Saturday 30 May 2020

Face Blindness

I had just about finished writing this post when my computer restarted for no reason and turns out autosave hadn’t kicked in since the day before so I lost all of it. This was frustrating and so I have left the rewrite for a little while. But now I will attempt to remember all the points again.

The first time I heard of ‘face-blindness’ was in the disappointing fourth season of Arrested Development. I assumed it was just a joke and applied it to myself since I often struggle to recognise an actor if he has a beard or suchlike. But then something happened that made me think about it a little harder and I found that I really do seem to have face-blindness.

The technical term is ‘prosopagnosia’ and it means that you can’t recognise or remember people’s faces. Now, obviously I haven’t actually been diagnosed with this disorder, because in what circumstance would you be? And so I am being one of those people who says they have a thing with no proof of actually having it, but I really think that I do have some form of face-blindness, although maybe in a mild form. According to Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, ‘it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others’ which is certainly true of me.

So here is my anecdotal evidence:

I tend to recognise people by their hair. To be honest, I think I have become quite lazy. Since I know that faces don’t mean much to me, I tend not to even bother looking at them, which probably makes me seem more socially awkward than I really am and also means I miss features that I might have been able to use to identify a person. If a person changes their hair, particularly how long it is or how straight it is, this really confuses me. This also includes wearing  a hat. I find recognising bald people extremely difficult.  I also get confused if glasses or facial hair changes. Even makeup makes it difficult for me to recognise someone. All bald men look alike to me and all women with makeup look alike. Filters on photos (and airbrushing) are a freaking nightmare. I also can't recognise people if their face is in a different position. As in sideways or upside down. This really only applies to TV and movies, but the number of times I have watched something and known who a character was from the context of the scene or the sound of their voice, but because they were in bed or the camera was below their face I just could not see that it was them, no matter how many times I have watched it.

So, like I said, I mostly use hair to identify people, sometimes age enters into it too, and occasionally sex but not always. Obviously clothes play a part too. This is difficult at work, because we have a kind of uniform, so some people will be wearing the exact same outfit, and I can get quite close to them and about to start a conversation before I realise that they are not who I thought they were. It’s really startling.

The way I think my brain works is that it has a select number of faces or facial types saved and then it simply fits everyone I meet into one of these categories. Did you know that 5% of the population all look like my oldest brother? And another 5% all look like The Slayer? My brain thinks so anyway.  Because of this, sometimes I will be drawn to a person illogically because they share some physical trait with someone I already like. I can think of numerous occasions when I have thought that someone at college/university/work looks exactly like a famous actor, when in fact they almost certainly looked nothing like them. I can sort of see it if I concentrate on individual features or compare pictures directly, but it kind of hurts. If I haven’t seen someone for a while, my memory basically completely erases what they look like and replaces it with one of the default settings, so when I do see them next, it’s really jarring and confusing. When I worked two jobs at once, and so was meeting a lot of new people, my brain basically just allocated one set of faces to both groups. This made it difficult for me to keep up with what was going on in their lives because I couldn’t remember if this was tall woman in 30s with short black hair from Job A or tall woman in 30s with short black hair from Job B. They became identical to me. And the absolute dumbest version of this categorising or face-merging is that my brain even does this for people who share a name. If they are already in the same basic group of age and body-size, then if they also have the same name, they just become one blob to me and if I happen to know them in the same environment, then I’m kind of screwed because I cannot separate them again (possibly I could if I saw them all the time).

Now for some specific examples:

It used to really baffle and frustrate The Housemate that I couldn’t tell that Captain Hook and Mr Darling were both Jason Isaacs in Peter Pan. 
*
I mean, logically I knew they were, but one of them has long hair and facial hair and the other doesn’t. So, you know, they look like completely different people. 

