About 10 years ago, a friend mentioned meeting someone at a conference who couldn’t see people’s faces. This person couldn’t tell TV characters apart, didn’t recognize herself in photos, and walked past her loved ones in public without realizing it. My friend said this person’s condition was called “face blindness.”
First chance I got, I googled face blindness, officially known as prosopagnosia. Little is known about the condition, although there is a research center affiliated with Harvard University. The more I learned, the more I was certain that I had it, too.
I’ve had it my whole life, but didn’t know that the way I saw faces was different from how others do. Actually, for me, face blindness doesn’t keep me from seeing faces exactly, but it does keep me from understanding them as a whole and from remembering them. That probably makes no sense if you don’t have face blindness, so I’ll explain it another way.
I can see a nose, a mouth, eyes, and a jawline, but when I look at a face, those components don’t stay steady for me. I may see a jawline but not be able to make sense of the nose. I may see the eyes but they seem to move around the face. To me, faces look very much like faces in Picasso’s paintings do. I didn’t understand why Picasso’s work was considered that interesting until I realized that I don’t see faces the way most people do. (In fact, there’s a theory that Picasso had face blindness.)
As far as being able to remember faces goes, I can see a face in front of me just fine and recognize it as a beautiful face or an interesting face but when I turn away, I have no memory at all of the face. When I turn back, it’s as if I’m seeing the face for the first time. I memorize aspects of people’s faces so it can appear that I remember faces, but it’s really that I’ve memorized that one friend has a heart-shaped face and another has full lips that form a perfect V shape at the middle of the upper lip. I might remember that someone wears distinctive glasses or has a nose piercing or has dramatic eyelashes.
I recognize people by their gait, voice, glasses, posture, clothing, or hair rather than by their face. I know I love my daughter’s face and find it beautiful, but I can’t describe it to you. When I used to pick her up after school, I saw kids streaming out of the school building, knowing one of them was mine but unable to say which one. I recognized my husband by his shoulders and the fact that he often wore Carhartts.
I’ve always had trouble recognizing people when they are wearing a hat, in a different context, or they’ve changed their hair. I’ve developed a lot of habits to offset these challenges. When I’m meeting someone at a restaurant or coffee shop, I try to arrive first and be seated so they’ll have to find me. I’ve had too many embarrassing incidents in which I walked right past the person I was meeting and got my own table near them.
My whole life, I’ve been accused of ignoring people in public. Many times in high school, a friend would claim I had looked right at them in a public setting, like the mall or library, and ignored them. I always said I hadn’t seen them, which was true—but it was weird to me that this was such a common accusation. I hated the cafeterias in high school and college because I’d get my tray of food and then look out into a sea of strange faces.
My inability to recognize faces leads to social awkwardness on a regular basis. When someone who had been my neighbor for ten years started working at my university and I introduced myself to her as if we had never met. Another time, a male colleague changed his facial hair and I introduced myself to him and welcomed him to the department. Once I hugged a man in the grocery store wearing Carhartts and nearly kissed his arm before he told me he was pretty sure I was confused. A guy I went on a date with was upset to learn his handsomeness might be lost on me.
Now that I have a name and a way to explain my condition, I’m much less embarrassed about my regular social blunders. I tell people regularly that I have face blindness. I mention it in my email signature and on the first day of classes. Many people I interact with on campus are in the habit now of saying, “Elizabeth, hi. It’s Susan from Admissions,” to let me know who they are. I’ve gotten much more confident when someone says hello to me in public about saying, “Hi! Who is it?”
A couple years ago, someone asked me if I had read Heather Sellers’s memoir of life with face blindness, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know. Although I hadn’t, I immediately recognized Heather Sellers as the person my friend had met at that conference all those years ago. I immediately bought the book and read it in record time. Sellers’s experience resonated with my own in such uncanny ways—she, too, was regularly accused of having looked right at someone and ignored them. She didn’t recognize herself in photos.
If you think you might have it, you can take this test to find out. Although there’s no treatment or cure, knowing you have it can help you understand your own experience better and, if you want to register with the Prosopagnosia research center, you can help researchers get a better handle on how many people actually have it.
P.S. Face blindness has nothing to do with my low vision. It’s a brain issue, not a vision issue.