Chapter Fifty-Eight: Faceblind (~jinghan)

There are two things you notice when you go somewhere completely new where none of the people you are able to see in person are people you have known for more than a month…

1. there are so many new names and faces to remember (I’ve taken to smiling at everyone that makes eye contact with me because I can’t tell whether I’ve met them before.)
2. you really miss meeting up with just one person (it is hard to judge whether it is appropriate to ask someone to spend time with just you when you’ve only just met them, it’s dead easy to find large groups of people to socialise with and amuse with your pronunciation of “water”)

So I decided to leap the faith an invite a friend over to have lunch with me since he lives in the same apartment area and doesn’t seem to hang around with a lot of other people. And if nothing else we could talk about how much we miss our respective boyfriend/girlfriend. Him being a neuroscience geek who is currently doing psychology as a stepping block to the neuroscience grail, and me taking my very first psychology subject and loving it we ended up talking about cool (and crazy) things that can happen when brains function differently. Or in other words, watching videos about Daniel Tammet and Kim Peek on youtube.

“If you could have a psychological special ‘power’ what would it be?” I ask him.

“Uh… I don’t know… What about you?”

I always forget that when I ask someone a question I might get asked back… I have to think for a while. “Oh I know! I would like to be able to tell how someone is feeling just by looking at their face and body language.”

He tells me about muscles in the human face that we can’t actually voluntarily control, but change depending on our emotions (such as “crinkle” muscles at the corners of the eye that only activate when someone is smiling because of genuinely happiness). And then he tells me about how there is a condition called prosopagnosia, which is the inability to recognise faces.

“Oh! I’ve met so many people recently, I’m struggling so much with all the faces and names. Of course I rely on people’s hair and what they wear to recognise them which is not the most reliable method since people like to change those…”

“Haha yeah when I said hi to you on the bus I could totally tell that you didn’t remember who I was from the international student orientation.”

“Yeah I have to meet someone at least a few times and have some conversations with them before I can really recognise them. And it throws me off to see them in a different context.”

“Whoa really?”

“Wait this doesn’t happen to you?”

“Haha, maybe you have mild prosopagnosia. Lots of people have skills or lack of skills that they think is normal until they can compare it to other people.”

And he tells me the story of how he discovered he had ADHD. A psychiatrist had just given him some medication to try. And he had taken it, but nothing was that different. A friend had called him and was talking to him about something he wasn’t that interested in so he flicked open a maths book he had spent two weeks reading up to page 7, and when he read it this time, it just made sense. He told his friend he would call him back. And managed to read up to page 29 before the day was over. “It was like putting on glasses for the first time” he told me.

After he goes, I can’t get the thing about facial recognition out of my mind. These are probably my foremost thoughts:

1. hey look I’m special!!
2. isn’t it normal not to recognise someone after only just meeting them once or twice? really?
3. what’s that long word again?

Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is an impairment in the recognition of faces. It is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments (place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, etc.) though sometimes it appears to be restricted to facial identity. Not surprisingly, prosopagnosia can create serious social problems. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves. They often use alternative routes to recognition, but these routes are not as effective as recognition via the face.

One of the telltale signs of prosopagnosia is great reliance on non-facial information such as hair, gait, clothing, voice, and other information. Prosopagnosics also sometimes have difficulty imagining the facial appearance of acquaintances. One of the most common complaints of prosopagnosics is that they have trouble following the plot of television shows and movies, because they cannot keep track of the identity of the characters.

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia often do not realize that they are unable to recognize faces as well as others. Of course, they have never recognized faces normally so their impairment is not apparent to them. It is also difficult for them to notice, because individuals with normal face recognition rarely discuss their reliance on faces. As a result, there are a number of individuals who have not recognized their prosopagnosia until well into adulthood. We have been contacted by far more developmental prosopagnosics than acquired prosopagnosics, and so it may be that this condition is more common than acquired prosopagnosia.

Totally feel you! (Really? This isn’t normal? Realllly?)

I find out that people with prosopagnosia often struggle with navigation. (Oh, that’s not me… oh wait… is that why I still don’t know the route to my high school even though i was driven along there a few times ever week for six years? And why I carry a map with me everywhere? oh… whoa! my mind is blown!) That there’s some correlation with left-right confusion (omg! totally me! I have to consciously think every time I need to decide on which one is left and which one is right.)

Wow… here is the power of science at work and it’s ability to come up with all these correlations between different skills. Like magic.

But take that world: I’m psychologically special =D (Though maybe you are too, you just haven’t realised that what you do is not what everyone else does. )

* here is the article I quoted from: https://www.faceblind.org/research/index.html