in the same evening, atleast not with full confidence. I often end up picking out something distinctive, like their style of earring, or tattoo, or clothing, that I can remember as a yes-or-no answer. One of the reasons it's undetected is that there are lo

        • I love the face co-processor analogy. I've never understood it to be "gray blur" but rather an identity face mapping that's broken.
        • People I deal with all the time I recognize by facial features alone, but I've had people come up and talk to me like we've met before and I have no idea who they are. That is usually only people I spoke to for less than an hour or so, except for people in memorable circumstances, like interviews.

          In my case, it could be that I usually don't look people in the face when I speak to them, because when I hear a particular name I mentally picture their face and nothing else. And if that is why, then this 1 in 50

          • People I deal with all the time I recognize by facial features alone, but I've had people come up and talk to me like we've met before and I have no idea who they are. That is usually only people I spoke to for less than an hour or so, except for people in memorable circumstances, like interviews.

            I have this all the time. An example: I ride the train to work, and there is a woman I buy coffee from several times a week. She greets me like we are old friends, and I have no idea who she is, other than the coffee lady. I thought maybe she was one of those overly friendly people, but I have observed that she is not like this with all customers.
            I have concluded that there are three possibilities:
            1. She knows me from somewhere.
            2. She has mistaken me for someone else.
            3. She is really, really into me.

            • 4. She overcharges you for the coffee and covers that fact by being extra-friendly so you'd only think of scenarios 1 to 3.

              • 4. She overcharges you for the coffee and covers that fact by being extra-friendly so you'd only think of scenarios 1 to 3.

                I had not thought of that.
                But as I am rather OCD, and thus naturally always order the same thing, and the price never changes, I think you might be off base.

                • She could have overcharged you from day one. Is the price of coffee listed somewhere? Are others paying the same price for their coffee?

          • by dryeo ( 100693 )

            In Donald Trumps case, it would be the hair I recognize.
            There are lots of ways of recognizing someone. I'm pretty nearsighted and in the past have gone without my glasses for too long. I found that I could recognize people who were just grey blobs by the way they move amongst other things.

            • I once met the former minister of foreig affairs, Kinkel, in the streets of Karlsruhe, when I was on my way to a club, late night.
              Took me a few hundret yards after I passed him to recognizze who it was. If he had not laughed at me, when I passed him with my bike, he would have been out of my mind 5 yards later, and I never had known who I just had passed.

          • I've had people approach me in the store, talk to me as if they knew me for years, and then leave. My wife will ask me who that was and I'll respond "I have no idea." It might be someone I've interacted with at work for years, but put the same face in a store and I'll blank on who they are.

            It's not just faces, though. My wife will mention a person. I'll respond "Who?" to which she'll reply "You know, So-And-So. We saw them six years ago at Disney World and talked with them for an hour." My wife remembers th

          • It is easier to reccognize random 'famous' people (you probably see daily in the news) than people you are actually aquinted with when you meet them at the wrong time at the wrong spot.

            I have a new coworker. Or more precisely, he has a new coworker, namely me. The first time we met at work, I sit besides him in the same room, he greeted me like an old fellow and proclaimed to our boss that he knew me since years.

            I had sworn I never had seen him before. He even knew my first name. Turned out we frequent the

        • Agreed. It's rather like everyone else has a dedicated co-processor that takes a set of facial features and returns a person, but mine is broken, or needs much more training. With new people, I find myself unable to re-recognise them when I see them later in the same evening, atleast not with full confidence. I often end up picking out something distinctive, like their style of earring, or tattoo, or clothing, that I can remember as a yes-or-no answer. One of the reasons it's undetected is that there are lots of mitigation techniques, and I've *never* had the ability so I don't know any different.

          I don't have face-blindness but I figured the scenario is like the following.

          We all have a general image classifier running, it allows us to extract enough features to easily recognize a coconut from a mango and, if we focus on the problem, distinguish two mangos.

          But most people also have a dedicated facial image classifier, and it's really good at extracting features from faces (or seeing faces in random things like rocks on Mars). But for some people this classifier is either missing or doesn't work well,

          • Yeah, sounds about right. Uncanny valley is still weird - I suppose that goes in the "is this human" classifier rather than the "which one" classifier...

        • With new people, I find myself unable to re-recognise them when I see them later in the same evening, atleast not with full confidence.

          I have a similar problem. I don't generally have a problem recognizing people I actually know but I find it impossible to find someone based on a photo (for example first dates). I also have a very difficult time keeping track of which waitress is my waitress when I go out to a restaurant. I also have no problem recognizing that I've seen someone before but at the same time have a hard time remembering exactly who they are.

        • It's rather like everyone else has a dedicated co-processor that takes a set of facial features and returns a person, but mine is broken, or needs much more training.

