Post by RLDavies on Jul 24, 2024 15:11:37 GMT
Before the old forums fade into the sunset, I thought I'd do a quick copypasta of the thing I posted there years and years ago, with a few minor edits and bundling in some bits that were originally follow-up posts. Apologies for length.
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I was a Rhesus-incompatible fetus (that is, I'm Rh-positive and my mother was Rh-negative, so her immune system attacked me). This was back in 1961, when the only possible treatment was to induce premature birth as early as possible and "flush" my blood with total-volume transfusions as soon as I was born. A great many Rh-babies suffered very severe brain damage. I ended up with a ragbag of neurological anomalies, but was very lucky in that I can lead a normal life, or something that passes for normal, anyway. One of my neuro-oddities is prosopagnosia.
There seems to be a facial recognition circuit hard-wired into the human brain. If this circuit is damaged, the result is prosopagnosia or face-blindness, which is a difficulty (or in bad cases a complete inability) to recognise people by their facial features. People with the most severe forms are unable to identify the most basic aspects of facial identity, such as age or sex, or sometimes even to recognise a face as a face -- a jumble of random eyes, nose, and mouth is indistinguishable from a face with everything in the right place.
People who are born with prosopagnosia tend to have it less severely than people who develop it later in life as a result of brain injury or illness, who usually end up losing recognition ability completely, or even losing the entire concept of "faceness". Those who are born with prosopagnosia also have the advantage of working out coping mechanisms from childhood onwards.
People with normal facial recognition ability sometimes find it difficult to understand what prosopagnosia actually is, so I'll get a few common misconceptions out of the way. I can see your face; I am not blind or visually impaired (assuming I'm wearing my glasses). I know what a human face looks like and what features make it up. I can see if you have light or dark skin, long or short hair, etc. I can judge your general age, although I'm very poor at this. It's just that -- broadly speaking -- any one configuration of these features means no more or less than any other configuration.
This web page is the best description of prosopagnosia I've ever seen. It will help you get a sense of what it's like to live in my world. Go there now, and come back here when you're finished.
Prosopagnosia and Stones (archived)
Now, my own prosopagnosia is not total. I could recognise my husband, Colin, for instance -- although he said there were times when I "blanked" him. In my defence, those were times when I wasn't expecting to see him, e.g. when he came to meet my train as a surprise. I also experienced frequent "false recognitions" of other people as him. A false recognition can be caused by something as simple as someone wearing a similar jacket.
If you and I were to become colleagues and see each other every day at work, I would probably be able to recognise you on sight in this context after about one or two months. This is an average: some people I latch on to quickly, others I just never get with any degree of certainty. This has nothing to do with whether I like them, dislike them, etc. It just happens. The last time I worked in an office, there were two colleagues I could never tell apart -- they were identical twins as far as I was concerned -- even after several years.
As soon as someone has gone out of my life and is unlikely to return (say a colleague leaves for a job elsewhere), my ability to recognise them gets wiped very quickly. Apparently there are only so many "slots" available, and they're much too precious to waste on people I'll never see again. I reckon I have about fifty slots, but this might be an overestimate.
I've noticed that since I've become a freelance working from home, and no longer have to identify colleagues on sight, I am now able to recognise many more people on television. Being free to fill identification slots with celebrities such as actors is a great luxury to me, one I've never had before. It's an exciting new experience. Presumably if I return to a situation where I need to identify lots of people in my own life, the actor identifications will have to be erased in a hurry.
So how do I get by? If there's someone I need to keep track of for just a few hours or a day, I try to remember their clothing. This usually works well enough, but can fail, especially when uniforms are involved. In the longer term -- even for people I can recognise by sight -- voice and body posture/movement are much more reliable clues to identity. The way someone tilts their head or makes a gesture with an arm can cause instant recognition, I suppose in the same sort of "flash" most people have when seeing a face.
The biggest problem I have in day-to-day life is watching TV shows and movies with lots of characters. They have the annoying habit of changing clothes, for a start! I've developed very sensitive dramatic antennae -- "this person who's burst in shouting and threatening must be the nephew, because that's the only way it makes sense as a story". (It's too bad judging by storyline logic doesn't work in real life.) Some programmes are just too much to cope with, and I give up. Midsomer Murders, for instance -- interesting stories, but at least twice as many characters as I can handle.
It seems that everybody who grows up face-blind cobbles together their own system. Voice is the most common fallback because it's so personally distinctive. One fellow on the internet, who has almost total prosopagnosia and is also hard of hearing, learned in school to identify his classmates by their jeans -- each child tends to wear the same brand of jeans consistently, and the stitching patterns were more obvious to him than the owners' faces. His problem got much worse in adult life when he could no longer rely on jeans and had lost the mental plasticity of childhood to fix on some other point of identification.
