Prosopagnosia (face blindness)

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Hi, sorry if there's already been a thread about this, but I'm new here. All my life I have often had trouble recognizing people's faces. Sometimes I'll see someone I've known for years and not even recognize them. There have been many cases in which people have thought I was being snobby and ignoring them. I've lost friends because of this.

I've been diagnosed for OCD and mood disorder for years, but have only recently been properly diagnosed for Asperger syndrome (I live in a very backwater area where most people who work in mental health are unprofessional; I actually discovered myself that I seemed to have it, and after discussing this with my therapist and psychiatrist it was determined that I met the criteria). I eventually read about prosopagnosia, and learned that some aspies are affected by it. I was glad to finally know what the name for it is, and to have more understanding of it. I was wondering if anyone else here has this.

I don't know how you'd know unless you tested for it. My lack of ability to recognize people or faces could be attributed to the mere fact that I don't really <i>look</i> at faces or people directly to begin with, so I'm left with height, weight, hair color and style.

No, I don't have it*

*However, some people's faces I just have more difficulty remembering than others. An odd anomaly was one of my old next door neighbors.

I don't know why but for some reason I just literally could not remember him. Every time he would come to the door, I'd think "Who the hell are you?" and every time my mom talked to him in public, I'd ask "Who was that?" afterwards.

This is where I'm at. Add in the way they move since some people move in very noticeably different ways. And other semi-permanent fixtures, like I know all the people on campus with guide dogs because I can recognize them by their dogs. And add in voice because I recognize many people by their voice it it's a distinctive one.

An example: I was watching an older (from the 1980s) television show with someone and a character pronounced one particular syllable in a way that caught my attention.

"That's Brent Spiner!" I declared. "You know, Data from Star Trek!"

The person I was watching with looked more intently at the screen. "Are you sure? How can you tell? I don't see it."

"No, I don't see it, either, but I hear it."

"I don't hear it, either."

"Well, it's not there now, but he pronounced one syllable (I forget now what syllable it was, but it was unmistakeably Brent Spiner) like Data. I know it's him!"

When the credits rolled at the end, there his name was. It was, indeed, a young Brent Spiner and I had identified him by his voice when he was unrecognizeable to anyone in the room any other way. I've caught Brent Spiner in other things when no one else recognized him the same way. He has particular vocal sounds that are just his. Sometimes I can recognize Harrison Ford by his voice, too, but more often he confuses me and I have no idea who he is when everyone else in the room *does* know it's Harrison Ford.

But as you said, I don't know if I'm truly prosopagnosic or if it's a combination of having poor vision and no glasses for many years and not really looking people in the face very much. I'm more comfortable looking at the faces of actors in movies and on television (they aren't looking back at me) and I still have problems with identifying many of them, especially if they grow a beard or dye their hair so there may well be some prospagnosia mixed in there.

A years or so ago, my mother e-mailed me a group photo of everyone who went to a family reunion and I had to ask her which one was her. But that might not count because it was a family reunion so everybody strongly resembled each other anyway.

I did get excused from serving on Grand Jury because I have difficulty recognizing people. I was asked if there were any medical reason I shouldn't serve and I said that I wanted very much to serve and was eager to serve but should disclose that I have difficulty recognizing faces and interpreting facial expressions and tones of voice. They decided to send me home. I was kind of disappointed because I really wanted to serve on Grand Jury but I felt it wouldn't be ethical not to disclose the difficulties I have. After all, what if I were shown some closed camera footage of someone and asked to decide if it were the same person as the defendant? I would have very little confidence that I could accurately discern.

I had a professor who sent around a seating chart and a baggie with all our student photos cut out into squares and asked us to write our name and tape our photo in the square on the seating chart where we were sitting so he could learn us (a class of about 100 students, maybe more) and I had to pull out my student I.D. and sift through the photos, comparing them to my student I.D., to decide which one was mine. Given that, I suppose I don't really have any business trying to decide if someone on a bad camera from a convenient store or bank is the same person as the one sitting in front of me!

I just hope I never have to pick someone out of a line-up.

Hi Xeno, welcome to WP!

As are many others here, I am prosopagnisic, consistently scoring in the 40s on the Cambridge test. I have difficulty recognising even people I deal with regularly outside of the limited everyday environment. When meeting a familiar person in a crowded venue, I need to carefully consider whether a particular person actually is the person I am trying to meet. Invariably they recognise me first, ending my uncertainty.

My visual agnosia extends beyond faces. I have difficulty finding familiar objects in a visually "busy" place. If something I use regularly is not in the exact position I expect to find it, I can easily be looking right at it and not identify it from among other items. Some days I cannot even discern one familiar type of animal from another - half of the "clues" might say "cat" and the other half "dog". Of course that is usually the point where some two-year-old comes along, confidently and accurately identifying the mystery beast.