          This co-processor may not be just 'broken', but any degrees of 'broken'. Some faces are innately more distinctive than others, so your recognizer may work for the most distinctive ten percent of faces. Conversely almost all observers will be fooled by identical twins, even if you happen to be married to one.

        • I have FB as well. My brain just doesn't remember faces by default unless I have repetitive exposure over a short period of time. If I meet you for 10 minutes, I'll likely not remember your face the next day. I've been aware of this since my college days when I realized I did not recognize a girl I had gone out on a date with just a few weeks earlier. I try my best to overcome by concentrating on faces. It helps but not always.

          Sometimes, I can remember a face but not associate it with the person, but I s
        • I'm also missing some of the co-processors that the nice normal social people seem to have. I have to do all that stuff in software on the CPU, i.e. by conscious thought. However, I believe we have all roughly the same amount of wetware, so the CPU might be stronger in cases like mine. Use geeks can get amazing things done in a short time, as long as we're allowed to focus on it.

          Another useful computing analogy would be I/O and memory access. Your local memory is a fast cache, so it makes sense to rememb

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        It's not that they can't see the body part, but rather that the body part is not connected to identity.

        And quite possibly a case of poor visual-textual memory in general. I'm great at absorbing facts, not totally autistic but textbooks, numbers, dates, menus, formulas, function names and that sort of thing. Like I get tired of pulling out my VISA card to pay online it's only 16 digits + expiry month + 3 digits (CVC) and I memorize it without really trying while others struggle with their PIN. If you ask me to distinguish between brands of dog or types of fish I'm quite poor, sure I can rattle off the names o

    • by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:38PM (#56027647)

      Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces. People can still see the face itself and the features, they just can't recognize who it belongs to.

    • I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...

      It's not that you can't see faces, atleast not for me anyway (I have a reasonably mild form), it's more that you don't have a bit of you brain that automatically collates all the relative sizes and positions of features and links that to a human identity. You can still see faces, and features, and be attracted to them, it's just that link to a person isn't as easy.

      As far as I know the grey blur thing isn't true, certainly not for the 1 in 50 anyway. For much more severe, perhaps.

    • Perhaps you should read the summary or the article?
      Why would anyone who is face blind see a grey blur instead of a face?
      Why would he not see random things as grey blurs?

    • It isn't being blind, but unable to different people by just their face. They will still see an attractive face, or an ugly face. But they have a hard time matching it to a person. For many of these people they are other factors that help them cope, hence why many go diagnoses. Things like Skin Color, Hair Color, general shape of the head, racial features. Other body features, the sound of their voice, their mannerisms...
      I know for myself I am not diagnosed with this (I havn't been tested), but I am usua

      • I have a mild version of this. I remember names, I remember faces but have trouble linking the two together.

        The odd thing is, I sometimes see lookalikes that others don't. Like Shrek and Tom Kerridge.

    • Um, no. As A/C said, it's got nothing to do with seeing a "pixelated" face, we (yup!) see faces perfectly fine. The problem comes down to being able to reliably all of a person's facial characteristics with a specific identity.

      Furthermore, as with most psychological quirks, it's a spectrum. If you're affected by it, it doesn't mean that you can simply never identify a face, in some more extreme cases maybe, but in others it just means that you take longer to be able to easily remember & associate all of

    • I think that description of being a grey blur is misleading. i'm certain that these people can pick out features on any given face. If you ask brad pitt to poke someone in the eye, i bet he could do it. They just are unable to build a map from a set of features to an individual. They are unable to build a hash from a set of facial proportions.

      think about this. upon first meeting identical twins, they often look, well... identical. after spending some time with them, you get to notice subtle differences
    • Attractiveness is a made of whole lot of attributes besides facial features (body type, skin tone, smell, voice, mannerism and hair - to name a few).

      Besides, a person who suffers from prosopagnosia cannot construct an identity from facial features, it doesn't mean she can't determine if a face she's looking at is attractive to her or not (she might forget it a second later, but that's a different issue).

    • It's not like that. I can tell you that Person X is very attractive; I just can't reliably recognize which attractive person that is. And it's dependent on a lot of things - often I recognize people I don't know well by their voice, rather than their face. Or, to take the example which made it crystal-clear to me: I was watching Sliding Doors with my wife. It's a movie in which parallel timelines play out, showing the differences in the lives the main character leads based on whether or not she just barely
    • I'd guess that "gray nondescript blurs" is inaccurate. It sounds more like prosopagnosia is when someone's "coprocessor" that quickly maps faces to memories of people doesn't work so well. It doesn't mean they can't see the face or the features on it, or even try and pattern-match normally as you would an apple or an orange.