What makes it a problem in real life happens when someone gets the idea that you ought to recognise them simply because you've met them before, maybe many times. This is why (like most in my situation) I have the basic strategy of being vaguely pleasant to everybody, just in case. Nod, smile, be noncommittal, and feverishly examine every comment the other person makes for clues to who they might be.
Simply making an effort to remember doesn't work. There's no available "hook" for me to hang a memory on. (This is one way of distinguishing prosopagnosia from just a bad memory for names.) If you say, for instance, "remember that so-and-so has a large nose", this means their nose is larger than the nose of some Platonic ideal average facial image. I don't really have a concept of this ideal image, or rather I can't perceive any difference between any individual face and the average, even if I'm looking straight at the face. For a face to look noticeably different from the Platonic ideal in my view, it would have to be distorted away from the average to a point that most people would call disfigured.
For this reason, I have no concept of attractiveness, except for the very basic idea of disfigurement or disease. All normal faces are identically attractive. In fact, I may have less than normal "revulsion" response to misshapen faces. As long as the face isn't actively diseased-looking (raw flesh, lesions, etc.), simple changes of shape just don't register very much.
I find it easy to identify cartoon characters, and for the same reason -- they're exaggerated and distorted. Cartoon characters differ from each other much more than real people do. If we all looked like cartoons, I'd be happy! Caricatures of real people (as in political cartoons) are another matter, and I can't usually identify them unless I've seen one artist's version of the person so often that I can recognise the drawn character.
Colin knew I had problems with faces, but he only realised the extent of it when he found me pondering over a magazine ad for, if I recall, Gordon's gin. They ran a short series of ads that (according to Colin) featured a photo of a famous classic film star in the top half of the page, and a close mock-up of a lookalike model dressed and posed similarly in the bottom half. The idea of the ad was along the lines of "there's only one original". I actually thought it was a find-the-differences puzzle, and spent 15 minutes picking out tiny details without ever noticing they were two entirely different photos of two entirely different people.
For this same reason, I can't match a person to a photograph. Or at least, not unless they're wearing the same clothes, and that's cheating! I've never failed to identify myself in a mirror, and I don't think I've ever failed to identify myself in a photo, but I've heard this can happen, especially to people who have developed prosopagnosia later in life. They tend to have it much worse, and compensate far less well. Anyway, when I look into a mirror I expect to see myself, and I've never seen a photo of myself that I didn't know about already.
-----
I was a Rhesus-incompatible fetus (that is, I'm Rh-positive and my mother was Rh-negative, so her immune system attacked me). This was back in 1961, when the only possible treatment was to induce premature birth as early as possible and "flush" my blood with total-volume transfusions as soon as I was born. A great many Rh-babies suffered very severe brain damage. I ended up with a ragbag of neurological anomalies, but was very lucky in that I can lead a normal life, or something that passes for normal, anyway. One of my neuro-oddities is prosopagnosia.
There seems to be a facial recognition circuit hard-wired into the human brain. If this circuit is damaged, the result is prosopagnosia or face-blindness, which is a difficulty (or in bad cases a complete inability) to recognise people by their facial features. People with the most severe forms are unable to identify the most basic aspects of facial identity, such as age or sex, or sometimes even to recognise a face as a face -- a jumble of random eyes, nose, and mouth is indistinguishable from a face with everything in the right place.
People who are born with prosopagnosia tend to have it less severely than people who develop it later in life as a result of brain injury or illness, who usually end up losing recognition ability completely, or even losing the entire concept of "faceness". Those who are born with prosopagnosia also have the advantage of working out coping mechanisms from childhood onwards.
People with normal facial recognition ability sometimes find it difficult to understand what prosopagnosia actually is, so I'll get a few common misconceptions out of the way. I can see your face; I am not blind or visually impaired (assuming I'm wearing my glasses). I know what a human face looks like and what features make it up. I can see if you have light or dark skin, long or short hair, etc. I can judge your general age, although I'm very poor at this. It's just that -- broadly speaking -- any one configuration of these features means no more or less than any other configuration.
This web page is the best description of prosopagnosia I've ever seen. It will help you get a sense of what it's like to live in my world. Go there now, and come back here when you're finished.
Prosopagnosia and Stones (archived)
Now, my own prosopagnosia is not total. I could recognise my husband, Colin, for instance -- although he said there were times when I "blanked" him. In my defence, those were times when I wasn't expecting to see him, e.g. when he came to meet my train as a surprise. I also experienced frequent "false recognitions" of other people as him. A false recognition can be caused by something as simple as someone wearing a similar jacket.
