Face Blindness- if you
met a new person today, would you recognize that person if you ran into them
again in a different location after a week or two? I probably would not. In my
mind, all faces look alike. I have Prosopagnosia which is a neurological
disorder whereby I have difficult remembering faces and the names that go along
with them. People I meet are easily forgotten unless they have a specific
hairstyle of unusual facial feature such as a mole or odd beard.
Family members and those
who I have known for years are exempt. Once I know a person for a sustained period
of time, I can remember their face. New people, or someone I meet once or twice
are readily forgotten. I have had former coworkers and once fellow classmates
approach me calling me by name and I had no idea of who they were. Studies have
shown that prosopagnosia is common with Autistics. One study stated that
approximately 40% of people with Autism have prosopagnosia.
I can sometimes utilize hairstyles
like a signatures. If someone has a distinctive hairstyle, it will make it
easier for me to recall the person. Likewise, if an individual has a unique
birthmark, they are more likely to make a lasting impression in my Aspie brain.
I easily remember the woman with yellow eyes, the friend with a mole on her
chin, and the favorite friend with the small space between two teeth. The
difference, the physical anomaly can be quite small, as in the case of my
friend’s mole, but it draws my attention which helps me to create and store the
memory of who that person is.
I have embarrassed myself
on many occasions by approaching someone and talking to them as if they were
someone I knew. They all gave me the standard confused look before I realized
that they were not who I thought they were. I have learned to stop approaching
people and thinking that I know them. It was a degrading lesson to learn that I
had prosopagnosia.
Even now, living 2,000
miles away from my home state, an individual will walk by that reminds me of a
someone I knew in Michigan and, for a brief moment, I think it might be them. I
have to consciously tell myself that I’m not in Michigan anymore and the
stranger that just walked by was not who I thought. This subject seems more
complex than when I first started writing about it.
Suffice it to say, I have
difficulty recognizing people that I have had little interaction with, as well
as misidentifying strangers as people I know. People’s faces are neither
attractive nor unattractive, but rather bland canvases wherein only a few have
interesting and memorable features.
I think this concept of
all faces looking alike dawned on me when I was watching Lord of the Rings.
Throughout the movie series, I was unable to tell Merry from Pippin. Thus, even
though I loved the movies, I always felt some degree of confusion while
watching them. Television shows with an ensemble cast proved to be completely
unenjoyable. Unable to distinguish facial characteristics led me to identify
people based on hair color or facial hair. I did fine if the show had only one
female with long blonde hair, but if there were two, I was unable to tell them
apart. Likewise, for a dark-haired male with beard. If there was more than one
such male, I was lost. It isn’t fun to watch a show or movie in which you are
never sure who is who. Maybe this is one reason that my favorite movies seem to
be one central character based or with a small cast, think Castaway or
Passengers. Those films are free of confusion.
And heaven forbid if a friend or relative or coworker got a haircut or changed
hair color. One of the most dramatic memories that I have stems from the time
my therapist, whom I had been seeing weekly for over two years, changed her
hair color and style overnight. I remember walking into her office and part of
me kept thinking I was in the wrong place. Surely, this was not my therapist
even though the office was the same and she was wearing clothing I had seen my
therapist wear. In my heart, I felt that my therapist had been replaced and was
forever gone. I walked out of that session. It took me some time before I could
convince myself that it really was the same therapist just with different hair.
[To be fair, my therapist did not just do a haircut and new style. She
completely changed the hair color, the style, and she ditched her trademark
eyeglasses for contact lens. Basically, everything about her from the neck up,
was completely new and unfamiliar.] No, I can’t even laugh or chuckle about
that one, and it has been over five years. The confusion that I deal with on a
daily basis is sad and astounding.
Multiple studies agree
that prosopagnosia is common on the Spectrum. One of the weird aspects is that
those of us who have face blindness are often unaware that we have it. It
wasn’t until I’d spent four decades with facial confusion before I realized
that it wasn’t normal, that it had a name and that it was a common feature in
Autism. I just thought everyone struggled to tell people apart.
If you think about it, face blindness really puts a damper on forming and
maintaining social and interpersonal relationships. It’s hard to be caring and
considerate if your friend frequently looks like a stranger. Absence may make
the heart grow fonder but if you cannot easily recall a friend’s face, it is
hard to send warm, fuzzy thoughts to them when away.
If making eye contact and
looking into someone’s face elicits feelings of confusion, why do it? This is
another hardship in trying to build relationships and friendships. If I’m at
the store, and my friend waves at me but I don’t recognize her and fail to wave
back, the friendship suffers as my pal feels slighted and ignored. (Probably
shouldn’t have used waving as an example as I rarely ever use such a dramatic,
public, uncomfortable gesture but I think it does illustrate the point well.)
I remember in high
school, looking at my classmates in the yearbook. I found no one to be
“attractive”. They all looked the same. My schoolmate would swoon over this guy
or that and I would just internally be stymied, shaking my head in disbelief
and wonder. I could not distinguish what an “attractive physical quality” was.
The inability to remember
and distinguish one face from another puts a serious damper on forming and
maintaining relationships, for sure.
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