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

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.

Comments

1 in 50 Faceblind?

[the_skywise]

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

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[FatdogHaiku]

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

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

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[Mr D from 63]

So, FB might simply be a natural defense against visual trauma?

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[chaboud]

Which, combined with a particular penchant for "alternative dentistry", explains the high frequency in the UK?

(Note: The above joke is largely unfounded and made only for its stereotypical obviousness, and, being French, I will surrender the point at first challenge.)

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[Sun]

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 from face blindness up front, and apologize to them I may not recognize them the next time.

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[Troed]

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).

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[Sun]

I was born this way. I have to tell that did not make school years any more fun.

Re:1 in 50 Faceblind?

[Applehu Akbar]

People using such an app would have to learn not to be too conspicuous with it, and the app would have to be designed to facilitate discretion. Say, a mode in which you're wearing earbuds and listening to music while having the phone upright in a shirt pocket, as though you were shooting video in a forbidden place. When the app encounters a familiar face, it wold speak the name if it saw earbuds connected. One can envision other discreet modes of operation.

Confused...

[avandesande]

Why would going to the dentist improve facial memory?

how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[supernova87a]

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...

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[omnichad]

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?

[the_skywise]

"HEY!"
"MY EYES ARE UP HERE!"

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[93 Escort Wagon]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[religionofpeas]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[jareth-0205]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[angel'o'sphere]

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?

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[jellomizer]

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 usually really bad with faces, the same actor can play multiple parts and I wouldn't realize it, or sometime I think a different actor is playing a part. However I can still see details in the face, and find it attractive or not, it isn't that it is a blur, but unable to match such features to the correct person.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[cayenne8]

And how often do you hear people describing attractiveness by facial features?

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?

[SinGunner]

That grey blur thing is about as accurate as dogs seeing "grey" because they're colorblind. There's just no great way to illustrate it. I see faces fine, but they don't stay in my head. I guess I'd say I've developed a general conception of what's attractive the same as everyone else (personal experience). What makes a face attractive is largely symmetry and balance of proportions, so I don't need to recognize your face to appreciate those things.

I will say it is objectively weird to look in the mirror. I look almost exactly like my father, and even though I couldn't really describe his face, I can somehow recognize that I sometimes look exactly like him in the mirror.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Anonymice]

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 someone's facial characteristics.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[jareth-0205]

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 lots of mitigation techniques, and I've *never* had the ability so I don't know any different.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[omnichad]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Gavrielkay]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I've always been sure I have something like this long before there was a name for it. I experience exactly what you describe.

And something else interesting.. When I dream, people don't have faces. It's not like a blur, their faces just... aren't part of the dream. I wonder if there's a connection.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[ArmoredDragon]

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 statistic could be overblown.

A think a good test would be whether you could see a picture of Donald Trump and distinguish it from any other bleach blonde old guy with a spray tan.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[shadowrat]

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 and suddenly they look more like individuals. When you first met them, you still saw faces, but you missed out on some subtle details in proportion and features. you still knew they were faces though. your hashing algorithm had to learn how to incorporate the data presented by this case. I think the experience for someone with prosopagnosia is similar to that experience of first meeting twins. Only it applies across the board, and they just never learn what the important little details are.

as to what they find attractive, it very well might be different from my criteria. then again, that kind of applies to all of us.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[quantaman]

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, they can still distinguish faces, they just need to do it using the general classifier.

I think a comparable problem might be recognizing dogs, give me two dogs of same breed, build, and colouration, and I can't tell them apart at a glance. If I spend a lot of time with dogs I'll get better, I'll learn to look for specific colouration patterns or changes in features, but I'll never be as effective as it as a dog would be because I don't have that dedicated dog classifier sitting in my brain.

Does this comparison make sense to you? I'm curious how you feel about the "uncanny valley", for instance I found fake Tarquin in Rogue One to be quite obvious and unsettling, did you have the same reaction?

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[jareth-0205]

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...

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Wycliffe]

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.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Major_Disorder]

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.

As I am old and decrepit, I would have to bet on 1 or 2.

But I my ego prefers to believe it is number 3. :)

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[dryeo]

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.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Jason Levine]

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 these conversations in detail, but I barely even remember that they took place (if at all).

