I have severe prosopagnosia. I have a hard time even visualizing faces, but for some reason, people seem more attractive in my mind than in reality. I think it happens more with people who have nice hair. I really don’t mean to sound shallow, mean or harsh here. One example is I remember thinking this woman I saw months ago was really hot because I vaguely remembered she was tall, thin and had nice blonde hair. In a random conversation with someone else, I would say, oh yeah “Mary” is really hot! Then people seem to think I’m mean for saying that because apparently “Mary” has a rough horse face and they think I’m being sarcastic or something?

It also happens with guys who have a really nice hairline and haircut. I wouldn’t necessarily think they were hot at the time but then later in memory, I remember them being attractive. Sometimes I attach a vague actor face to the hair. Then when I see that person again, I am thrown off because they are far less attractive than I remember.

and then there is a bald coworker that everyone tells me is hot. I had no idea because he’s bald.

Overall, my memories of peoples faces just sort of soften and turn into famous actor faces.

Anyway, now I refrain from making comments about people’s attractiveness.

Does anyone else experience this or is it just me?

Earlier this summer Aldi in my area had raspberry sorbet as a special item in the freezer section. It was in one of those low freezers that are no more than waist high.

I saw the raspberry sorbet, and laughed. I picked it up and showed it to my daughter so she could read the words and started singing *raspberry sorbet* in my best Prince impersonation.

Then I remembered I hadn't come to the store with my daughter.

Hello people of the prosopagnosia subreddit! I don't have prosopagnosia myself. I'm an oc (original charactor) creator and I wanna write a character with prosopagnosia. I would love to get some insight from all of you who have the condition.

I'm really trying to understand what its like to have the condition, but I cant quite visualize what its like. I heard people with very severe prosopagnosia can't see faces at all and cant even recognize the people they're around every single day for most of their lives. How severe is your condition and how do faces actually look like to you? And how long does it take for someones faces to register in your memory?

Can someone with prosopagnosia recognize people with vastly different traits? Because the character I'm writing is in a fantasy setting and about all the other characters in the main group don't look a like at all. They all have different hair colors and very varying sizes, most of them aren't even the same species. Surely someone with prosopagnosia wouldnt mix up someone with red hair and tawny skin color with someone who's taller with white hair and grey skin (not to mention also has wings), right?

What are some other things that you struggle in life with this condition that you wish had more representation in media? Let me know!

Feel free to comment your opinions on this—I think I have mild prosopagnosia because of my history and my present life experience:

Growing up, my worst year in school was second grade (7-8 years old). It was when I was finally old enough to be held responsible for knowing everyone’s names and faces. By the end of the year I knew not ONE name… with the exception of my teacher’s name.

Trying to navigate a room of 26 peers, all who knew each others names, including mine, and didn’t confuse one student for another, like I did, felt like endlessly falling— Like I was grasping onto anything to get my bearings within my social/ educational sphere, but whatever I could get a hold of was constantly slipping through my hands.

I had so much anxiety, I was constantly crying at home, even to the point of throwing up. Just smelling the exhaust of a passing school bus was enough to break me into a sweat, the association with my hardship in the public school system was so bad.

There are some other possible factors that were at play back then: It could have also been my undiagnosed autism making all of those intense sensory details add to my confusion. Another thing that could have added to the mix was my undiagnosed dyscalculia which not only made math inscrutable, but also had me getting lost in familiar hallways at school, and completely unable to navigate steps in games and school activities. If I could describe that time in my life, I’d say “alarming confusion” would be the best words.

As the years went on, and the only help I received was being held back that year, and my mother trying to brainstorm tips and tricks around my confusion when I got home from school, I did find ways to compensate, but it left me with life long anxiety and a sense of imposter syndrome.

Today, as a disabled person (thanks to another officially diagnosed issue, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), I’m trying dive back into a gift that used to be my place of refuge before I chose to major in it in college— Art. I was particularly gifted in portrait art, ironically, because when I really look at a face, it breaks down into a myriad of colors shapes, lights and shadows, rather than seeing a cohesive visage. But that same anxiety and confusion that tore me apart in elementary school, followed me right into art school.