      I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually gets filed as an autism spectrum disorder. To me this sounds like just another "people skill" that normal thinkers take for granted tha

    • I wouldn't characterize it as perceiving faces as nondescript blurs. You can see the face and it's features just fine when you're looking at it. But a few seconds after looking away you don't really remember it. It's like you mind has a much harder time developing a visual fingerprint of a specific face which would make it easier to recall, or develops a much less sophisticated fingerprint. I have no problem comparing pictures of faces side by side and picking out matches. But if you showed me a pictur
    • Face blind people don't perceive faces as grey non-descript blurs. It's more like being illiterate. A person who can't read sees the same letters and words that you do; but doesn't impart meaning to them.

    • by Sun ( 104778 )

      My case is mild, but I don't think gray nondescript blurs is the correct way to put it.

      The face is there, and if you ask me questions about someone I can answer them without a problem, so long as I am seeing them right now. Ask me to look at a picture, and then cover the picture and ask me questions, and I'm hopelessly lost. I can see the face just fine, but nothing from it registers in memory.

      Like I said, my case is a mild one. People I see often do stick to memory, but not via the details. I'm hopeles

  • Men staring at women's chests: the face blindness epidemic sweeping the nation!

    I mean... I never knew until now! ;)

  • by SinGunner ( 911891 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @12:47PM (#56027717)

    I can finally show this article to my wife and she'll think I'm a little less crazy.

    I recognize voice, gait and stance very well. I also have great recollect for floorplans and topography. Hair changes frequently enough to not be super helpful for me.

    My 3rd grade art teacher gave the class a project to draw your own face and I broke down crying because I didn't understand how everyone else could start drawing from memory. The teacher gave me a mirror, but just looking away from the mirror was enough to forget what my face looked like. Luckily, this is also the teacher that eventually taught me to just draw the individual lines you see. I'm still a shit artist for anything not predominately geometric.

    • Im the same way. very hard to be an artist if ya cant remember details.I can remember a faces "ya i know him"...... if i see someone in a crowd but if i had to tell you his/her name to save my life i would be dead.
    • As I think about your comment, I realize that I could not begin to draw my own face.

      I also have problems remembering the color of objects. I can really only remember color if I have the object tagged with the name of the color in my memory.

    • by Quirkz ( 1206400 )

      I'm curious, is it just faces, or do you maybe have a limited mind's eye visual recall altogether? I just recently learned about something called aphantasia, the inability to picture things in the mind's eye. I'm not fully there, but I've got a pretty low visual recall or imagination, and that might tie in. Really interesting thing to look into, if you think it might be applicable.

    • I wonder if 1/50 is truly face blind or all fall into related conditions. I don't think I'm face blind, I can pick out my wife from pictures pretty well. For me, I quickly forget facial features of people I don't see every day and tend to see familiar faces a lot with an initial glance, but on looking closer I realize it is someone else. I suspect linking faces to familiar memories is fairly common for everyone.

    • I'm not fully prosopagnosic but recognizing faces isn't a strength. If someone is out of context I will have a hard time recognizing them (even people I know very well). What I can do is recognize people from their gaits much better - how they walk and move is more identifying to me than what their face looks like). I'd never be good at describing what someone looks like for a police sketch artist - they have eyes, a mouth, and a nose in the normal positions. That's about it.
      • I should add that I do well on face recognition tests of famous people. My main problem is in vivo situations when people are out of context to me.
    • This. Like you, I've gotten very good at recognizing people by non-facial features - voice, gait, stance, and the clothes they like to wear. This has resulted in some what to others are impressive displays of recognition. I can frequently recognize uncredited and minor voice actors in animated movies simply by the timbre and intonations, sometimes if they've only got a single line. I've located a friend we were searching for from the opposite side of a soccer stadium by his gait. I can often pick out f
    • I've also got it and find that those same characteristics - voice, gait and stance - are super important for recognizing people. As I'm walking down the street with my coworkers, I'll see someone several blocks away that we know and correctly recognize them, and my coworkers are amazed. Then, at other times, we'll bump into an acquaintance at a restaurant and I'll have no idea who that person is. When they're some ways off and I can see them moving for a bit, I can pick up on who they are pretty well, bu
  • I'm pretty sure I'm not covered herein, but I've always needed a face and a voice to be sure of anyone. Make-up, hair, eye-colour, glasses, there are far too many elements of a person's face that change quite drastically.

    You're telling me that Brad Pitt, an actor whose face is changed on a daily basis in a make-up chair, and who works, daily, with an entire industry doing the same, has a brain that specifically dis-associates faces from people? This really doesn't sound like a defect. It sounds very much

  • Considering that most social networks and cloud based photo apps can identify who a person is based on a photo, I wonder if an app exists that can help these people by allowing them to discretely take a photo and then tell them it's best guess who the person is if they've tagged them before or if they've been publicly tagged before.
    • The problem is, any such app would geotag people it identifies. That would limit the places/poeple who would allow it to function. Certainly, GoogleGlass was banned from bars over this issue.