If you and I were to become colleagues and see each other every day at work, I would probably be able to recognise you on sight in this context after about one or two months. This is an average: some people I latch on to quickly, others I just never get with any degree of certainty. This has nothing to do with whether I like them, dislike them, etc. It just happens. The last time I worked in an office, there were two colleagues I could never tell apart -- they were identical twins as far as I was concerned -- even after several years.
As soon as someone has gone out of my life and is unlikely to return (say a colleague leaves for a job elsewhere), my ability to recognise them gets wiped very quickly. Apparently there are only so many "slots" available, and they're much too precious to waste on people I'll never see again. I reckon I have about fifty slots, but this might be an overestimate.
I've noticed that since I've become a freelance working from home, and no longer have to identify colleagues on sight, I am now able to recognise many more people on television. Being free to fill identification slots with celebrities such as actors is a great luxury to me, one I've never had before. It's an exciting new experience. Presumably if I return to a situation where I need to identify lots of people in my own life, the actor identifications will have to be erased in a hurry.
So how do I get by? If there's someone I need to keep track of for just a few hours or a day, I try to remember their clothing. This usually works well enough, but can fail, especially when uniforms are involved. In the longer term -- even for people I can recognise by sight -- voice and body posture/movement are much more reliable clues to identity. The way someone tilts their head or makes a gesture with an arm can cause instant recognition, I suppose in the same sort of "flash" most people have when seeing a face.
The biggest problem I have in day-to-day life is watching TV shows and movies with lots of characters. They have the annoying habit of changing clothes, for a start! I've developed very sensitive dramatic antennae -- "this person who's burst in shouting and threatening must be the nephew, because that's the only way it makes sense as a story". (It's too bad judging by storyline logic doesn't work in real life.) Some programmes are just too much to cope with, and I give up. Midsomer Murders, for instance -- interesting stories, but at least twice as many characters as I can handle.
It seems that everybody who grows up face-blind cobbles together their own system. Voice is the most common fallback because it's so personally distinctive. One fellow on the internet, who has almost total prosopagnosia and is also hard of hearing, learned in school to identify his classmates by their jeans -- each child tends to wear the same brand of jeans consistently, and the stitching patterns were more obvious to him than the owners' faces. His problem got much worse in adult life when he could no longer rely on jeans and had lost the mental plasticity of childhood to fix on some other point of identification.
What makes it a problem in real life happens when someone gets the idea that you ought to recognise them simply because you've met them before, maybe many times. This is why (like most in my situation) I have the basic strategy of being vaguely pleasant to everybody, just in case. Nod, smile, be noncommittal, and feverishly examine every comment the other person makes for clues to who they might be.
Simply making an effort to remember doesn't work. There's no available "hook" for me to hang a memory on. (This is one way of distinguishing prosopagnosia from just a bad memory for names.) If you say, for instance, "remember that so-and-so has a large nose", this means their nose is larger than the nose of some Platonic ideal average facial image. I don't really have a concept of this ideal image, or rather I can't perceive any difference between any individual face and the average, even if I'm looking straight at the face. For a face to look noticeably different from the Platonic ideal in my view, it would have to be distorted away from the average to a point that most people would call disfigured.
For this reason, I have no concept of attractiveness, except for the very basic idea of disfigurement or disease. All normal faces are identically attractive. In fact, I may have less than normal "revulsion" response to misshapen faces. As long as the face isn't actively diseased-looking (raw flesh, lesions, etc.), simple changes of shape just don't register very much.
I find it easy to identify cartoon characters, and for the same reason -- they're exaggerated and distorted. Cartoon characters differ from each other much more than real people do. If we all looked like cartoons, I'd be happy! Caricatures of real people (as in political cartoons) are another matter, and I can't usually identify them unless I've seen one artist's version of the person so often that I can recognise the drawn character.
Colin knew I had problems with faces, but he only realised the extent of it when he found me pondering over a magazine ad for, if I recall, Gordon's gin. They ran a short series of ads that (according to Colin) featured a photo of a famous classic film star in the top half of the page, and a close mock-up of a lookalike model dressed and posed similarly in the bottom half. The idea of the ad was along the lines of "there's only one original". I actually thought it was a find-the-differences puzzle, and spent 15 minutes picking out tiny details without ever noticing they were two entirely different photos of two entirely different people.
For this same reason, I can't match a person to a photograph. Or at least, not unless they're wearing the same clothes, and that's cheating! I've never failed to identify myself in a mirror, and I don't think I've ever failed to identify myself in a photo, but I've heard this can happen, especially to people who have developed prosopagnosia later in life. They tend to have it much worse, and compensate far less well. Anyway, when I look into a mirror I expect to see myself, and I've never seen a photo of myself that I didn't know about already.
