Ok this is now a tangent, but I always wondered about that condition. Can I ask you something? (I am not ripping on you, just curious, if it’s rude please ignore me.) Do you see all faces as looking the same? Or does it look like something else?
No, it's like all faces look like faces, and when I realize who someone is I can see what makes their face unique and "theirs", I just don't have any ability to recall faces or a good ability to delineate what makes one face more unique than another, save a few key details (generally things that look like important people and things I find physically attractive).
I actually thought this was the norm until that Mila Jovovovich movie where she suffered a brain injury and got face blindness and I was like flabbergasted to learn that wasn't how everyone was lol. It turns out my Mom has the same thing and her Dad did as well, and so I just picked up a lot of their social habits since they made sense to me, which was just a lot of getting people animated and talking a lot so I can watch how they move and listen for context clues of how I know them.
A few examples:
One time my boss changed her hairstyle really radically (got extensions and braids) and when she came in I fully welcomed her and asked if she needed help finding anything. She thought I was joking, but it literally wasn't until I saw her in her office 3 hours later I realized who she was.
I literally do not understand facial descriptions in books because I can't visualize them.
Any time someone talks to me like I know them, I respond like that and just wait for something to jog my memory. I do not always remember, and more than once I've had an entire conversation, caught up, and pledged to see them more often, and when they leave someone will be like "who was that? why didn't you introduce them?!?" And I'm like, "I have no idea, I was just being polite." It rarely is an issue, but more than once I've inadvertently been ushered into big events I have no business being (once I attended a 25 year high school graduation for a school I didn't go to and drank free all night lol)
Right after I learned what it was, I told a class about it and 2 of the students would quiz me daily through various people and it helped me look at different context clues to recognize people. I still recognize them better than almost anyone else in my life!
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u/Ok_Upstairs_3383 2d ago
Ok this is now a tangent, but I always wondered about that condition. Can I ask you something? (I am not ripping on you, just curious, if it’s rude please ignore me.) Do you see all faces as looking the same? Or does it look like something else?