Slashdot Mirror
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.
There's an iPhone X joke in there somewhere...
Why would going to the dentist improve facial memory?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Exactly. Another made up malady. "No really, I thought it was YOU."
"HEY!"
"MY EYES ARE UP HERE!"
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
#DeleteChrome
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.
Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces. People can still see the face itself and the features, they just can't recognize who it belongs to.
I've always been curious to know how people who are face-blind find other people attractive? As depicted in biology texts, they basically perceive faces as gray nondescript blurs. Do they have any attraction to faces at all, or what takes the place of this? It certainly opens the interesting notion of a group of people who are foreclosed from being as facially superficial as most people are...
It's not that you can't see faces, atleast not for me anyway (I have a reasonably mild form), it's more that you don't have a bit of you brain that automatically collates all the relative sizes and positions of features and links that to a human identity. You can still see faces, and features, and be attracted to them, it's just that link to a person isn't as easy.
As far as I know the grey blur thing isn't true, certainly not for the 1 in 50 anyway. For much more severe, perhaps.
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.
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?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
He's face blind, not ass blind.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
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.
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.
It really helps if people don't change their clothing.
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.
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
#DeleteFacebook
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.
i bet movies have a lot of unusual plot twists for you.
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-...
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
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.