    • I've long wanted a pair of Google Glasses (or a similar product) that would put a little pop-up overlay on people with vital information that I know about them. This way if I walk into a store and a "complete stranger" starts talking to me as if we've known each other for years, the overlay can inform me that this is "Mary Smith" who works three cubicles away from me, and who I worked with on the Foo project three years ago.

  • Yeah just assumed that people were mostly all so similar that i lost track of who was who. i suppose its possible that I have this. I find that there are really only a handful of "face types" per race (or racial combination), and that i very rarely encounter a face type that I havent seen before. Happened to me the other day when i met a half korean and half brazilian girl, but most people fall into a regular face pattern that I have seen before.

    Happens to me all the time, people recognize me and i have no

  • by pubwvj ( 1045960 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:27PM (#56027987)

    It really helps if people don't change their clothing.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "...but in your case, I'll make an exception!"
      – Groucho Marx

  • "Its impact can be severe if undetected." if it is undetected then people don't feel it anymore and have coped... So why would it even be severe ?
    • >> "Its impact can be severe if undetected." if it is undetected then people don't feel it anymore and have coped... So why would it even be severe ? When you have this problem people think you are inattentive or don't care about them. You have to page people to find them in stores. Being able to thank your interviewers by name is very difficult. Meeting someone at an airport means you have to hold up one of the little signs like limo drivers to. I'll never have a sales position because of it, fo
    • I have a friend who has prosopoagnosia.

      She has no trouble recognizing me, because she knows me since a long time and is used to that.
      But she can't easily recognize (the face of people) she's been recently introduced to.

      So it might be undetected because the affected people are used to it and have found other way to recognize people than face.
      But the method is suboptimal.
      Imagine how severe it would be if the person changes jobs and cannot recognize their new boss.

      This can lead to ackward situation to that can

  • I seem to have difficulty recognizing characters when watching TV programs.

    It's not that I cannot recognize characters; it's more that I have difficulty distinguishing between characters where the actors have similar body types. As I continue to watch the drama, I can distinguish them.

    • According to a friend with prosopoagnosia, it's more like not even noticing when the same caracters are played by different actors (thing the different actors playing Hulk in Marvel movies).

      That friend is a fan of a Song of Fire and Ice, and has absolutely no problem tracking the loads of characters in the books (she has near perfect memory for names).
      She also enjoys watching Game of Thrones, but didn't notice when different actors are playing the same characters : She learned that the people playing "The M

  • It takes me a *long* time to learn new people's faces, and if I don't see someone for a few years (even close relatives) I can't recognize them. Sometimes this causes embarrassment as apparently most people can recognize others even after 10+ years.

  • Check the Military rate.

  • You can take a short test to see if this affects you: https://www.testmybrain.org/ [testmybrain.org]

    I was sure I had this but it turns out I just apparently can't be bothered to remember those around me. The site looks legitimate but I make no guarantee that's it's not just another one of these "test your IQ" type sites that's setup to harvests your email address.

  • Sorry, darling, I fucked her because I thought it was you. It’s my prosopagnosia acting up.

  • There is nothing new in this article, I found a similar article from 2013 https://www.livescience.com/34... [livescience.com]
  • One in 12 people reading this sentence have no idea what it means.

  • I consider myself slow to identify people by faces alone, but quick to realize by gait alone that a person in a coffee shop was also there the previous day.

    I recognize facial mannerisms quite quickly, as well. First, there's the "oh, I've seen that look before". That maps onto a psychological profile. And finally (most of the time) the psychological profile finally indexes onto identity. I also find that gait is more psychological than facial features. How people amble about expresses a lot about their

  • by gnunick ( 701343 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @03:34PM (#56028915) Homepage

    Wow. It would sure suck if you had this disability and had to take tests such as these:

    According to China Youth Daily, students at the Sichuan Vocational College of Culture and Communication were handed papers with photos of seven people during their exams, and asked to select their teacher and write their name underneath.

    Those who were able to identify their teacher did not get any extra marks, but students were severely penalised if they answered incorrectly, having 41 points deducted from their final score. China Daily says that the identity test accounted for 30% of their overall grade.

    Source:
    http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-... [bbc.com]

  • like most things there is a spectrum. Once I've met someone a few times I can recognize them, but before that it's just another face. Is this just normal? I don't know.

    It has resulted in some awkward moments when I should have known someone and just didn't recognize them as well as the opposite when I think I know someone - or should know them - but I'm just not sure.

    Of course there are a lot of people who look so distinctive that I recognize them immediately but usually I have to meet and talk to so

  • In my opinion, it is a mistake to call disease a condition shared by 1/50 of population, and that is so harmless that people ignore they have it.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills. -- Ambrose Bierce

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