Face blindness and depersonalizing other people.

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I hope you are going to understand what I mean. I am afraid I can't explain it in a way that won't make me look like an feelingness robot. But I will try.

It is better now but I have always had a problem understanding other people, seeing them as individual persons.

For example a teacher was always just a teacher for me. The role, not the person. It was hard to me to recognize him/her out of the school, I didn't give a damn what is his name, if he/she has a family, if he she/likes coffee or tea. In fact as a child I couldn't even get that he/she might be doing anything when he/she is nowhere to be seen by me. If something happened out of my knowledge - it didn't happen.

Same with my classmates. I always had an ability of "out of sight - out of mind". As a young child I could just look away so I can't see other people and they were disappearing from my mind (as long as they were not too noisy). I remember doing it a lot during music class - I was staring at a point at the wall over my classmates heads and singing without any anxiety as if there was only teacher and me.
I can still do it.

I also don't care about knowing names of actors, authors etc. even if I really like something. All I care is the characters and story. I am oblivious there are real people behind those.

I know there are some differences between people - they are boys and girls, blondes, dark haired, white, black, yellow people. Some like sweets some don't, some are shy some not etc. but I don't care about the differences. All together they are all one specie. They got a body that is explained by medicine, they act specific ways within a huge but limited array of choices... Basically - they are swallow. And uninteresting to me because I simply don't care to figure out all the different but pointless specifies. They are just like computers with an complicated, blurry OS installed. I would rather stick to Windows.

However I still have empathy. I do get hurt when I see someone getting hurt even if I know nothing about them and don't care to know. If I see a child crying because she/he lost parents I will come and help him/her find them because I understand how a lost child must feel. I don't care about the specific child - it is just one of millions children on the earth. There is no point for me to junk my memory with it's name and history. But I want to help/him her because I feel how he/she must feel and I am unable to just stand and watch how a clueless child cries.

I like some people and care about them: my parents, my friends, people I was in love with. They are somehow individual beings to me. I care to remember their faces, names, likings and dislikings and I wonder where/how they are when they are gone. But I care the same way about my favorite stuffs/pets. I was crying "as if someone close to me died" when my computer broke, I say "Oh, you must be hungry." when my tablets battery is low, I play with my cat when it wants to play with me etc. The same mechanism makes me wonder if my mom is healthy, if my friend is not hungry and if my boyfriend feels he is getting enough attention from me. People seem just like advanced computers/animals to me...

I wonder if it is autism related, prosopagnosia(face blindness) related or both. Perhaps my face blindness makes my autistic traits worse?

Please vote.

Edit
If you got no disorder please choose the answer "I got some other disorder(please specify)" - the poll doesn't let me change possible answers anymore and I just figured out there might be someone normal browsing the forum too. Lets just assume "normality" is also a disorder.
ASD means anything in the autism spectrum.
"Only prosopagnosia" means prosopagnosia without ASD, can include some other disorders(but specify if its the case).

I would say that I don't depersonalize that much unless I hate the person. I usually care very much about others' personal lives.

I too, have prosopagnosia (face blindness) only I didn't know it for many decades past when it would have helped to know. I used to be very skeptical about "Milk Carton Kids" because I thought EVERYONE had this problem with remembering faces. Even folks I remember vividly from my past, I can't get their faces cause they sorta ran like watercolors especially when they scrunched them up, or broadened their faces and parted their lips to SHOW ME THEIR TEETH! Yikes, I always thought that they wanted to EAT ME up for a snack.

Adults would smile at me and I would cower, kids smiled and I ran to the furthermost point on the play ground to hope to hide until the bell rang and the kids stopped smiling because they had to go to class. As I grew up, I figured out they weren't going to eat me, cause it hadn't happened, and I didn't see other children gobbled up. However I always had that mistrust when someone smiled. I couldn't smile to show my teeth, and don't/can't to this day.

Needless to say, I couldn't identify a person's emotions from their body language or facial expression because I didn't know that they could DO that. I was always confused in movies, because so much was not in the dialogue. And I couldn't tell the hero from the villain (I use closed caption because sometimes it gives me the name of the one speaking and I get clues from that.) I remember romantic comedies were so confusing because the hero/heroine would just gaze into each other's faces and the next thing you know, their engaged/married/coupled. That never happened to me, cause I was oblivious to their unspoken language.

I think people without Asperger's (sorry, I am old fashioned and will go with my formal diagnosis) might have these difficulties, too, but perhaps they KNOW they have the issue.

Merle

Last edited by sinsboldly on 19 Jul 2014, 10:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I chose "yes and I got some other disorder" because I haven't been evaluated for ASD yet, and I'm afraid the doctor won't be able to recognize it in me anyways. I have a problem with face recognition, but it's not severe enough to be full-blown prosopagnosia.