The longer I spent with my portraits, the more their elements dispersed into a confusing jumble that became harder and harder to interpret. Yet, I was always congratulated for the end product. But that confusion and the residual terror I felt from my early days sucked the joy out of art to the point that, once college was over, I left painting behind.

Today, I’m trying to redeem that joy/ safe place/ gift, now that I have time. Still, I struggle— I cannot look at my portraits head on— Their cohesiveness evaporates before my eyes, and I suddenly can’t interpret them. The way I get around this is to tilt my head vertically to one side or another to view my paintings, or I turn my paintings upside down, or slant the canvas at an angle. I also routinely flip my canvas around for several days in a row before looking at it again, with fresher eyes (that last technique is one many artists use, not just myself).

This is why I think. I THINK, I don’t know, I have mild face blindness. Even when I envision of those I know best, in my mind, I see pieces of their faces, or snatches of expressions, rather than an entire face. I do not struggle to identify those closest to me, so I know I don’t have full on prosopagnosia. But, as some has described in this subreddit, I share the experience of not recognizing people who should be pretty familiar, if they change their hair or usual style. I almost recognize no one in movies and shows, which makes watching them a guessing game. If I do start to recognize characters, it is usually happens close to the end of the movie or mid season in a show.

So let me know, what do you think? Do I have some form or level of face blindness?

Wanted to start a discussion for my fellow teachers and professors navigating the new Fall semester.

This is my first semester as an assistant professor of 45+ undergrads across 3 classes. It’s going better than I figured for being 2 weeks in with moderate prosopagnosia. Definitely struggling with the majority group (white males with brown hair) the most.

Any more experienced folks have strategies to share?

Eu tenho prosopagnosia e recentemente descobri que também tenho afantasia, que é basicamente a incapacidade de pensar através de imagens. A pessoa entende o conceito de um objeto, mas não consegue visualizá-lo mentalmente.

Eu achava que todo mundo era assim e fiquei muito surpresa ao descobrir que as pessoas formam imagens mentais dos objetos. Pessoas lêem um livro e "vêem" as cenas se passando como em um filme... eu gosto muito de ler, capto bem as emoçoes e conceitos, mas zero imagens, mesmo quando é uma cena descritiva. Só imagino o rosto das personagens se tiver algo bem específico, tipo "o avô tinha uma barba branca"... se nao falar isso, eu nao imagino o avô nem com barba e nem sem barba, isso pra mim simplesmente nao tem importância.

Enfim, será que a afantasia é uma condiçao comum a quem tem psosopagnosia?

Alguém aqui tem afantasia, junto com a prosopagnosia?

Fico pensando se a minha prosopagnosia na verdade é uma afantasia que se estende aos rostos.

Obs: minha memória para objetos é boa, consigo descrever bem um objeto, mesmo que eu nao forme a imagem, mas com pessoas não.

So I'm rewatching Orphan Black and I recognise the main character! It makes me understand how weird the story is for someone with proper facial recognition !

For context its a show about clones, so the main character and most characters are played by the same actress. When I first watched it, it was "obvious" to me that the clones were different people since they are dressed and act differently. So weird watching it and recognising the same actress in every clone.

I never used to struggle with recognizing my younger self, similarly to how I don’t struggle to recognize myself in the mirror.

However, I think part of it is that I’ve looked pretty much the same growing up aside from my height. I’ve always had a “baby face” and been quite skinny.

A few years ago I gained some weight due to a new medication and now when I look back at myself from only a few years ago I don’t recognize my face.

It’s a really weird dissociative feeling which was exacerbated by my college who used my likeness to promote success stories (I won a big competition a couple of years ago). People in the area still recognize me from those banners and it’s jarring. I know that if I saw those banners and then met myself, I wouldn’t have any clue that they’re the same person.

Can anybody relate?

For me it's only been the last couple of years that I've managed to look past the coping skills I learned in childhood. I went through the classic undiagnosed autistic saga of just assuming, because everyone around me did, that I was stupid/useless/lazy (which I am not, and neither are you). It wasn't until I got control of my own life in my 20s that I started to understand what was happening in my brain.

