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Are you faceblind?
Yes 62%  62%  [ 47 ]
No 38%  38%  [ 29 ]
Total votes : 76

whiterat
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27 Oct 2011, 4:57 am

ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
I was face blind as a child whenever my parents took me to movies. I would get the characters mixed up a lot.


Same here. In a costume drama I am currently following, I just realised I mixed up two male characters, one from the good side and one from the villians' camp.

In costume dramas, I find it slightly easier to distinguish the ladies, because their clothes are more colourful, and each character has a distinctive style of dressing.



wavefreak58
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27 Oct 2011, 6:15 am

Mildly. Seems context sensitive. I won't recognize people I know when I meet them outside the normal context of our interactions. Like not recognizing someone I work with daily when I run into them at Walmart.


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ediself
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27 Oct 2011, 9:09 am

Yes, and it bugs me. Just yesterday I saw this woman passing me by in a car. She waved slightly. Now, I recognise her face, I know that I know her, I know that she has a high pitched voice that is a bit childish and slightly annoying, and somehow I think there's a relationship between her and my children's school. I see her a few times a week. I have talked to her before, more than once. If I could only remember what conversations she held with me in her annoying voice, a sentence, something, I'm sure I could remember where I know her from but.....
Argh this is irritating.



itsnot42itsas
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27 Oct 2011, 9:38 am

Yes and no (!).

Of course I know my family, though, if, say, I'm meeting them somewhere I have to look and ask myself if this is the person walking towards me.

I can pick up detail that others completely miss, though. My father-in-law has a cousin who is a near-clone of father-in-law's own mother (long dead). The same eyes, the same mouth, the same mannerisms. I've mentioned it to him and he doesn't see any of it.

I have a niece who married a man who, shall we say, wouldn't attract many girls at first sight. More than one person has been heard to say, what does she see in him. Yet, their lips are interchangeable, I mean, she must look at him and see her own lips smiling back at her. No-one else can see it but it's obvious to me.



chssmstrjk
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27 Oct 2011, 9:16 pm

I am definitely not faceblind. I am usually pretty good at associating people's faces with their actual names once I know them well enough and have seen them enough times.



SammichEater
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27 Oct 2011, 9:21 pm

Anything that's more than 60cm away looks like someone applied the Photoshop blur filter to it. In that respect, of course I'm faceblind. :P


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invisiblespectrum
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28 Oct 2011, 1:07 am

I wouldn't call myself face-blind, but sort of... Face-recognition-challenged? I can recognize faces. I am much worse than average at it but not totally incapable.



skenasis
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28 Oct 2011, 2:35 am

Yep. When me and my boyfriend had been going out for about six months, he dropped into my work without warning. He had to tell me who he was before I could actually recognize him. You'd think I'd be able to recognize my own boyfriend after six months, but nope.



johnsmcjohn
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28 Oct 2011, 3:37 am

When I was younger, I was very close to being faceblind. It would take me dozens of meetings until I recognized someone. Then I started one of the most important jobs I ever had. I worked in(and later ran) a poker room for close to 3 years and one of the most important things about working in a situation like that is recognizing people and being friendly to them. It was very difficult at first, but toward the end I could instantly recognize more than 500 players by name and tip propensity. I think it's a great skill to have if you can put the time into honing it. Of course not everyone has 14 hours a day 5 days a week for 3 years to do it.


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LunaUlysses
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28 Oct 2011, 6:13 am

I"m not too good with faces. It takes me seeing a few times before I realize who they are. Sometimes, I think I recognize them by what they wear, their looks as well.
I had a job where I worked nights, and there was a new employee I'd met once. The next 3 nights, this girl came in with her sister to get stuff, and she looked familiar, but I couldn't figure it out. Finally I asked her outright "You're the new employee, right?"
One way I've taught myself to recognize people a little bit better is I'll associate their looks and their demeanor to someone I know and recognize very well.
One of the therapists I've gone to, the only reason I remembered him is because he looked and acted similar to my brother-in-law.
I saw a psychiatrist one day, and then my case manager the same day, and a week later I went back to the office, and saw one of them, and I couldn't remember for the life of me which one that person was. I'm so embarrassed about it, that I do things to figure out who they are by commenting about something I knew I talked about with one of the people, and if they comment/remember it, I know I got them right. After a good couple times, I can start to remember their faces, but then if I don't see them for a good week or something, I'll go back to being unsure who they are again.



