Anyone else suffer from Face Blindness?

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i often dont recognise people by their faces. i recognise people by their hair and body shape mainly not the facial featurs. if somebody asked me right now to draw a picture of my mom (who i last saw yesterday) i would get her hair right and draw her with earrings on and perhaps be able to draw the lines around her mouth but apar from that i wouldent have a clue cos the the restof her face is a blur in my mind now

but if somebody asked me to draw the new jersey state flag now id be able to as i saw a pic of it about 3 days ago and i remember the coat of armswell that appears on it

It's weird - I have visual hyperacuity but also have face blindness. I can't even look at myself in the mirror because I look different every time and it freaks me out. I didn't recognize my mother once when I was about 8, and had a panic attack because she curled her hair.

I have prosopagnosia also. It is not too much of a big deal to me, I am just mainly worried about approching people in case I mistake them for someone else. I hardly ever use peoples names also, just in case I mess up

I can reconize people by their faces.

It's facial expressions I have trouble with.


-SpaceCase

Heck yes!

I can't recognize anyone. But I learned about this problem very early and have since been a serious student of voice recognition, kinesiology (body language), dialect, habits, and idiom. I even took courses on practical diplomacy but I still have major problems. Ask my Dad. Or my fiancee. I have failed to recognize both of them when I saw them in unusal circumstances. I actually recognize my family and friends and even my lover more by voice, vocal tone, vocal idiom, body language and mannerisms, or favorite items of clothing, favorite foods, and habits.

And in movies, I have the same problem - if a plot twist hinges on recognizing someone's face, I will miss it completely. I recognize even celebrities by their voices and core body language - and yes, even actors have traits they cannot change, look up kinesiology for more info on that if you want. So I won't realize that the 30 pictures are all of, say, Brittany Spears if her color, length or presence change from image to image.

I require motion, speech, or tonal quality in real life and I'm a professional and published writer of fantasy and dark horror stories...and although many of my tales have been published and my characters are frequently described as vivid, I usually have NO IDEA what they look like myself. I usually can perfectly grasp their clothing styles, personal tastes, habits, and even verbal dialects but they are physically formless to me even as I create them.

No face, no height, weight, or physical descriptions at all - unless they have horns, or tentacles or twelve eyes and that has something to do with the plot of the story. To me they are more "flavored". If I describe someone as Goth - and mention some of the Goth tastes or dialects or reading habits, that is frequently enough. my tales tend to have characters described by their dialects, favotire hand gestures, or personal tastes. A smoking southern judge who rubs his hand through his hair, for example - but if you asked me for more, face, eye color, mustache, levels of obesity - well, even as I create Judge Harvard Lavender of Caldia, Louisiana, - his favorite tobacco is Cherry blunts, he dtrinks Southern Comfort, he likes Meryl Haggard, and drives a Chevrolet. He has a wife and ten kids, four of them girls. And a cat, which "h'aint traditonal, I know, but hounds jus' stank" - I could not tell you. I have no idea what he sees in the mirror.

I have also had readers and editors congratulate me on my ability to capture the person without getting bogged down in physical - 5 foot 2, eyes of blue - descriptions or adjectives. What they don't seem to realize is that this has nothing to do with a refinement of prose or a writing style but rather my personal scotomas as far as faces and so on are concerned.

And I'd love to hear from any other writers pro, amatuer, or dabbler about how this works for them as well. (No ego tripping here - to the tale, y'all, not he who tells it - I don't care if you're Stephen King or Joe Blow fr Kokomo - so I'll be hitting this post often and also welcome any private messages on the topic.

I'd love to hear about other face blindness coping tricks as well.

I recognize faces, but often can't place them to names. This doesn't happen with historical figures, but with people I've met... if I see someone I've known a while, in an unfamiliar setting, I may not recognize them. Like for instance, a friend of mine that I've known for a few months, that I always meet at this one club. I saw her at a different club quite by accident... and although I had a vague sense that she "looked familiar", I had no idea who she was. And forget even placing a name to her. I finally had to go up to her and ask her who she was, it was bugging me.