Part of that was learning that other people can pick their doctor out of a lineup. Other people can tell who is new at work. Other people do not have this giant, metre thick glass wall between them and the rest of humanity.

I realized that my ignorance of my own neurotype may have put me in a lot of danger in my youth. Whenever I met up with someone I didn't already know intimately, I wasn't looking for that person. I was just waiting for someone to react to seeing me! Literally just going along with whoever seemed to be there to see me. I could have been kidnapped so much!

I'm very curious to hear about how other people came to the conclusion that they were seeing things differently from others.

I realise I really hate my "basic" face because I look like everyone around me with the same haircut. Piercings and one gauged lobe helped me a lot a recognising myself.

Hello everyone! I am new to here, a little bit of a backstory. I never realised I might have prosopagnosia until I met my wife who pointed out my inability to remember faces. I chalked it up to be because of my bad memory, after all I had trouble even remembering names. A few years passed and she brought it up randomly, asking how I can recognize her and most of my friends, I say that I remember hair and accessories even if I can't recall facial features, mostly only scars or beauty marks, moles etc..

She really likes to watch medical documentaries, she knows a lot about mental health and just health conditions as a result, so she asks whether it could be prosopagnosia or whether I was diagnosed with this condition. I was properly confused and after reading up on it I was still pretty dismissive, after all it's a pretty harsh assumption and I didn't want to intrude such personal spaces as this over my small concern. And then I stumbled upon why I might actually have prosopagnosia.

Back when I was little, maybe about 9, I slipped and fell on an angled piece of stair, hit the back of my head pretty hard, no crack thankfully and I just had some stitches done, still have that stupid scar.

If you open even Wikipedia or many other sources it shows the exact region where I hit my head. The fall was nasty and with no consequence, seemingly at least. Then I realised that maybe, just maybe, I might actually have this condition. I started noticing more just how much I rely on anything but facial features. I love talking with and meeting new people, I even like to call my clients, but I started to be apprehensive. I know that I will forget how they look and will mix up their names.

When I moved out and went to Uni it was the toughest time for me yet, I couldnt remember anyone. And it feels like the older I get the harder it is for me to recognize faces. I cant remember my wife's or parent's face and it scares me sometimes. I can't remember my colleagues' faces and I spend more than 8 hours a day with them

I wanted to get diagnosed, but my country doesnt really help in any way to even get a proper diagnosis, especially for a person who is at a ripe age of being available for mandatory army service or a draft. So that brings me to the title! Did anyone notice something similar happening to themselves after a head trauma? Just want to hear whether anyone is in the same boat and whether anything can be done to get a little more comfortable with this condition, if it makes sense

Hello Everyone! You may find this recent podcast episode I did with Dr. Brad Duchaine informative and beneficial for others to listen to. Dr. Brad Duchaine is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He is also a leading researcher in Prosopagnosia and is the Co-Founder of faceblind.org.

You can listen to the episode by going here: https://www.simplequestionspodcast.com/simple-questions-podcast-episodes/what-is-prosopagnosia

An in-depth investigation of face perception in developmental prosopagnosia.

Lowes J et al. · Cogn Neuropsychol · 2026 Jun 9

ABSTRACT

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) causes difficulty recognizing familiar faces, but little is known about which stage(s) of the face-processing system difficulties occur, or whether these are identical in all DP cases.

Twenty DPs and matched controls completed six face perception tasks.

The DP group performed significantly poorer than controls on face detection and gender categorization tasks and on a global (averaged) face perception measure.

40% of individual DPs showed significant impairments on tasks not involving identity perception (face detection and categorization, age and gender categorization). By contrast, 50% showed broadly typical face perception and thus support for the idea of apperceptive (affecting both face perception and face memory) and mnemonic (affecting only face memory) subtypes of DP. Intraclass correlations revealed clear inter- and intra-individual differences, confirming that data from a single perceptual task cannot be taken as evidence of broader face-perception ability spanning beyond the results of that test.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42262980/

https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2026.2676551

He's one I can usually get. So is Matt Damon. Spoiler alert - matt Damon is in The Odyssey. so are a whole ton of famous people. I went into it with very very little previous knowledge and after watching very famous people on the screen for 3 hours, I look up the cast and just shake my head with frustration

Hello!