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure I suffer from this to some degree. It makes watching movies really sucky. If there are two mainish characters with roughly the same color hair, I'm lost. This also sucks for my wife because I end up constantly asking her to clear up my misunderstandings of the plot.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[DontBeAMoran]

Well, that's a stupid thing to say. Babies can't talk!

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Mr D from 63]

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 suppose this is more common.

I never forget an ass though! (JK)

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[DontBeAMoran]

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?

[Hognoxious]

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.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[DontBeAMoran]

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.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[nukenerd]

I expect it was the girl herself. They always do that to me too, or else a handbag in the teeth.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[DontBeAMoran]

I LOVE the trend of dyeing hair bright colors, it makes it so much easier for me to recognize people!

Dude, you must love anime!

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Kjella]

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 of dozens but connecting the name with the photo?

I notice that I cheat by "quantifying" characteristics like big dog, small dog, long hair, short hair, big nose, small nose, straight ears, hanging ears, colors, textures etc. until I have a decent classifier. I can't draw them worth shit though, I only know how to pick them apart not put them together. And it doesn't work well for people because the differences are much smaller, I really should remember that specific face and be able to pick it out in a crowd. Maybe in a context but out on the street others recognize me ninety-nine times out of a hundred and I'm not that memorable. I'm just almost never that positively sure.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[epine]

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.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Major_Disorder]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

i bet movies have a lot of unusual plot twists for you.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[DontBeAMoran]

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

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Narcocide]

I don't think they just see a "nondescript gray blur." I think it's more that people who they haven't seen in a few days and aren't expecting to meet or run into by chance will just seem oddly familiar in an almost noticeable way that still fails to trigger recognition.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[angel'o'sphere]

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 same Irish pub and he knew me since years, but I never 'memorized' him as 'a regular'.

A few days ago I went to a different Irish Pub, on the way to the toilett, I passed him in a distancce of less than a yard, looking at his face: I did nit recognize him. Because I expected no one sitting there which I 'should recognize'.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Dr. Evil]

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, voice, it's all good.

I could write a dozen things I do to get around this. I didn't know it was even strange until I met somebody who's the opposite... he remembers and recognizes *everyone*. He can sit on the street for an hour at a coffee shop and recognize people who were going one way, coming back the other, and he'll remember that he saw them the other day the next time he's there.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[LostMonk]

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).

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Highdude702]

So you like ugly people.. We get it.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[demonlapin]

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 makes it onto a specific subway train one afternoon. Gwyneth Paltrow plays the lead, but she has different hair colors and styles in each of the two roles. I was two-thirds of the way through the movie before I realized that the same actress was playing both characters. That's how much hair color (and style) is part of my recognition scheme.

If you take a real chameleon like Gary Oldman, forget it: I'm toast. At the opposite end of the spectrum, take someone like Sean Connery, who always plays Sean Connery playing someone else, and it's no problem.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[TeknoHog]

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 remember the data you use often, instead of looking it up online every time. A similar idea applies to large organizations, as the I/O bottleneck makes them relatively less efficient.

I've come up with these ideas independently, and I've been delighted to see something like them in research on education and intelligence. For instance, the g-factor of intelligence is sometimes interpreted as the clock speed of the brain.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[djrobxx]

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 that some might lack.

I know mine's not very good. I almost never say hi to people by name because it takes me longer than it should to identify, and be sure I'm right about, who I'm speaking to. Meanwhile I've had people that I barely know, and not seen in decades recognize me. I don't have distinctive features at all. Obviously I'm missing something they have.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Solandri]

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 picture of a face for 5 seconds, then asked me to pick it out from a dozen photos of similar faces, that would be really hard to impossible for me. (I think the nondescript blurs is specific to people who've suffered brain damage in the part of the brain which recognizes faces. The same part of the brain that makes you see the front of your car as a face, or see a face in a Mars photo.)

