I don't understand the concept of face blindness

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My son has it...a few anecdotes to maybe help you understand.

When he was younger, I had three friends who visited on a fairly regular basis. They all had long dark hair. 1 was Dominican, 1 was Ecuadorian, and one was Caucasian. Aside from their long dark hair, they did not look a like. One had a large nose and crooked teeth, one had a classically beautiful face and one was...well...a whole different race. My son could not tell them apart.

When he was in 3rd grade and his sister in kindergarten, I learned that they had a set of brothers in their classes. I asked my son if they looked alike and he said "Yes. They have the same backpack." When I said "No, I meant do their faces look alike?" He said he had no idea.

Once we were at a restaurant and I saw who I thought was one of my son's classmates. I asked him "is that Julia over there?" He paused, looked at her, and said "No. Julia does not wear earrings." They went to Catholic school and she could not wear earrings at school. He took a look at her hair and saw it was the same, but then noted that this person was wearing earrings and concluded it could not be Julia because Julia did not wear earrings.

He has always thought that "strangers" know his name in public places. They are not strangers. They are people he knows from school. He only knows the names of his very closest friends in school. Otherwise, it seems like he does not know anyone and does not care about other people. I think the truth is, he cannot tell one person from another. He notices people by odd things...hair, their backpack, etc, so if those things change, or when the context changes--out in the community vs school--he has a hard time knowing who they are. Since he was little, he also has been faulted for not greeting people he knows. Ummm...I think he would greet them just fine if he knew he knew them. Poor kid!

I think I have a mild version of this. Funny story...once I was at a fund raiser for my kids' school. This man came up to me and started talking to me...a lot. I actually thought he was hitting on me at one point. Eventually, he must have realized I had no idea who he was and so he purposefully mentioned his daughter's names and the bus stop. It was my neighbor...I saw him all the time--and talked to him regularly--as we waited for the bus to come! How embarrassing. It really helped me understand why my son gets some degree of social anxiety. It's embarrassing when you do not know who someone is, when you really know who they are.

Facial blindness? Wikipedia is yor friend:

Prosopagnosia /ˌprɒsəpæɡˈnoʊʒə/ (Greek: "prosopon" = "face", "agnosia" = "not knowing"), also called face blindness, is a cognitive disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired

As I said, "where the ability to recognize faces is impaired". That's what I've got!

It's not the inability to read facial expressions. Look up Prosopagnosia. and do a search of expression. There's no mention of "expression". It mentions nothing about reading expressions. That's more Social-Emotional Agnosia!

It's purely the inability to recognize faces when you see them in places you don't expect to see them in (as far as I know).

For example, if I know my mechanic and I see him all the time in the garage, I recognize him but if I bumped into him in a shopping centre, I won't recognize him (out of context)! You can't tell the difference between a familiar face and that of a stranger's.

Personally, I also have trouble telling if people are male or female in situations where it's obvious to everyone else what they are. It's screwed up! I don't know?

As I said before, if I see people I know well (like family) out of where I'm not used to seeing them, I won't see them. I had my ex-partner for many, many years (22 years) and I don't know how many times she used to complain about the fact that she could be right in front of me and I wouldn't recognize her. I just never saw her.

I have trouble picturing people's faces in my mind, but I usually can identify them when I see them. Once I recognized someone I hadn't seen in years, and it was weird, because if you asked me to picture what she looked like I wouldn't have had a clue.
A couple times, though, I've mistaken one person I know for another person I know. Thankfully, I didn't call them by the wrong name before I found out who they were.

To the OP:
Well, that's autism. For some, it's really bad. But for others it can be severe in one area yet completely unaffected in another. For the record I'm not face-blind, I've never struggled hugely with coordination, and for years now I've been fine with eye contact.

I have it to at least some degree, but it affects me mostly either when 1) I am surrounded by many people and sensory overload is a factor (this happens often at the end of the day at work, when everyone is in the same area getting ready to go home - the person I'm looking for could be right in front in of me, and I might think I don't see the person because the faces blur) or 2) when it is out of context, like some others have said - if I see a person I know from one aspect of my life pop up in another, I can't place them. Work people who aren't at work, school people who aren't at school, people I know from performance events outside of them - it scrambles my circuits somehow.