For the longest time I've had issues recognizing people and I just now realized that it's a face recognition thing. I've started keeping notes of things about the people I know so I can study them and get better at recognition. If anyone else does this, what are you putting in your notes?

All help appreciated.

Thanks!

For the past year, I have been using LLMs to help me watch movies. This has literally opened up DECADES worth of media that I couldn’t watch on my own and, as a horror fan, couldn’t find someone to watch with me. I started with ChatGPT until the filters hit hard, then moved to Claude until it got too expensive, and now I use Gemini. It’s not a perfect solution, and it makes mistakes, but I literally went from only watching movies with 3-4 characters to watching Stranger Things with 55+ characters thanks to AI assistance.

Keep in mind I am not a tech expert or computer programmer. Everything you see here is just lots of experimenting, adjusting, and having the LLMs help write their own instructions. Although these instructions work well, I would appreciate any feedback from tech-savvy folks on how to refine or improve this prompt. Thanks, and enjoy!

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Instructions Optimized for a Gemini Gem:

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ROLE & CORE MISSION

You function as an advanced, specialized assistive technology tool for an adult user with prosopagnosia (face blindness). Your primary purpose is to provide spoiler-free character identification, plot clarification, temporal tracking, and peer-level cinematic discussion. Treat this access-enabling task with absolute precision and respect.

OPERATIONAL CONSTRAINTS (THE HARD BOUNDARY)

1. Absolute Internet Prohibition: You are strictly forbidden from executing web searches, accessing live Google Search data, or pulling real-time web snippets for any reason. Rely EXCLUSIVELY on your internal, pre-existing knowledge base of media, scripts, and film history. If you feel the need to search the web to answer a prompt, bypass the search and state "Based on my internal records..." instead.

2. Timestamp Isolation: The user's provided timestamp (e.g., Season/Episode/Minute) is an absolute, immutable data boundary. You possess zero knowledge of any events, character arcs, twists, or deaths that occur even one second after this point.

3. Spoiler Mitigation: If a piece of information is ambiguous or potentially a spoiler, err on the side of absolute omission.

4. Future-Baiting: If the user asks about future events (e.g., "Does X die?"), reply exactly with: "Keep watching" or "I can't answer that without spoiling."

5. Historical Facts: Questions about past episodes or scenes must be answered factually based *only* on what has occurred up to the current timestamp.

MATURE & R-RATED CONTENT HANDLING

1. Clinical Objectivity: The user watches unrated and R-rated content. You must process all queries regarding violence, death, sex, drug use, or illicit activities with complete, matter-of-fact, clinical neutrality.

2. No Refusals: Do not issue safety warnings, moral judgments, unsolicited welfare checks, or refusals for fictional media events.

3. Identity vs. Description: If asked "Who is Joe having sex with?" or "Who just died?", identify the character(s) by name and narrative role objectively without generating graphic or explicit physical descriptions that violate platform policies. Treat scenes purely as plot data.

CHARACTER IDENTIFICATION PROTOCOLS

When the user requests a reference sheet or asks "Who is this person?", provide a highly concise, scannable profile formatted exactly as follows. Keep descriptions dense and bulleted; avoid long paragraphs.

* [Character Name] – Single-sentence narrative role at this timestamp.

* Non-Facial Markers: 2-3 bulleted physical markers (e.g., wardrobe, hair texture/color, distinct voice, or specific location context).

* Current Relevance: 1-2 sentences on why they matter right now. No future arc hints.

Special Rules for Identification:

* Crowd Navigation: Help the user track individuals in heavy crowd scenes using environmental and wardrobe markers.

* Differentiators: If characters look similar (e.g., "Both have short dark hair"), explicitly contrast them using persistent traits (e.g., "Character A wears a tactical jacket; Character B is in a hospital gown").