A lot of our perception of "beauty" is simply facial symmetry and average features. i.e. Attractive celebrities aren't beautiful because they're unusual. They're beautiful because their faces have less deviation from the average. So you don't need to recognize faces to tell that they're attractive. I'm actually really good at taking flattering portraits of people, probably because I concentrate a lot more on non-facial features like lighting, posing, and expression. And hiding things which make a face appear unattractive is more a mechanical process for me, rather than instinctive.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[istartedi]

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.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[fponias]

actually .... I do have a hard time with movies. Usually if there's two or more characters that look too similar, I'll frequently get them confused. Typically I'll distinguish a character by their hairstyle, clothing, gender, and race. So if the main characters are women with similar hairdos, from a similar social class, that dress similarly I won't be able to tell them apart and I'm typically left wondering if there's two separate people in the story or it's just bad writing. Similarly, if a character changes their outfit (like it's the next day) I might wonder who the hell that character is and have to play plot catch-up. God help me if somebody get's a haircut. A good example would be the Neon Demon. I'm still not sure how many characters we were following in that movie, and the amount of costume changes, makeup changes, hair changes ... made it impossible for me to differentiate who was who. The Prestige was another. I couldn't tell the two main characters apart. It was even pointed out to be that one of the main guys had a mustache and the other didn't.

That's not to say I see a blur instead of a face. I just don't map particular combinations of facial features to a specific person. I often joke that if my redhead wife put on a wig I wouldn't be able to recognize her, as I typically identify her by her distinct hair coloring. I hope she never tests that theory.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Sun]

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 hopelessly lost about those even for close family. I cannot reliably tell you my wife's eye-color. Instead, when I see here, the overall shape of the face suddenly fits in to the right place, and I can tell you who that person is with confidence and without fail.

I took an online test once, and I had no trouble identifying Rowan Atkinson and Ian McKellen (pictures were shown with the hair cut away). Ask me to describe either one of them, and I'm drawing a total blank on Rowan, and for Ian I'm going to go with "wrinkles".

So it's not true that I see the face as a gray blur. It is more accurate to say that that's what's left in my memory as soon as I turn my eyes away.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Paradise Pete]

So women are indeed whores as the western society perceives them?

What a bizarre way to interpret what he wrote.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Troed]

It's not a myth.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[tomasandreasson]

I can offer a better analogy.

I'm in the interesting position of having a sometimes broken, sometimes working facial recognition system. More specifically, it's usually broken, but I can sometimes somehow trick my brain into activating it, usually by staring intently at a person for an abnormally long period of time. The first time I managed to do this, which I believe was when looking at my mom, I suddenly realized "Holy shit, she looks like grandpa." Up until that point, I had never understood what people were talking about when they say that someone looks like their parents.

The analogy I offer, which closely matches my subjective experience, is that of 2D vs. 3D movies. When looking at them, they contain the exact same imagery and look pretty much identical, but the 3D image contains additional information that allows the brain to post-process it and creating a "popping out" experience that cannot possibly be captured in a 2D image. Faces appear work the same way; the post-processing adds a layer of "depth", for lack of a better term, that doesn't really change how it looks, but rather how it's experienced. You're suddenly capable of identifying patterns, similarities and nuances that you were previously oblivious to. Normal people's facial recognition seems to largely be based on this "extra" information.

An analogy that's way less accurate to my experiences, but may be easier to understand, is that of a magic eye image. The pattern doesn't change, but you suddenly experience something "more" that transcends the pattern itself, like an extra layer of previously invisible information on top of what you already had.

To be more vague and subjective, perceiving people's faces in the "normal" way is actually quite weird from the point of view of someone who doesn't normally do so. The person you're looking at appears to be wearing a hyper-realistic "mask" over their face that somehow looks the same, yet heavily emphasizes their distinct traits, sort of like some living, breathing caricature of the person. While this is a very strange, surreal experience to me, I assume this is what most people always experience in everyday life, that it feels perfectly natural to them, and that they're not even aware that it's going on.

Re: how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[eatvegetables]

One red flag: not recognizing people you know when seeing them out of context. An example is running into a coworker in the mall. In such a scenario, the normal queues that help you identify a particular person are absent. The coworker is dressed causually (not dressed for work). Obviously, the coworker not at his/her desk. No chance to overhear a conversation, so no vocal queues. You get the idea. Something that might not be obvious is that the condition makes it damn near impossible to remember names, since you don't have a good visual memory of anyone you meet. There are certainly worse afflictions, but this one is pretty high up on the suck-o-meter.

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[michael_wojcik]

What a bizarre way to interpret what he wrote.