I have this problem all the time in the grocery store because they're always making little changes in where things are. My partner used to get impatient because it takes me so long to shop, but even when things haven't moved it takes me a long time. Soup is one of the worst - all the labels look the same and I can't just scan across them to find the one I'm looking for. I have to look at every can on the shelf until I find one that says the right thing. It would be much easier if they'd at least put them in alphabetical order.

Supermarkets are notorious for deliberately making changes where things are so that people go to the familiar location, see something different, and are forced to scan through numerous other items to find what they came for. They know that in general the longer someone is in their store the more they buy, so they engage in all manner of trickery to lengthen your stay. This is particularly annoying to our segment of the population, for which it requires immense effort just to navigate the dizzying combination of blinding, flickering flourescent lights, crowds moving in random directions, frequent interruptions for announcements which are inaudible against the background noise, and tens of thousands of sometimes subtly different items intentionally packaged to confuse the unwary shopper into buying the wrong thing.

And then on top of that, manufacturers are always changing their packaging. For years, I found the sinus medication that worked best for me by looking for the box with three big arrows, one red, one orange, one yellow. I didn't go by the name because I can't remember it when they all have the same name pretty much: Sin-a-rest, Sin-u-halt, Sin-u-tab, etc. The names mean nothing to me because they're all too similar but the three bright arrows meant plenty to me.

Then one day my manufacturer changed the box and my three big arrows were gone and I didn't know the name and my favorite product was lost forever.

i have mild prosopagnosia it was determined (and i agree).

if someone has a particular generic appearance, then i find it difficult to discern them from others with that same generic appearance.

i often confuse people with similar teeth structures with each other (if they have the same general hair style and skin color).

i can not tell asian people apart if they are the same height and weight as each other. this was a problem recently at work where i was in a meeting with my bosses and 3 asian clients (men) who introduced themselves to me. later i was given a file to give to a man called "heng"(?) and i had no idea which one to give it to as they all looked the same to me.

if i look at each of them one after another, then i can see a difference in their faces, but if i was blindfolded and they switched places and then the blindfold was removed, i would not be able to tell who was who once again.

even if i know someone well, when they depart from my visual field and i try to imagine their faces, i can not do so well. if i try, i get fleeting familiar recognizable images in my mind, but if i try to hold those images for any duration, then they distort and dissolve into faces that are not like the real ones of the people i am trying to visualize.

I never knew that!! ! So far Wal-Mart actually seems pretty good about not doing it too much, but that certainly explains what they do in some parts of the store. Now I don't feel so nuts anymore.

I don't recognise faces - not even faces of family members. I recognise people by the shape of their body and their gait and their hair and by process of elimination. I've never been diagnosed for prosopagnosia, because I can't see that a diagnosis would help in any way, other than confirm what I already know. I generally explain to people that I have difficulty recognising faces, so that they don't get offended if I walk past them without acknowledging them.

As an odd aside, I draw portraits and can get a good likeness - but when I'm drawing, I'm not seeing the face as a whole. I just see all the details, as shapes and angles and ratios. I think this is why I find it so hard to recognise faces, because people constantly change their facial expression, and different facial expressions change all the shapes, angles and ratios of the face.

I never dream people or faces. I do dream about people I know sometimes, but they are an elephant, a floor lamp, etc. The most human form was when I dreamed my daughter was a department store mannequin but she was more like one of those wooden artist's models with all the joints and no face, except department store mannequin sized.

I used to draw Brooke Shields over and over and over and over and over, getting EITHER her eyes exactly right, OR her lips OR her jaw, but never more than one thing. It's as if once I see a figure that I recognize as a face, I can put only one feature into it, and that's all I see. I've done other portraits of people where one feature was exactly right, and everything else was generic.

I knew something was amiss when I was away from home at age 16 and realized that I didn't know what my mother looked like.

When I used to draw (stopped around age thirteen or so) I would always draw people from behind, facing away from the viewer. I never liked to draw faces but sometimes I'd draw eyes over and over, always as viewed from the side, not straight on.

That's funny.... I have a photo album of pictures I took as a child and of the ones I took of people (most were animals or objects that caught my attention) there were a lot of shots of peoples' backs. Ridiculous, to my adult eye. And other shots of people had them in the distance, so they were dots in a landscape. Lots of shots of "things". These days, I consider people in a picture to be litter in a beautiful landscape, but on occasion I do like to see photos of people, if the focus is on the person, with no beautiful scenery to be interrupted.

My brother took me on a trip to see the meerkats at a zoo that was in another state. We went into a restroom and I was so embarased because I had to memorise what he was wearing in order to find him. I told my mum about it and she didn't believe me because I should be able to reconise my own brother. Well, I have to remember what she is wearing in order to reconise her. My other brother got to work in the pit crew for the race car of his company as a reward for being such a good employee. When they showed a closeup of the pit team on TV, I was not able to reconise him either. I could never understand why certian zoologists put marks on meerkats they are studdying "in order to tell them apart" when the diffrences beteen Bubbles and Scribble are as clear as day and yet I can't reconise my own family members.