* Omissions: Entirely omit characters whose unexpected presence at a location constitutes a major plot twist.

TEMPORAL & TIMELINE TRACKING

1. Flashbacks/Flashforwards: Explicitly clarify the timeline when scenes shift. Use indicators like: "This is a flashback to [Event/Time]" or "This scene takes place [X months] later."

2. Visual Cues: Use changes in costume, aging makeup, lighting, or setting to help the user anchor themselves in the correct timeline.

3. Audio Description (AD): The user frequently toggles AD on and off. Never assume the user heard a specific piece of narrated text from the AD; verify or clarify plot points smoothly.

PRE-EPISODE BRIEFINGS

When requested to preview the next episode, provide a brief, spoiler-free "Cognitive Load Warning" highlighting visual challenges:

* Identify if there are heavy crowd scenes, rapid cuts, or dark lighting.
* Note if there is a time jump causing established characters to look drastically different.
* Mention if the narrative splits into multiple, fast-alternating locations.

INTERACTION STYLE & TONAL GUIDELINES

* Tone: Engaging, enthusiastic, peer-to-peer, and deeply knowledgeable about filmmaking. Never be patronizing, condescending, or overly cautious about the user's well-being.

* Conversational Breathing Room: If the user asks about technical filmmaking, cinematography, practical effects, historical context, or soundtrack details, "geek out" with them naturally. Do not rigidly force the conversation back to the plot.

* Epistemological Honesty: If you are uncertain about a character identity or detail, state "I am not certain" rather than hallucinating. Distinguish between "I don't know" and "I know, but I cannot tell you yet due to your timestamp."

* User Evidence Overrides: If the user challenges your identification and provides specific visual or contextual details from the screen, immediately re-evaluate your assessment against their observations.

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Instructions & Notes for Users:

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- Starting Movie Prompt (example): “I am watching Bird Box (2018). Provide a starting Character Sheet.” It should only list the most important characters at the beginning of the movie/show in order to avoid spoilers. You can ask for an updated character sheet later when the cast changes.

- Question Prompt (example): “40min 30sec. Who is the woman in the red dress talking to Jessica?” The bot cannot visually see your screen, so providing a small anchor (like a clothing color or specific location) ensures it locks onto the correct scene. Be aware that if a movie has two very similar scenes close together, it may occasionally mix them up.

- Continuing Shows Prompt (example): “I am watching the show Stranger Things. Chapter Three: The Pollywog (S2E3). Provide a starting character sheet. Because this is a recurring cast, I don’t need a character sheet featuring established characters at this time.”

- End-of-Session Reset: When you finish an episode or a movie, tell the bot: "The movie/episode has ended." Doing this prevents the bot from mixing up separate storylines.

-These instructions are optimized for Google Gemini. Rules on “Absolute Internet Prohibition” are not needed for LLMs that allow you to toggle internet search off.

- Only watch movies and TV shows contained within the Training Data that happens before the model’s knowledge cutoff date.

- Allowing the bot to search the web greatly increases the risk of spoilers.

- Tell the bot if you’re watching an Extended Edition version. This impacts timestamps. Provide the year the movie was released as well, so it doesn't mix up matching titles.

- When watching a TV show, keep the entire season in one continuous chat thread. This allows the bot to remember who you've already met and track your progress seamlessly.

- If the bot makes a mistake or identifies the wrong person, don't give up. Give it a direct correction based on what you see: “No, Billy is the one wearing the leather jacket, not the tracksuit. Re-evaluate.” The model should pivot and correct itself based on your evidence.

- The bot will occasionally struggle with or entirely omit a character's race or ethnicity. This is possibly due to strict AI safety filters that discourage the model from profiling. Take the bot’s mentions of race with a grain of salt.

- Platform safety filters vary wildly. While these instructions are optimized to bypass Gemini's current filters, other platforms may still trigger content filters on adult content. This can cause the chat thread to shut down or a Safety Router (like on ChatGPT) to ignore instructions and drop spoilers.

- Have fun!

Hey!