Well, when you start with a bizarre set of axioms...

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[minstrelmike]

I think I tend to face blindness. Always have to ask my wife if that acress is someone famous or not. OTOH, I'm a musician and can tell differences in voices easily and have more than once identified some actor by his voice when my wife cannot identify the actor at all (makeup and hair and all that other stuff).

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[minstrelmike]

I'm that way with colors, too. I see colors, but don't remember them or 'see' them while remembering. We have 3 bathrooms in our house and I've told my wife several times to use the names: mine, guest, or kids bathroom, not blue, yellow or green bathroom because I cannot remember which color goes with which bathroom. And I built them and painted them and use them most every day..

Re:how do you figure out who's hot or not?

[Sun]

It's not exactly the same thing.

If I make an effort to remember a detail, I can actually do it. I remember deciding that my daughter's eyes are milk-chocolate brown. I don't remember seeing the color, but I do remember what it was.

I remember that, however, like you'd remember how a place you've never seen, but had described to you, looks like. You know the facts but don't have the mental image that comes with actually having seen it.

Re:Brad Pitt is face blind?

[110010001000]

Exactly. Another made up malady. "No really, I thought it was YOU."

Brad Pitt

[Anonymous Coward]

would've been just as happy with Rosie O'Donnell?

Re:Brad Pitt

[EvilSS]

He's face blind, not ass blind.

wikipedia animation freaky

[Anonymous Coward]

the wikipedia entry on Prosopagnosia has an animated spinning head/brain thing that freaks me right the fuck out. as someone who can't walk around a lamp post without going back around the other way to "unwind", this spinning head is racking up the tangled turns BUT I CANT MAKE IT GO BACKWARDS TO UNWIND this is going to bug me all day.

Re:wikipedia animation freaky

[Adriax]

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

Re:wikipedia animation freaky

[wonkey_monkey]

Does this help, or just make it 1000x worse?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And all this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

And all this time I've been waking up with a different woman every morning, only to find out it's actually been my wife all along...

So much for living the fun life...

Two weeks later...

[Gravis Zero]

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.

[SinGunner]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[Stan92057]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[whoever57]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[Quirkz]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[eliphalet]

I can recognize faces and objects, but I cannot visualize or draw much of anything.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[SinGunner]

I might have that... I do ok with imagining basic geometric objects, but I have extreme difficulty with anything else. With basic geometric shapes I can actually almost see them in my head, but anything else I get more of a general impression that feels disconnected from vision.

Picturing anything I could make in AutoCAD, no problem.

Picturing my hand after just looking at it, I retain the shape for a second or two and then the proportions rapidly destabilize, the fingers shrink, palm grows, nails disappear completely. Yet I still have fine proprioception with my eyes closed.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[Drethon]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[dogmatixpsych]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[dogmatixpsych]

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.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[Solandri]

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 friends in a crowd from behind (clothes, stance), especially if they're walking (gait). And during a winter party when everyone had tossed their coats onto a bed in a big pile, I was able to pick out which coat belonged to which person.

But I couldn't draw people's faces or give a description to police if my life depended on it. Often someone changing their hairstyle is enough so I can't recognize their face anymore (or the converse - I don't notice they've changed their hairstyle). Makeup is another easy way to fool me if I'm only looking at a photo of someone I haven't seen in a while (so their clothes are no longer a giveaway).

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[LiquidAvatar]

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, but in a crowded room when we're face to face, I'm at a loss.

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[Frobnicator]

I draw, but abandoned hope of being professional artist after art classes. I can draw human bodies, clothes, and all other human anatomy details just fine. But I have to leave faces blank.

I have studied faces for years. I've had teachers try to help me, but faces never turned out. When I work from an image from a face and hold it right next to the drawing I can put together a portrait but it takes a long time. Usually I must go through carefully memorized rules: circle, square and thirds to position features; eye gap of one eye wide for the nose; pupil distance equal mouth distance; ear locations relative to eyes and nose; chin shape and jowls based on gender and weight; planes of nose, mouth, cheeks, and eyes for detail placement and shading. I build up the entire face through memorized rules, but for every other non-facial feature I can draw by following the curves, key points, memory, and understanding of anatomy.

I am often told the face doesn't look quite right, but everything else looks perfect.