Working in retail for quite a few years now has been a struggle whenever I’ve had to deal with customers who want something from the stockroom.  Because the second I turn away, my brain wipes what they looked like from my memory. I have to memorise what their shoes look like or their bag or something in order to find them again. If I forget to do this, and they aren’t standing in the same place when I come back (and they never are) I just have to go around asking every customer in the shop who is a similar age group if they are the person I was talking to. When I worked at Waitrose this was an absolute nightmare, because I’d remember ‘the old lady with the grey hair’ and then come back to discover this description matched every customer in the shop.

The worst case of face-blindness I’ve ever had was at work. One day I was talking to one of my colleagues, a young woman with long blond hair, and then she left the room. She came back in a few minutes later in a different outfit. I thought it was weird that she had got changed, but we carried on talking. Then she left again and when she came back, she was in the original outfit. This is when I realised that she was in fact two totally separate people. After this, whenever I saw one of them, I got quite anxious because I just could not tell which was which at all. Once, I was even in the staffroom sharing the same break as both of them and I looked from one face to the other, trying to force my brain to accept that they looked different and remember how, but I just couldn’t do it. Eventually the only way I could tell them apart was because I worked out that one wore bright lipstick and the other didn’t. I dreaded that one day the other one might start wearing a similar lipstick!

Last year when we visited the Upside Down House in Brighton, we paid at the ticket office where there was a young woman and then we went inside where another young woman showed us what to do. She then discreetly left us alone so we wouldn’t feel self-conscious. However, later we needed her to take a photo of the two of us together, so The Housemate went and got her. Only later did I find out that this ‘third’ woman was in fact the first woman. I had just assumed she was the second woman from the context of where I had seen her. The Housemate couldn’t understand this at all. Apparently one of them was wearing glasses. So is this me being lazy and not even trying to recognise people? All I know is that they were both of a similar age, similar hair, similar voice, so identical.

Very recently a facebook friend put up a before and after photo of his beard being shaved off. So I knew that these were both photos of him and he had deliberately taken them so he was in the same position with same expression. The two pictures were side by side. I could not recognise that he was the same person. I really tried. I focused on each bit of his face and compared and logically I could see that it was the same eyes and the same nose etc, but my brain just would not accept that they were pictures of the same person. It was like sitting in the staffroom opposite those two young women. It doesn’t matter if I can compare the differences or similarities in the moment, my brain just rejects the information. It’s like fighting against two repelling magnets or trying to get a grip on a slippery piece of glass and it starts to give me a headache if I try too hard. I just can’t record the information.

And finally, the case that kind of validated it for me that I really did have face-blindness and this was actually a real thing. I decided to watch Broadchurch. I had never seen anything by Chris Chibnall that I liked, and people spoke highly of this series so I wanted to give it a go (turns out it was just as bad as I would have expected but never mind). VAGUE SPOILER AHEAD. We were a couple of episodes in and I had pretty much constantly been telling The Housemate my theories of whodunit when he had to stop me because what I was saying didn’t make any sense. And confused and cautious and unbelieving, he had to ask me if I knew that there were two bald characters in the show. I didn’t know what he was talking about. There was one bald character. But he was adamant that there were two. And he showed me the cast list and the cast photos and… oh my God, he was right. There were two bald characters. 
*
I had watched several episodes and thought they were the same person. This ruined my theories… or did it? Because these two men looked bloody identical. And why would a casting director cast two such similar types? And when someone sees a bald bloke up to no good and blames one of the bald characters… I knew that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell them apart! And thus I cracked the case. Because I recognise people by their hair and if they don’t have hair then they are all the same person as far as I can tell.

So that’s the story of how I realised I had face blindness and the kind of trouble it can get me into. So if I ever get confused about your personal information, or start talking about something as if we were in the middle of a conversation, or just stare at a random part of you that isn’t you face, rest assured, it’s because I have no idea who you are.






* I found the images at the following sites: 
http://smoldering-rose.blogspot.com/2011/03/monday-at-movies-peter-pan-2003.html
https://www.bbcamerica.com/shows/broadchurch/cast-crew/joe-miller
http://www.david-tennant.co.uk/2013/04/broadchurch-suspect-profile-nige-carter.html

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