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Mountain Goat
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07 Jul 2019, 6:06 pm

https://youtu.be/mlYkIJVguCU

This gives a small understanding of what it can be like... I can give many more examples... and I am sure some of you can too! I hope the link works.


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Mountain Goat
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07 Jul 2019, 7:50 pm

Examples from my personal life have been when I have been told off by both aunts (Mums sister and Dads brothers wife) along with the odd cousin for not saying hello to them when I saw them....
Walking down a street eading for the bank.. At the opposite end of the street I saw two people that I thought I knew but could not think where I knew them from. I said "Hello" just incase to the lady who was holding the hand of a little boy. The lady said "Hello" back and I saw the little boy tug his mother hand like he knew me and wanted his mother to stop...
Well, I carried on walking down the street. Who was that? I can't think! I know those people from somewhere but where?
I walked into the bank. A bit of a queue. Gives me time to think. I started to try to recall all the people I know... Difficult to remember faces, but one by one I was trying to recall all the ladies of that age that I knew... It was difficult. For some reason I knew I knew them well, but just couldn't think...! Who are they?
Well, while I was thinking it suddenly came to me who they are! Oh gosh! Oh dear! I ran out the bank and down the street and just into the next street where I found them... Phew! My mother and my little brother! My Mum also has faceblindness so she was thinking the same things that I was... Now that was lucky. I remembered who they are. But many occasions even 15 or 20 years later I am still trying to fathom out who I have met and had entire conversations with and I still don't know who they are. All I know is they know me! It is rude to ask "Who are you?" as many people would be soo offended if I did that. I just have to keep them talking and try to introduce random subjects in the hope that the random subjects give me a clue as to who these people are.


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IstominFan
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08 Jul 2019, 9:23 am

I have had embarrassing moments where I saw someone in an unfamiliar surrounding and drew a blank on that person's name. I have heard instances of people whose prosopagnosia was so severe that other people looked like blurs to them. Thankfully, I'm not nearly that severe, but it was bad enough to be really embarrassing at times.



Mountain Goat
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08 Jul 2019, 11:35 am

I picture people in a setting. I am thinking about this. I hve a visual inner mind. I tend to identify people because I see them in the expected setting. It won't be their facial features I will be looking at to grasp their identity. It would be their voice or their hair colour or hair style, or their shape or size. The way they walk... The way they talk. Some facial features may work like a big nose of they wear glasses. Something like that.
I find only certain people I know I can remember their face. I often can't think what I look like, so if you took a photograph of me, and I didn't know I was there at the time, I would struggle to know it was me in the photograph. If, however, I remember the surroundings and remember the photograph I will know it is me. Group photos... Well. I identify myself from where I am. Sometimes I can remember what I look like at certain times in my life.
I don't find faces like a blurr, but it is more that I tend not to notice them. I think it could be because for me, to remember someones face, I have to have a very long stear at them and to have done this many times so I eventually learn their face. Most people find this to be rude or uncomfortable, so I don't learn most peoples faces. I cant talk and they can't talk when I stare like this.So to learn peoples faces is awkward! So generally I don't.


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kraftiekortie
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08 Jul 2019, 11:36 am

If I know a person who is in uniform, it is inevitable that I will not know the person when he/she is out of uniform.



Mountain Goat
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08 Jul 2019, 12:16 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
If I know a person who is in uniform, it is inevitable that I will not know the person when he/she is out of uniform.

Haha. That's what I also get. I never forget someone greeting me and I was puzzled as to who it was... And they said "We were in work together five minutes ago!" To be fair. It was my lunchbreak and I was out walking in the town near where I worked. It could happen to anyone.


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boating_taxonomist
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09 Jul 2019, 6:49 am

I don't know if i might have a bit of prosoprognosia. Sometimes I do find myself talking to people who clearly know me and I don't recognise them at all (they might say something that means I can suddenly place them in my memory, but still won't necessarily recall their face), but on the other hand I don't seem to have trouble recognising a vast array of people in familiar contexts (like I can pick out regulars on the bus I use frequently). Out of context, however, and I have failed to recognise people I know well (and I am always slightly unsure, even if I have recognised someone, that it is really them), and misidentified strangers as people I know.