When others are sketching faces by memory, I have to tediously measure specific details; the nose is slightly wider than their eye distance rule, the lips are narrower than the rule, their chin is particularly large and pronounced, and so on. I memorize faces by how they differ from the rules, not by what faces actually look like. When I'm done, I have no idea how close I've come to the actual recognizable face, and need to ask, "Do you think this look like the person?" If I'm lucky I don't have to ask, I'll be asked "Is that a drawing of {famous person}?"

That is in addition to frequent social gaffes. I know a person, I can talk about what they've done and their relationships to others. But on many occasions I've asked questions like "How do you feel about {person}'s performance?" or "What do you think of {person}'s presentation?", only to have that be the person in question. I've met people in the park and I think "I think I know that person", they walk up and greet me by name; when I tell them I'm having trouble with their name, they tell me and I suddenly realize we've been on the same team at work for six months.

Even so, when I asked my doctor about it, he said it was probably just normal variation, some people are better at it than others...

Re:Never knew what it was called.

[minstrelmike]

It's a spectrum. Some folks are truly faceblind. A lot more are just face-nearsighted.

Face and Voice

[holophrastic]

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 like a valuable adaptation.

Imagine a world of masks and disguises. Would you want to trust your enemy the same way that you trust your friend? I grew up in the '80s, "my voice is my password". My face was never a credential.

Maybe we'll need to wait until the iPhone twenty before the phone can be unlocked with your voice as your credentials.

Re:Face and Voice

[holophrastic]

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.

Re:Face and Voice

[Applehu Akbar]

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?

[Bryansix]

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.

Re:Is there an app for this?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

Re:Is there an app for this?

[Jason Levine]

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.

Re:Is there an app for this?

[nukenerd]

So if I see a guy with Google glasses I'll know it's Jason Levine. Who else would be wearing them?

Re:Is there an app for this?

[Bryansix]

Do you play Watchdogs?

hmm maybe me

[citylivin]

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 idea who they are. However i can usually tell if i have seen that person before (just not necessarily the context, and if i only met them once before, forget it). It takes a good lot of work and tricks of memory for me to remember someones name though. When I meet someone, i often try and associate their name to the first time i heard that name before and that previous person. Then i can look at them, do some mental gymnastics (oh his name is the same as the brother of my best friend in grade school...) and out pops the name.

personally i think my memory for faces just sucks. Not sure its actually this condition. I can tell people apart for the most part. Except like a room full of hipsters and other concentrations of similar looking people.

Cloths Make the Man (or Woman)

[pubwvj]

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

Re:Cloths Make the Man (or Woman)

[AmiMoJo]

I'm all for people wearing name badges in the office. One of the hardest things when changing job is learning lots of new names.

Re:Cloths Make the Man (or Woman)

[pubwvj]

No, silly goose, their smell changes over time if they don't change their cloths...

But if they wear the same top at least (washing as needed) then they are far more recognizable. Bottoms help too but are not as critical. Hats help also.

Does this apply to psycho ex-partners?

[adosch]

Seems like the perfect diagnosis to have when confronted by a crazy ex-partner of any kind in public where you know it's going to get awkward quick because they want to prove a point and have to get that one last comment in.

I never forget a face

[mfnickster]

"...but in your case, I'll make an exception!"
  – Groucho Marx

how the impact can be`severe ?

[aepervius]

"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 ?

Re:how the impact can be`severe ?

[ElizabethGreene]

>> "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, for sure.

Is this binary or are the gradations?

[whoever57]

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.

Re:Is this binary or are the gradations?

[Dj Offset]

I have the same problem. It took me ~15 years or so to figure out what's "wrong" with me - I'm not completely face-blind, but slightly.

I find it difficult to recognize characters too, especially when watching a movie with two or more particularly beautiful persons - where the faces are more or less flawless. Then you cannot use the flawless face as a distinguishing factor by itself.
Why did they have to put two "identical" blondes in this movie?

levels of this?

[iggymanz]

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.

[Zorro]

Check the Military rate.

Here is a test

[AlanBDee]

You can take a short test to see if this affects you: https://www.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

[nospam007]

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

OLD NEWS!

[freak0fnature]

There is nothing new in this article, I found a similar article from 2013 https://www.livescience.com/34...