I definitely relate to not wanting to clutter up my mind with useless personal details about other people, even though I care about people in terms of their welfare. When I read both fiction and non-ficton, I have a habit of skimming over the names of people so I can get to the plot or point of the article faster. It's like my mind is convinced that it's irrelevant and refuses to remember, so I have trouble with names even when I try to pay attention to them.

I don't have the issue with not seeing people as individuals like you mentioned, and I suspect that it's because of a coping strategy. I tend to zone out and then get out of step with others, and to keep from drawing attention to myself when I do something weird, I over-concentrate, which causes me to notice other people more. It's also a sensory thing ? the noise people make make is the noise that bothers me the most; in some sense, I can't help but notice them.

I was always confused when watching movies but not because of body language (well, this too, but not to this degree). I couldn't tell who is who. Two blond girls with long, straight hair? I'm done. "Why does she speak to this guy like she doesn't know him? Didn't they kiss each other in last scene?" <another blond girl enters the room> "Oh... I see now. So THIS must be the girl he kissed." And ever worse with guys. "Why does the main, his friend, the antagonist and the neighbor next door all look the same?"... "Oh, wait. The neighbor got a slight mustache and the main got a cowlick. Hmm... why is he angry by meetinging his friend? Oh, wait, it must be the enemy. Those two got nothing I can stick to..."

For characters just staring at each other and then getting engaged/married/coupled - I never seen anything like that. They were always nice or irritating to each other, talked a lot, kissed etc. before going to that stage. Sometimes I couldn't get why a girl fell in love with a guy that was keep bullying her but I was figuring out she must appreciate that he spends so much time with her despite her being angry with him. I was aware they are interacting, I was just missing the subtleties so I was giving myself some logical explanations that could make me less confused (I always knew people are wierd and unpredictable so any explaination worked) and be able to have fun. As long as I identified the characters correctly...

Btw.
I inherited the prosopagnosia from my mom (she is a NT, my ASD genes are from my dads family side) and while she got trouble recognizing faces like I do (but she hides it better by paying more attention to peoples clothes and hairstyles) she is very interested in people and she must know everything about anyone she meets. She knows more about my friends than I do. I spend a few hours with them, she talks with them for a few minutes and after they are gone she asks me:

- So, what do you think about Davids new school choice?
- What school choice? Doesn't he still study pharmacy?
- No, he dropped out 2 years ago...
- What!?!

I'm helpless.

Prosopagnosia drives me insane sometimes, especially when I'm in a new class with completely different people. Last time, it took me over a year to learn the names of my classmates in my form group (there was 29 of them) because I struggled to remember and recognise them, and sometimes confused their faces and names with someone else, which they found amusing but it wasn't very funny for me at the time. There were three of my classmates who I thought looked exactly the same, but over the year I began to tell them apart and spot the differences in their faces. They weren't even related. When I was getting assessed for ASD, I had to partake in a facial recognition test. It turns out that I'm in the 1% of the British population who scored the lowest.

When I watch TV shows, I do try to learn the characters' names and faces. Game of Thrones has been the hardest so far. I can't tell the difference between Rob Stark's and Theon Greyjoy's faces which my dad finds rather amusing. He has to tell me who is who and remind me who some characters are if I've forgotten the actors' faces completely. This is why I find manga and anime easier to read and watch because the characters' faces are usually more simplistic and easier to remember and recognise, and put names to their faces too. For this reason, I'll always prefer manga to English or American comics.

I find it difficult to understand a lot of face expressions to the point where some look hilarious to me so I laugh instead. My grandma has the greatest straight face of all time so whenever she tries to be serious and pulls it at me, I laugh hard to the point where she had her head in her hands and is hopeless. But I never laugh when my elder cousin does his straight face though because I know he's about to give me a bollocking when he does that. I don't know what a straight face means though.

I don't mind learning small personal details about someone's life but if it's too many, I feel that it may be too personal or too much to remember, or both. Then I don't know what to do or say.

It's strange. No one else in my family has ASD or prosopagnosia. My brother is the complete opposite and I suspect that he's a super recogniser because he can memorise faces and names of people so well, even in TV shows where he sees a minor actor for one episode, he'll be able to recognise them in another TV show. My dad is very supportive of my prosopagnosia and tries to help me whenever he can.

I love what I call "cartoons" because I can SEE the faces of drawn characters. I Mdon't know why, but they come through with emotion and funny and I think I also can recognize facial expressions and body language when it is drawn (not that I know what they MEAN, just that they are having facial/body expressions.