The image I have of people in my head often feels quite tenuous, and often really far from accurate (I had an engineer visit my boat yesterday-I thought I knew what he looked like, he's been before, and I was totally wrong). I get quite worried meeting people in crowded places, even people like my mum and siblings (I hate my parents picking me up at the airport because I always suddenly feel like I've completely forgotten what they look like), because it always feels especially difficult to try and match the picture in my head with what they actually look like. I always find myself a little confused/surprised/sometimes uncertain (depending on the person find myself standing there going 'I think that's them...') that it is them and how different they look from what I remember.



Mountain Goat
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09 Jul 2019, 8:31 am

boating_taxonomist wrote:
I don't know if i might have a bit of prosoprognosia. Sometimes I do find myself talking to people who clearly know me and I don't recognise them at all (they might say something that means I can suddenly place them in my memory, but still won't necessarily recall their face), but on the other hand I don't seem to have trouble recognising a vast array of people in familiar contexts (like I can pick out regulars on the bus I use frequently). Out of context, however, and I have failed to recognise people I know well (and I am always slightly unsure, even if I have recognised someone, that it is really them), and misidentified strangers as people I know.

The image I have of people in my head often feels quite tenuous, and often really far from accurate (I had an engineer visit my boat yesterday-I thought I knew what he looked like, he's been before, and I was totally wrong). I get quite worried meeting people in crowded places, even people like my mum and siblings (I hate my parents picking me up at the airport because I always suddenly feel like I've completely forgotten what they look like), because it always feels especially difficult to try and match the picture in my head with what they actually look like. I always find myself a little confused/surprised/sometimes uncertain (depending on the person find myself standing there going 'I think that's them...') that it is them and how different they look from what I remember.


I can totally relate to this.


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BTDT
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09 Jul 2019, 8:37 am

There is a black lady I've seen many times over the years. It never occurred to me that it may be useful to associate her race with her name as way of getting around my face blindness. Is this racist?



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09 Jul 2019, 10:24 am

I don't think it is...

Something very strange about faceblindness for me and my mum... It is as if skin colour does not always compute when one is trying to identify a person on TV in a film... Like my mum said... "I can't tell them apart" and my brother would look at her and say "One man's black and the other is white... How can't you tell" And it would then suddenly occur to my mum and she would be able to follow the film better. It is so wierd how we don't always pick up on the obvious.
Both of us tend to group people... A group of similar faces... (If that makes sense?). We can be fine until we meet two or more from a simular group, and then we are lost. Prosoprognosia seems to work in different ways like this.


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darkwaver
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09 Jul 2019, 7:58 pm

One time a lady I had worked with for years changed her hairstyle, and I was asking everyone who the new employee was. :oops:



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09 Jul 2019, 8:06 pm

names and faces. sigh... no wonder i'm a hermit.



naturalplastic
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09 Jul 2019, 8:11 pm

Someone on WP a while ago complained that when they watched Capt Kirk era StarTrek they could never tell Mr. Sulu from Checkhov. At first that seemed crazy to me. Sulu was East Asian, and Checkov was a White guy from Europe. But then it occurred to that ...yes ...they were both guys in their twenties, and both had black hair, and both had their hair cut in a similar style with bangs. So if someone were a tiny bit impaired in their face recognition those two guys could look a lot alike.



auntblabby
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09 Jul 2019, 8:39 pm

^^^mebbe if you dressed them and groomed them alike, there might be a bit of confusion.



naturalplastic
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09 Jul 2019, 9:03 pm

auntblabby wrote:
^^^mebbe if you dressed them and groomed them alike, there might be a bit of confusion.


They already wore the same uniform.

You and I would never confuse them. Like most folks we would read their faces as being of "not even the same race!". But to a Martian they would be hard to tell apart. And to folks from earth who lack that brain circuitry to lock onto faces they might look alike.



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09 Jul 2019, 9:15 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
^^^mebbe if you dressed them and groomed them alike, there might be a bit of confusion.


They already wore the same uniform. You and I would never confuse them. Like most folks we would read their faces as being of "not even the same race!". But to a Martian they would be hard to tell apart. And to folks from earth who lack that brain circuitry to lock onto faces they might look alike.

uniform ain't enough, if you made them up the same and gave 'em the same haircut, that would be more of a challenge. that was my situation in the army and civil service. :oops: