Face Blindness

What is it?

I have face blindness (Prosopagnosia) "a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces including one's own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision-making) remain intact". It has a prevalence of roughly 2 percent.

I only found out that this was a medical condition a few years ago from my mother, who also has it¹.Putting a name to something is powerful. Not knowing what face blindness was, I had struggled and developed ad-hoc systems for dealing with it over time. As is common for people with face blindness, I am highly dependant on context clues to identify people. Meet a colleague at the supermarket? They are a stranger to me. A gym buddy in the streeet? ditto. Friend gets a haircut? Total reset. I have kept and abandoned dozens of lists on my phone trying to retain names and tie them to non- facial aspects. Here's a sample of a current one from my kickboxing gym (Ironman Majorna if you wanna come train!)

• Anna - floppy hair youth. Super fast
• Bert - The Beast. hexagonal tattoo on shoulder
• Carl - serious Black coach with good music
• Dani - regular, skilled very light punch, blond
• Elinor - nice bald shaved older 1.85 80 kg
• Frank - classic Kickboxer Guy short blond hair. Serious. Bad block
• Godot - the gymnast
• Harriet - cropped blond hair, spin kick

Note how none of these depend on facial features and a lot of it is context specific (I'm probably not gonna identify a guy with a good spin kick on the tram). I also depend a lot on haircuts, so please don't change yours. After Bert shaved I though there was another overpowered hitter to survive sparring with.

N.B. names have been changed throughout this article. If you think you recognise yourself in one of these stories, sorry!

My experience of this

Face blindness is a cause of substantial background anxiety. My inability to recognise people often puts me in unfortunate social situations and I worry that I frequently come across as rude/dismissive when I blank someone I have previously met.

My face blindness has also lead to some amusing situations:

1. At a gig, I met my friend Abe and, for the first time, his new girlfriend Beatrice. After exchanging some comments about the band with Abe, and having not been introduced to Beatrice, I offered my hand to shake, said "Hi, I'm Callum" and continued the conversation. Some 15 minutes later I realised, from a peculiarity of her accent, that Beatrice was a friend of mine. In fact, she and Abe had met at a dinner at my house some weeks prior.
2. About a year into my work at VOTO, I was the first arrival at the office that morning. Locking up my bike I saw a woman standing in front of the office attempting to make eye contact with me to initiate conversation. Being a socially anxious person, I blanked her and proceeded to unlock the office and walk in. This woman turned out to be Carla, someone I had met in work meetings over zoom and several times in person in social situations. She later forgave this supreme act of rudeness and has become a dear friend. I wouldn't rule out this happening again though.
3. During summer holidays at the end of my first year of university, I was working my summer job rowing the Southwold/Walberswick ferry. A man my age boarded with his parents. He greated me by name and spoke about several topics before I realised he must be a university classmate. My class was 25 people. Once I returned to uni, I only found out who it was after someone else mentioned that coincidental encounter with Dave. Seeing him in context had not jogged my memory.
4. While conducting field work in the Canaries, I approached a man in a hotel lobby and asked him about how we were getting to the lab that day. He was not, in fact, my colleague, but a complete stranger.

In nearly all of these encounters I have been able to hide my lack of recognition. I think most people just find it so unlikely that someone they know relatively well would not recognise them that it is not even something they consider.

Reading some of the anecdotes on the original face blindness website choisser.com I seem to have a mercifully mild version of face blindness. Statistically, I am sure, friendships have faltered, professional relationships never bloomed and many people have felt offended and put down by my failure to recognise them. This is a real shame and there are many past events I wish I could go back and rectify. More alarming to me are the many misses I was never even aware of.

Now that I have a name for this condition, I can be up-front about it with people. I no longer have to think of half excuses (I didn't have my glasses! I was in a hurry! I was listening to a really good podcast! (though these were likely contributing factors)). I hope that this increases awareness of face blindness. Maybe somewhere down the line a social interaction will be saved when someone like me fails to recognise someone who they should. This post is partially an effort to increase awareness of this condition.

Some side effects

Realising that I suffer from an identifiable medical condition has allowed me to explain quite a few seemingly unrelated issues that I have long struggled with. Some of these are obvious (Failing to recognise classmates and colleagues in different contexts, ) others less so. Here are some of the less obvious effects of my face blindness:

• I cannot identify/visualise family resemblance
• More broadly - I can't identify when people "look similar"
• I cannot picture people in my head - typically old photographs I have seen many times come to mind instead
• I sometimes do not identify myself in group photographs
• I struggle differentiating characters in films, especially if they all have similar clothes (legal thrillers, war films etc.) If a character changes hairstyle/clothes I often think they are a new character
• I am often anxious in situations where I will meet new people (though, aren't we all?)
• As a child I frequently got lost/lost track of my parents
• I was very late to an understanding/appreciation of beauty standards, the effects of makeup etc. I couldn't say until I was in my late teens who was attractive.
• I cannot connect/identify people in old childhood photographs, photos of celebrities before they were famous etc.

This may additionally explain why I struggled making friends as a child. Or maybe I just had bad vibes idk².

Further reading

• A good narrative style Wired article, you know the type https://www.wired.com/2006/11/blind/
• There's a bunch of papers in the footnotes of the wikipedia article if you really want to go deep on this. I didn't find much new in the ones I skimmed.

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Footnotes

1. this is not unusual. The wikipeida article states that many people do not realise that they have face blindness until later in life. It has also been suggested that a genetic factor is responsible for the condition. "Many adults with developmental prosopagnosia report that for a long time they had no idea that they had a deficit in face processing, unaware that others could distinguish people solely on facial differences" ↩︎
2. Prosopagnosia in children may be overlooked; they may just appear to be very shy or slightly odd due to their inability to recognize faces." lol ↩︎