I don’t remember when I learned about face blindness—but I was glad I did, as I learned it’s not just me.
Face blindness is a condition in which the ability to recognize familiar faces—to identify people by their face—is impaired.
According to Wikipedia the prevalence in the general population is 2.5%, so it’s not particularly rare.
The name is a bit dramatic, but face blindness just means that the brain doesn’t boost memory of faces. Normally, special circuitry kicks in when you see a face because it’s important socially to know when you see it again.
Doesn’t seem to work for me.
To figure out if I’ve seen someone before, I instead rely on clues: clothes, hairstyle, height, skin colour, things that are said.
It takes a while to be sure, so if I encounter someone at random then I’m immediately at a disadvantage: they know if we’ve met before; I don’t know, so I make non-committal noises while frantically looking for clues.
I’m not sure if it’s related, but I also have trouble with names. I guess it must be related—you can’t remember a name if you have no idea who the person is.
All this makes chance encounters nerve-wracking as I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m offending someone by giving the impression of not remembering them; when in fact the memory is probably just fine, it’s my ability to recall the right memory that’s lacking.
I should carry cards to hand out explaining the condition—except that I’d have no idea who to give them to. Hah!
I found a simple test for face blindness here:
The test basically makes sense—it shows a series of faces and asks you if each one is new or has already been seen.
Different images of the same people are used to tilt the result towards “real” recognition.
This isn’t enough to cut out false positives, though. While taking the test I pretty much worked fully from hairstyle, clothes and skin color, and these are enough to get quite a few right: I scored 36 out of 75.
Apparently the average score is 57.7, so even “cheating” my score is very low.
What can I say? We all have our challenges, this is one of mine.
It makes written communication particularly pleasing to me—as, unlike in person, I can be sure immediately who I’m talking to.
So far today, 2024-05-26, feedback has been received 4 times. Of these, 2 were likely from bots, and 2 might have been from real people. Thank you, maybe-real people!
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