I Just Saw A Face

Prosopagnosia. Ever hear of it? I have it. I think.
You might, too. According to some recent studies, 2 percent of the population may. So what is it? It's a neurological condition which might be hereditary or can be the result of a head injury which causes something called face blindness. So what the hell does that mean?
It means that it's really, really hard for me to remember faces. As in, if I know you from some place, like working at Publix, if I see you at Barnes and Noble I probably won't recognize you. I may not even recognize the fact that I've seen you a thousand times.
Weird. The odds that I will recognize you are better if you have some unusual features or a very unique look. But if you're sort of a generic type person, I probably won't.
I've always had this problem and just thought I didn't pay attention to faces. And then one day, I was reading a book by (saint) Jane Goodall and she described the condition exactly. She said that the hardest part of going around the world on speaking tours was not recognizing people she'd met before. She even got in touch with the famous neurologist, Oliver Sachs, who told her he had the same problem and gave her the name for it- Prosopagnosia.
Wow.
I think I must have been born with the condition although my mother says I did hit my head pretty hard on the metal dashboard once when I was quite young in the before-the-child-seat era, so it may have been a result of injury. Who knows? But I remember distinctly, at the age of four or so, running home from playing with a friend and begging my mother to put my hair up in pigtails and letting me change my clothes so he wouldn't recognize me. I wanted to fool him. So I suppose I was already making my identifications with the aid of hair and clothing on the people I knew, which is very common in people with prosopagnosia.
It's not that we can't see faces. We can. We just have a very hard time identifying them later and it's very hard for us to visualize what people's faces look like. I know it sounds so odd and ridiculous, but I think it's a bit like trying to explain to a color-blind person what red looks like, or blue.
I've always had a terrible time watching movies and following the story, especially if some of the characters have similar coloring and hair styles. I'm constantly asking questions like, "Is that the bad guy?"
I think this condition is one of the reasons I am sort of socially shy. It's so embarrassing to be in a situation where someone comes up and starts talking to me as if he or she knows me quite well and I have absolutely no idea who they are. I know everyone does this to some extent, but in my case, it almost always happens. When I was a volunteer in my children's classrooms, it was not uncommon for me not to recognize and remember the kids' names after an entire year of being with them weekly. It happens for me with kids, men, women, children, black folks, white folks, all sorts of folks.
I hear that the problem is so intense for some people that they don't even recognize their own family members if they come across them in unexpected places. Thank God it's not that severe in my case, but I do understand how it could happen.
I tell people sometimes that I have this problem and that if I meet them again somewhere and don't recognize them, to please just tell me who they are. Most people look at me when I tell them this like I'm a complete moron and I feel like one, but the truth is the truth.
There's quite a few resources on the Internet, including this one- http://www.faceblind.org/research/index.html
which has some links to some quick tests for face and object recognition. Quite frequently, those two things go together. People who have problems recognizing faces may have problems recognizing cars, of all things, and also places. I call myself directionally dyslexic and this may be related. Who knows?
There's a lot of research going on in the field. The diagnosis wasn't even coined until 1947. It will be interesting to see what comes of it as new things are discovered.
At the very least, people may be more understanding when I don't recognize them. But I'll still feel like a moron.
And the image I have used for this blog is a portrait by a friend of mine named Karen Davidson. She has just begun painting and I am amazed at her work. This piece perfectly illustrates what prosopognosia feels like, although I doubt that's what she had in mind when she did it.
Thanks, Karen! Keep painting!