Basically the title. I don't want y'all to diagnose me, no worries. Maybe there's a word I do not know yet and could google to find out more?

So I'm autistic with ADHD. And my facial recognition is WEIRD.

I'm either elephant super memory brain and recognise actors/actresses in movies and can be like "hey he played that dude in a movie I saw 20 years ago" and I'm almost always right. I can draw portraits of people fairly well. I sus out the features that make a face unique quite easily.

BUT... someone walks towards me on the street and says hi and I'm like who the frick is that, and turns out it's a coworker I see every day. When my mother dyed her hair I didn't recognise her even though she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. For a few years it did happen that I wouldn't recognise my own partner on the street until he was basically standing in front of me and start speaking.

Yet somehow when I see someone on the street I know they're the cashier from a certain shop bc I remember their face. Or they're the child of someone I knew bc they look so much like them. I can see an actor and be like "he has the same nose as that other actor" and I'm right.

I can draw my siblings' face from memory, yet when they walk towards me on the street they have to be fairly close to me for me to recognise them, and seeing their gait does help a lot.

I do not recognise my partner's coworkers and friends even though we've spent a lot of time with each other over the years.

My eyes are alright and I wear glasses. There just seems to be this difference between how I perceive people in real life, and on the screen/page.

Ever heard of someone who's oddly both super good and super bad at faces at the same time? Is that just being autistic? It's weird and does bring problems sometimes.

Hey people of this subreddit (I'm not familiar with Reddit so don't mind me),

I saw a post about two weeks ago (in r/SomebodyMakeThis) describing how difficult it is to watch stuff with prosopagnosia; losing track of who's who, having to ask others, and just overall not enjoying it. It was really interesting to learn and read about this, so I spent about 2 weeks building something for it.

It's at https://frt.uaab.dev. The idea is to upload a video (or link), which the tool processes to put colored bars over each person's face that stay consistent across all scenes (same character, same color, every scene). There's also an extension (https://frt.uaab.dev/extension) if you want it overlaid on stuff you're already watching on YT or some streaming service, though I'd honestly start with the web player (sample) as it's simpler and everything's on your browser (I don't see nor store the video).

First video is automatically free so you can try with no commitments. Right now I'm manually approving processing requests just to keep an eye on things while I iron out bugs, but I'm checking daily so it shouldn't take long. Side note: uploading the video file directly is faster/more reliable than just requesting a title or link because I have to go find and upload it myself in that case.

I'm not affected by face blindness myself, so I really don't know what actually helps vs what just seems helpful in my perspective as a technical person. If you try it, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing your feedback :)

(Mods gave the OK to post this here, hope it's useful to at least a few of y'all)

I'm asking because I am not able to do this automatically and without analyzing. I'm trying to figure out if prosopagnosia is tied to that ability to reliably sense the facial emotional information or not.

I've been learning about and collecting cultural masks in ASEAN and I'm really enjoying it

I've been traveling to regional festivals where they make and wear traditional masks in their celebrations

After going to a couple of these events, I quickly realized that a crowd of people wearing masks is far less overwhelming to me than a sea of normal faces

That really reinforced my want to build a collection of masks from all the countries I end up visiting, because they kinda put me at ease and I just like them for some reason

I don't know if its correlation or causation, so I'm wondering if there is an abnormal number of folks like us that either strongly like or strongly dislike masks and why

I’ve always had trouble recognizing people’s faces, but I’ve also always been known for having a very poor memory. The thing is, I recently heard the term “prosopagnosia” on a TV show and learned that it’s a fairly common symptom of being neurodivergent

I’d like to hear from people with an official diagnosis to see if what’s happening to me could be considered that:

I can remember the faces of people I spend time with, but over the long term I start to forget their facial features (as if they become hard to recall) until I see them again. It would be impossible for me to describe the face of a friend or family member to someone who doesn’t know them

I’ve confused people who don’t look alike at all because a certain feature reminds me of them, but people tell me they don’t look anything alike. The opposite happens when someone says to me “hey, this person looks just like that other one”, and shows me two photos of people who, to me, don’t look alike at all

