Prosopagnosia: how many of you have it?

Post Reply New Topic

I have this problem with people I've met only once or twice; I'll meet them some place unfamilliar and they'll start talking to me like we've seen each other somewhere before, something in me tells me I recognise them, but I have no idea who they are. I usually have to smile and nod and pretend I remember them until they go away. The most awkward time that happened was with my boss. Yep. I was working at a fast food place and on my first day one of my bosses (not the one who hired me) came in to show me the ropes. I didn't see her again for at least three weeks, then one day she showed up and said hi, and I couldn't remember who she was! I thought she was one of my old school counsellors! Fortunately I remembered pretty quick when she came behind the counter and started working!

About twenty years ago I was driving through a small town in Oklahoma that I had never been in before (or since) and stopped at a store for a Dr Pepper. As I was standing in line to pay, I looked at the back of the head of the person in front of me in line and suddenly realized it was a cousin of mine. I called his name and he turned around and sure enough, it was him.

Yesterday I was picking up my son and my friend's daughter from school. I stand on the far side of the road and watch the kids as they cross the playground. I've known my friend's daughter since she was born and can pick her out easily at a distance, then she crossed the road to me. As I greeted her, I looked at her face for the first time and had a fleeting panic of non recognition, before her recognition of me settled the matter. I would never mistake a voice, but faces are little more than a collection of eyes nose and mouth, pretty similar in most kids!

Similarly I have failed to pick out my son up close, for a few seconds only, but can spot his particular movements on a distant sports pitch easily.

I have it a little bit

Yeah I do have prosopagnosia. It will take me a few times of seeing someone to recognize them. Normally I will just recognize them in a specific context. If I see them out of that context, I have trouble recognizing them. I used to work at the supermarket and didnt recognize majority of the people I knew from the outside or often times I wasnt sure. I would only recognize a customer if I was used to seeing them in the store context.

It is my opinion that, while people with ASDs may have a lot of difficulty recognizing faces and such, very few have actual prosopagnosia. In true prosopagnosia, a person can never recognize faces, even after years of practice.

I don't think so.

My understanding is that that would be true only in the very worst of cases, usually acquired prosopagnosia that results from something like a stroke or a brain injury.

Cases of developmental prosopagnosia are typically less severe than those of acquired prosopagnosia.

It is thought that the right fusiform gyrus is the part of the brain involved in indentifying faces. Assuming that to be true, any defect in that part of the brain that leads to problems identifying faces would be prosopagnosia regardless of the cause.

"I am faceblind."

These are the words I wish I could say to my family whom I love very much.

I can't though, because I am a coward. Because I know that whenever I've tried to talk to them about it in the past, they say, "Oh, that's not a real thing." or "look! You can tell who I am right now. I don't think you have a problem."

My faceblindness comes and goes, but it is sometimes so severe that I can't tell family members or even my best friends apart from people I don't know. I remember being school-age and going to my dad's work place every day in the summer. I was always embarrassed when my uncles stood in the same room because I couldn't tell them apart except for where their desks were (even though one was ten years older than the other). I remember them all laughing at me in disbelief, with hurt feelings... So I tried to hide it from then on. The problem with faceblindness is that even if you try to hide it, people still get hurt. When my best friend in high school got her hair cut and colored the day before school started, I had no idea who she was. She began talking to me like she knew me and I was really confused until finally I recognized her voice... but by then the damage was done. The I-don't-know-you look I gave her had sunken in and she just turned and ran away before I could say anything. She never wanted to hang out with me again after that. I tried apologizing saying, "With your pretty new eyebrows and hair I just didn't recognize you at first," but I think she though I was making it up.

It is the most crippling thing I deal with, and I deal with it in silence... because people don't want to think about it, and also in part because I don't want them to see me as nothing more than my disability. I hate it.

There are other things that could keep you from being able to identify people by their faces that wouldn't be prosopagnosia. Blindness is the obvious one.

Another can occur if the connections between the two halves of the brain just aren't there or aren't there in sufficient numbers.

Think of the neural pathways involved. When you see something, the lens in your eyes focuses the right side of your visual field on the left side of your eyeball and the left side of your visual field on the right side of your eyeball. There is a bundle of axons from each eye that go to the visual cortex in the back of your brain, but they get there after passing through the optic chiasm.

Unless you are an albino or a Siamese cat, the axons don't just go straight through and continue to the visual cortex. Instead, the bundles split and regroup so that the axons from the left side of each eyeball carrying the right side of your field of view continue back to the visual cortex in the left side of the brain. In a similar manner, the axons from the right side of eyeball carrying the left side of your field of view continue back to the visual cortex in the right side of the brain.

The left fusiform gyrus is thought to be the part of the brain responsible for identifying objects in your field of view and the right fusiform gyrus is thought to be the part of the brain responsible for identifying faces. Their structure would be very similar to do these slightly different tasks.