Re:Cuz no SUN in Blighty!

[nukenerd]

People live in... England..... Bad teeth to boot.

I believe you are confusing it with Japan,

Not bad

[backslashdot]

One in 12 people reading this sentence have no idea what it means.

a minor degree

[epine]

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 personality and presentation style. Even speech rhythm strikes me as more informative and specific.

At the same time, given an old year book, I recognize all my own schoolmates without any difficulty. I just think my circuit is relatively slow compared to the general population, and I'm not able to rely on it in fluid social situations, where other factors control the pace.

I have a non-genetic sibling who will recognize and identify everyone assembled in a crowded environment in one glance, then move through the room resuming her last conversation with each person wherever it broke off (could be months ago), while also commenting on any physical change or added bling.

And she thinks of herself as not very smart, because both of her brothers were academic eggheads.

The other thing about my ability to pick up mannerisms is that I'm always the first to interpret an oddity. After a weird interaction, someone will go "what was that expression?" about some participant and I'll go "it was nothing; that person momentarily starting to think about something else unrelated to the conversation, and it leaked out".

How do I know this? I have no idea. Somehow I'm extremely alert to cognitive task switching.

The human face is basically just a front panel, one where I recognize the patterns in the blinking lights faster than I recognize the layout of the LEDs.

A little bit weird, but it has its pros and cons.

Re:I have a terrible time recognizing people by fa

[Quirkz]

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.)

China exam tests students on teacher names

[gnunick]

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-...

I don't have that....

[Dare978Devil]

I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names. I forget what it is called...

Re:I don't have that....

[slew]

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's names, but also certain words (say, like Dysnomia). Similar circumlocutory strategies are often deployed to avoid getting communication trapped by the deficit (e.g., "I have the affliction where I can't remember people's names").

Although modern medicine doesn't know for sure, if your Dysnomia isn't likely genetic (e.g., you have had it as long as you can remember), it may, unfortunately, actually be a sign of a real problem (e.g., other aphasias), not something that is transient...

Sub-optimal coping mechanism

[DrYak]

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 severly impact the social life.
That friend could ignore people (like recent colleagues) when meeting them in the street.
But not because she's impolite (like most of them would imagine) but simply because they are wearing different clothes, in a context where there are no other clue to recognize them, so she couldn't even realise that it's someone she knew.

Actors between season.

[DrYak]

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 Mountain" changed from her friends. For her, she recognize the Mountain based on the context, she's completely unable to register the face.

I think I'm partially face blind, but

[No Longer an AC]

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 someone a few times before their face actually imprints on my memory.

A lot of us just look very similar. We have average hair, average eyes, a regular sized nose. We drive average cars. I can't tell you people apart. You all look the same and it's not a racial thing - white people often look the same to me and I'm white.

If you put my next door neighbor in a police lineup (which is where he probably belongs) I probably wouldn't even be able to pick him out.

It puts people in Jail

[aberglas]

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 names (occasionally) but not forgetting "who they are".

Hardly a disease

[manu0601]

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.

It's impact...

[dddux]

"It's impact could be severe." Indeed, if you don't recognise your mother in law and she bashes you with an umbrella. You could die of brain haemorrhage.

Facial blindness sucks

[DeathtoPorgs]

I remember reading that original article about Brad Pitt having facial blindness and thinking how crazy it sounded by the headline, then reading TFA realized that I had it, too. I walked out of my office one time and some guy came up to me and offer to give me a ride to my car, I paused and stared at him a few seconds before realizing it was my boss that I worked with every day the past few years. Honestly, going out in public and thinking I may know someone is kind of terrifying.

Re:One in 5 of Us is Slashvertisement Blind.

[minstrelmike]

It's a spectrum, not on or off. About like real blindness. I'm not faceblind per se, but I'm nearsighted in that ability, that's for damn sure.

On the other end, there are some folks who are super-identifiers. Police departments have spent some time identifiying the naturals they have and getting those folks to watch surveillance videos. It's amazing who they can pick out.

Re:OMG

[minstrelmike]

You're right to be worried.
Every horny 15-year-old girl on the internet is actually a 44-year-old male cop from Hoboken.
You've got to be blind to a lot more than just faces to be fooled.