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.
1 in 50 Faceblind? (Score:5, Funny)
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There's an iPhone X joke in there somewhere...
I'm not paying $1000 to research it...
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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.
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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
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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).
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Confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:2)
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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.
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:4, Funny)
Most of the time actually....
I mean, if they are facing you, that's generally the first thing I look at.
If looking at a chick and can't see her face, then the body...but after that, have to see the face and if ugly, its an immediate deal breaker.
What the hell do you look at?
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:5, Informative)
It was really more of a joke. In actuality, face-blind can see and respond to attractiveness just fine. But actually being able to quickly distinguish who belongs to what face is what's missing.
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Well, that's a stupid thing to say. Babies can't talk!
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So you like ugly people.. We get it.
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:5, Funny)
"MY EYES ARE UP HERE!"
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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
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:3)
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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She could have overcharged you from day one. Is the price of coffee listed somewhere? Are others paying the same price for their coffee?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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,
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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...
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes, I can remember a face but not associate it with the person, but I s
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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
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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
Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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i bet movies have a lot of unusual plot twists for you.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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).
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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
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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.
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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
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Dude, you must love anime!
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A lot of people with this condition recognize people they know in a given situation, such as on golf courses. Take the face out of context, and you might not recognize the same person waving to you in the supermarket.
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I'm probably in this camp... it's extremely embarassing.
Last night I mixed up the hostess of a party with staff. She's a friend of my wife's, so I don't know her *that* well... and she was standing next to the bar, wearing black.
I'm aware of it, and I guess I use a lot of strategies to get around it. which means not using names. She didn't notice, I pretended not to have made the mistake. That's normal for me.
Once she opened her mouth and made eye contact, of course I knew who it was. Body language, voi
It puts people in Jail (Score:2)
Most people are not actually as good at recognizing faces as they think they are.
In crime situations, witnesses often confidently pick innocent people out of a line up. Particularly when a suspect is in a line up precisely because they look a bit like what witnesses have described, and no one else in the line up does, and they do not have an alibi. A legal aid lawyer and they are going down.
Fills jails.
BTW. I personally have some difficulty recognizing faces. People will forgive you forgetting their nam
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I expect it was the girl herself. They always do that to me too, or else a handbag in the teeth.
Two weeks later... (Score:2)
Men staring at women's chests: the face blindness epidemic sweeping the nation!
I mean... I never knew until now! ;)
Never knew what it was called. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Face and Voice (Score:2)
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
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To be fair, most people recognize brad pitt in movies with big posters that say brad pitt right at the top, after having chosen to spend their hard-earned money and time to see it.
I don't think that counts as recognizing anything.
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Yet most people do recognize Brad Pitt in different movies, or so I'm told. I don't generally recognize actors from one movie to another.
Judging from what's happening in Hollywood right now, in the future there will be NO actors in movies, only actresses. All male roles will be CGI-synthsized.
Is there an app for this? (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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So if I see a guy with Google glasses I'll know it's Jason Levine. Who else would be wearing them?
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hmm maybe me (Score:2)
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
Cloths Make the Man (or Woman) (Score:3)
It really helps if people don't change their clothing.
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I never forget a face (Score:2)
"...but in your case, I'll make an exception!"
– Groucho Marx
how the impact can be`severe ? (Score:2)
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Sub-optimal coping mechanism (Score:2)
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
Is this binary or are the gradations? (Score:2)
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.
Actors between season. (Score:2)
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
levels of this? (Score:2)
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.
Where everyone wears a name tag. (Score:2)
Check the Military rate.
Here is a test (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Sorry, darling, I fucked her because I thought it was you. It’s my prosopagnosia acting up.
OLD NEWS! (Score:2)
Not bad (Score:2)
One in 12 people reading this sentence have no idea what it means.
a minor degree (Score:2)
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
China exam tests students on teacher names (Score:3)
Wow. It would sure suck if you had this disability and had to take tests such as these:
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-... [bbc.com]
I think I'm partially face blind, but (Score:2)
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
Hardly a disease (Score:2)
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.
Re:Brad Pitt is face blind? (Score:4, Interesting)
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As someone who has to even out stepping over the sidewalk cracks between his left and right legs, I feel your pain.
Here. First entry from google for "play a gif in reverse": https://ezgif.com/reverse [ezgif.com]
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Does this help, or just make it 1000x worse?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Brad Pitt (Score:5, Insightful)
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People live in... England..... Bad teeth to boot.
I believe you are confusing it with Japan,
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I have a tendency to do that, too. I've frequently failed to recognize someone, just because they were wearing a hat. (Or once, when a guy took off his ubiquitous baseball cap.)
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I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names. I forget what it is called...
I think the word you are looking for is Dysnomia (aka Anomic Aphasia)...
Often people afflicted with this type of cognitive deficit often use circumlocutory phrases in an attempt to hide it (e.g., rather than addressing someone's name, they often use phrases like "I met you/him/her at that party last week...") or they make up nicknames for people based on other things they remember about them (e.g., "Mr. Java Expert", kind of a circumlocutation in itself)...
Dysnomia often isn't limited to remembering people'