Dae
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28 Oct 2011, 5:57 pm

Yes, I experience faceblindness. When I was younger, I hadn't even realized what it was, that I 'had it', or that there was a name for it...that it was/is a 'condition'. I went a long time thinking everybody else saw (or, maybe more accurately, DIDN'T SEE) the same way I did/do. Back then, I instinctively used context and people's habitual ways of doing things to hasten a recognition of them. Now that I know faceblindness isn't a 'norm' and that others often 'punish' those who fail to recognize them (and quickly), I've gotten a bit more proactive...have taken the previously instinctual behavior and have turned it into a more 'fine-tuned' identifying 'mechanism'. Determining (more formally) what does and doesn't work for ME in recognizing others has been crucial for self-preservation in general. It's also helped me tremendously in shifting focus (and verbal accusations such as 'you're not paying attention' or 'you've got a bad attitude') away from what I 'DON'T' see, to better underscore what I DO see and what I am aware of -- which, in turn, takes away (some of) the irony of Aspies being 'praised' for noticing details while (often simultaneously) being criticized for being 'inattentive'. ....Incidentally, I've found that 'level' of recognition success/'failure' has NOT been affected by whether or not I've made eye contact, studied/scrutinized an individual's face, or if a trauma's involved during interaction (i.e. witnessing a robbery). The soonest I've ever been able to 'overcome' the 'blindness' is after having met/interacted with someone a minumum of 6 times (without a cap, a significant change in hairstyle, etc.) - though it often takes longer/more times than that, or having been able to 'study' a photograph for some weeks before meeting someone in person (again, without significant changes from appearance in photograph), or, as mentioned by another post-er, meeting/interacting with someone who strongly resembles somebody from my past (which brings along the necessary task of matching appearance to new/different mental 'records').


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Eloa
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28 Oct 2011, 6:57 pm

Yes, I have it in a way. Not with people I know very well like family etc. but with other people. It's like I visit a place a lot and see someone there and being there I know he's the light-technician for example. Then it happens , that I am outside somewhere else and someone is waving to me and I have no idea who it possibly might be - then my husband says: "It's ..." - the light-technician I know for a couple years. But seeing him in another "enviromental context" doesn't give any signal of recognition to my brain.
Sometimes I feel very ashamed of it.



LadySera
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30 Oct 2011, 11:01 pm

I don't normally recognize people out of context off the bat either. I also don't remember names easily. My brain actually seems to assign some order of importance to people too. Almost like my brain can't be bothered to try to remember every person so if I don't think they are going to be important in the future my brain doesn't really try to remember them.

Back when I used to go to house parties it was common for new people to float in & out and want to talk to you for at least 10 minutes at a time. They would often say something like "see you soon". I quickly realized that I would not remember them the next time. Sometimes I would try to warn people by saying "I'm not going to remember you until I meet you at least 3 times", they would assume I was being ditsy, laugh and repeat their name again, like that would help (it wouldn't).

I recently met a seemingly nice person who repeated his name for me at my request. The next day I went to look at the note he had given me & his name was completely different than what I had thought it was.

I've had some cashier jobs and remarked to coworkers "I don't know how you remember all of these people" when they greeted customers by name. They said "oh, you will too after a while because they always come in" but I just thought to myself, no, I won't.

When I was younger I would get offended that my dad didn't introduce me to someone when we ran into them (I assumed he was ashamed of my lack of success) but he said that he just didn't remember their names.