If the connections between the two halves of the brain aren't there, then the left fusiform gyrus only receives its input from the left visual cortex and the right fusiform gyrus only receives its input from the right visual cortex.

This leads to a rather interesting phenomena -- a person can only name objects appearing in the right half of his field of vision. The right half of field of vision focuses on the left side of the eyeballs which end up at the left visual cortex and then from there to the left fusiform gyrus, but not the right fusiform gyrus.

Thus if they stand out in the street, they may be able to correctly identify the grocery store on the right side of the street but not the car dealership on the left side of the street. Take them a block past the grocery store and the car dealership and turn them around and they will be able to identify the car dealership now on the right side of their field of vision but not the grocery store now in their left field of vision.

I haven't seen it mentioned, but logically someone with this problem should be able to identify people to their left, but not their right. But I don't think that this would be considered to be prosopagnosia because it doesn't involve the facial recognition areas of the right fusiform gyrus.

I don't have any real trouble with recognising people by their faces now. I lacked the ability up until some time into kindergarten, I think mostly because I hadn't really needed to develop it before.

I do sometimes fail to recognise a person in the flesh whom I've only seen a photo of before. These photos tend to be ones NTs regard as unmistakable. I suppose it's a case of detail fixation or somesuch.

I usually recognise people I know well fine if I have a clear view of them but I can't visualise the faces of people I know at all; even my own mother and father. For people I know less well then it can be very difficult for me to recognise them unless they alert me to their presence or unless it is in a specific context where I always see them. In fact even if I see someone I know well like a family member "out of context" i.e. in a different place to usual then I might not recognise them. People have accused me of "blanking them" or being rude before because of it. I hadn't realised this was a "thing" and I always just thought of it as me being dim or something :/ So it's nice to know that other people experience it too.

I would be really hard pressed to describe someone to a sketch artist. About the best I could do would be to say "he reminds me of John Wayne". The problem is that I might not have the vaguest idea what about him reminds me of John Wayne. It might be merely because he was big and wore a cowboy hat.

Don't even bother creating a police lineup for me to identify someone.

I'm quite the opposite. I recognise faces easily, and can even recognise people I haven't seen in, say, 20 years. I'm also good at picking actors who I have seen in other movies/shows, and that sort of thing.

That ^ people in the wrong place are nearly as bad as those who dye their hair

I can't think of faces in my mind, they just aren't there except some pieces of face, if I try hard and am not too tired.

Strange thing is, if I see a photo of someone then I might well recognise them in another picture, (or on TV), but not in real life. I'm not as good as most people at photos though because I tried facebook, but then couldn't confirm my identity when asked to identify friends' faces!

I'd say, yes, I do have issues with prosopagnosia. It generally takes me a half a dozen meaningful exposures or so to the person to identify them successfully the next time, and until then it is pretty much based on general features. Person with glasses versus without glasses? Extremely different! Two people, both with a similar beard? Look pretty much the same for a while. I had a brief conversation with someone this afternoon in a school lab, who clearly recognized me enough to greet me and converse, but I still have no clue who it was. I love watching movies and watch lots of them (on dvd from the library), but still only would recognize less than half a dozen actors, and it's pretty much b/c they always look the same in their roles (like Robin Williams, Michael Caine (although I didn't remember his name without looking it up now), Angelina Jolie, and Will Smith). On the upside, actors generally always do a convincing role of looking like whoever they are supposed to be, because I don't recognize them as the original actor (which would spoil the mood, really) (but if there's a bunch of guys in something that all have the same generic facial/body type, it can be quite confusing). It's pretty much always been like this (a teacher in my high school about a month after I had started classes there called my Mom in once to a parent teacher conference to point out I didn't seem to be recognizing the names of the other students (it was only a month, and like 30 people!), so I guess that's just the way I am.

Anyway, I am posting tonight because I was watching Mr. Bean on a DVD, and this portion of the episode ("Mr. Bean goes to town") is where he has had his camera stolen and he has gone to the police station to pick out the criminal from a line-up of similar looking people. Clearly he can't figure out who the criminal was, until... he comes upon a creative solution... [sorry for the poor video quality and that this clip seems to be dubbed in a foreign language or something (but it doesn't really matter what they are saying), but this is the only clip that I see that has just the relevant section; to view the rest of this episode section, search in youtube search for "mr bean camera thief" (you're going to need to see the earlier part of the episode to see why this makes sense to him anyway)]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yURk3mzQAvI[/youtube]

This is what I meant. I feel that prosopagnosia acquired from traumatic brain injury is the actual phenomenon of prosopagnosia. I think the difficulty found in ASDs and other developmental disorders isn't severe enough to qualify as the full-blown condition. And the FFA isn't just for facial recognition. Yes, that is its primary function, but it is quite capable of learning how to differentiate objects in many types of categories. Even Greebles.