Prosopagnosia (face blindness)

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I always have to come up with coping techniques to cover for not being able to recognize people.

Once, right after my book was published, I went to the Book Expo because my publisher wanted me to sign copies there. I showed up at the hotel and had the desk page the publicity agent. He came out and made sure everything was okay and then said he was going to take a shower and I could, too, and then we'd meet back in the lobby and join the rest of the group for dinner.

So I went up and half-way through my shower, I realized that he probably wasn't going to be wearing the same dark purple suit he ha dbeen wearing when I met him and so there was going to be no way to recognize him because otherwise he was just "generic guy" -- average height, average build, no deformities, short hair of an average sandy brown in an average cut -- with nothing to distinguish him from anyone else.

I raced through my shower and getting dressed and ran down to the lobby and then sat in a prominent location where anyone coming off the elevators would see me immediately and then started reading a local paper and getting really absorbed in it (or at least pretending to, because I was too stressed to actually read it) and intentionally not looking up whenever the elevators opened so he would have to come up to me and get my attention away from the newspaper and then I would know who he was.

Just went to Wal-Mart today...and sure enough they'd done this to me. Now I know why and it won't be quite as disturbing anymore--annoying, but at least I won't think I'm nuts.

On-topic, I found a neat test online that tests how you are better at recognizing faces--in the whole, or in parts. The average population has an 8% advantage interpreting whole faces. I scored -2.8%, meaning I am better with just parts. Which squares with how I am when I am trying to remember a face--I lock onto certain features and over time build up the whole image. (Which is NOT something I can do on the fly, which meant that when I worked retail I would often see a customer going out and fail to recognize them when they came back in. I learned to deflect it with humor, but it was very embarrassing sometimes. People I see frequently--that sticks in my head, but people I briefly encounter? I am hopeless there.)

https://www.testmybrain.org/consent_all.php?exp=203

I'm terrible at faces. My husband is insanely good at recognizing people. We'll be watching TV and he'll recognize an actor that we've only seen in alien makeup before. I would be so useless if I witnessed a crime. I mainly go by hair cut and color. After college I worked in Japan as an assistant English teacher in a few different high schools. Which meant that everyone had the same hair color. And they wore uniforms. And there were only a couple of different hair styles that they were allowed to have. It was hard.

I don't know that I have face blindness, but I'm definitely below average.