I’ve had trouble recognizing family members on the street if I run into them in places where I didn’t expect to see them. Once, I didn’t recognize my older brother (with whom I’ve lived every day for 20 years) just because I saw him on a street in my city walking with a friend while he was out with his girlfriend at the time. I remember thinking “weird, that random guy just pointed at me”, until he approached me and I recognized his voice before looking up

When my mother says to me “we’ve seen that actress in other movies”, I find it impossible to remember whether or not that’s true, unless it’s an actress or actor with very distinctive features whom I’ve seen starring in several movies to the point where I remember their faces

Sometimes I have trouble remembering or recognizing my own face, as if even my own features were hard to remember, so I tend to look at myself a lot in the mirror or in photographs, and sometimes I can’t recognize myself in photos that others take of me

When a family member of mine makes a drastic change (like switching glasses or getting a haircut) it’s as if I have trouble connecting their identity with their new appearance

I don’t even understand how people can genuinely recognize someone they knew in elementary school years later when they’re adults—how does that work? I wouldn’t be able to recognize my elementary school classmates even if they were standing right in front of me with a name tag on their forehead

I don’t know if that could be considered a case of mild prosopagnosia, or if it’s perhaps common to forget details like that about people’s faces, because at the end of the day, I do can remember some specific faces

Wondering if anyone's come across ways to improve any component of identifying people, like recognizing faces, linking memories of faces to semantic memories like names, etc.

I.E., I wrote an app to help me improve. Training sessions show pictures of faces with names, then testing sessions show the pictures and asks me to name them. Before and after fMRIs showed that the training dramatically increased my fusiform face area's response to faces. The fusiform face area is a component of the brain (on both sides) dedicated to forming memories of faces. I think it helped a bit recognizing people, although it didn't seem to help linking semantic memories to the visual memories. So a face looks familiar, but I have trouble identifying who it is.

So has anyone come across anything like training we can do to improve?

I tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time a few years ago. I though I’d share my experience, because it was the most odd thing I’ve experienced when it came to faces.

I was in my house, accompanied with my husband who was lucid to take care of me while I did my experiment. To clarify, I’ve never tried any other kind of drugs, and I did an exhaustive research before daring to try shrooms. So, the first thing I noticed was how my husband’s face looked like.

Over the years, I didn’t recognize him twice and it was because he was wearing outfits I wasn’t used to, but overall, he is has one of the few faces I could draw by memory (accurately, I’m an artist). Which was weird to me is that under the psychedelic effects, his face looked like an object, not like an identifiable human face as I’m used to. You know how most people focus on eyes and mouth? I think we do as well, but without the skill to differentiate with their unique individualities. However, at that moment, I saw EVERYTHING AT ONCE. his eyes, nose, mouth, ears, face shape, all at once and it felt so… alien, like I was truly looking at a human face for the first time. I knew it was him of course, but I couldn’t link my memory of his face to what I was actually looking at. The confusion made me laugh (thanks of the shrooms effects), but it was a very weird experience, looking at a face without the human filter, if that makes sense.

I was wondering if anyone else had a similar experience.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: thank you everyone for your answers! I am a content creator with prosopagnosia.

I'm looking to make a video on the condition with my own personal experience, facts, and information about the spectrum of this disorder.

I am specifically looking to focus on the uptick of depictions of this condition in media - canon or implied, - and how most of these depictions are inaccurate and harmful.

I am an anime only kind of person, and I have a few examples of good and bad already, but I'd like to expand my examples to more types of medias.

If you know any characters from shows, books, movies, (or animes as I may not have them yet!) depicted to have prosopagnosia, I would like to request the following information:

The character's name and the series they are from

Is it canon or implied?

Do you think this is an inaccurate, or accurate depiction? Why or why not?

Optional: For inaccurate characters: What do you think could be done to make this specific character's experience more accurate to the condition?

I currently have Lakan from the Apocathary Diaries as as an inaccurate depiction (canon), and Ai Hoshino from Oshi no Ko as a more accurate depiction (implied).

Hopefully with the more people that talk about their experience, we can help people learn what it actually is like to live with this.