My college roomie (Cade) and I bonded during our freshman year by playing Kingdom Hearts, alternating our mental breakdowns, and watching lots of shows and movies. I'd never been all that into TV, especially the not-cartoons kind, so Cade gave me a visual media baptism, for which I was deeply grateful. It turns out that I like TV.
One show we watched was about a butt-kicking special agent-type woman. The structure of the show alternated between the past and the present, showing the adult woman on modern missions, and then her younger self (I assumed from the context) training in what was basically spy school. I was having trouble following the plot, but things really got messy when present protagonist busted into past protagonist's school.
"What kind of convoluted time travel twist is this?" I exclaimed in disbelief.
Cade was understandably confused. "What do you mean? Character A is rescuing Character B. Where did you get time travel from that?"
And that's when Cade had to explain to me that everything I thought was happening in the story was a total lie. There were no past/present shenanigans, and the people who I thought were the same person (slender build, light skin, long dark hair) were actually entirely separate characters.
"They're different races," Cade told me, baffled by just how lost I'd been.
And they were. When I saw them side by side, I realized one person was taller and had a different eye shape. As soon as they were apart, even though I knew their eyes were different, I couldn't envision either face. Their actresses could be replaced, and I'd never know the difference.
Soon after this (and several other) incidents, I heard neurologist Oliver Sacks (my idol and potential name inspiration for a future child; may he rest in peace) talking on a podcast about a neurological condition that inhibited facial recognition, and suddenly, things started making sense to me. My years of shyness, of describing my first friend as "the girl with the hair," of my mistaking teachers for each other, of losing the names of people I saw every week at church... All this time, I'd assumed I wasn't paying enough attention, or was rude without even trying to be.
I had a name for what one of the most frustrating aspects of myself: face-blindness (AKA prosopagnosia, but prosopamnesia may better describe my particular struggle).
When I tell people that I'm face-blind, it tends to cause confusion. The most common question goes kind of like this: "So, you can't see faces? It's just blank skin?" To which I answer something like: "No, it's less like Figure A..."
Figure A
"... and more like Figure B."
Figure B
Except, maybe not as creepy. I can see eyes and noses and mouths. The problem is, once I look away, they are gone from my memory. I cannot picture the person I just saw, and I definitely can't imagine their head at a new angle. I compensate by describing their features in my mind as I look at them (like, "She has a mole above her lip and her eyebrows look like check marks"), but that's a weak fix.
The problem with poor facial recognition is that humans have evolved to rely on that ability to the extent that faces are used as a memory tool for keeping track of the other humans you know. Let's think of your mind like an office:
Yes, exactly. There's a section of your brain office that keeps track of the people you encounter. In this analogy, when you see a face, your little office workers open their filing cabinets, find the file with the matching face on the tab, and grant you access to things like that person's name, biographical information, and shared memories. This doesn't happen for other features, like the voice. You get a slight delay with voices as your workers search their cabinets. No, faces act as a special memory shortcut, and seem to be uniquely tied to recognition and recall. [Source]
Well... for most folks. For people with face-blindness (and there's a spectrum, by the way), the files are missing that useful face tab feature. In fact, there may be no stored information about faces at all. This makes for a messy office environment. When a face-blind person sees a face, their brain office might look a little like this as the workers paw haplessly through unmarked files and try to gain identity clues from much less efficient details, like voice, hair, and stature:
Couple that with anxiety and the following scene may occur:
Luckily, my face-blindness isn't too severe. I usually recognize friends, family, and myself, if I'm expecting to see them/me (though I did recently startle myself by glimpsing my reflection and thinking it was a stranger stink-eyeing me in a McDonald's). People with exaggerated or unusual facial features stick in my mind a bit better as well. Exposure helps, but I require quite a bit of it before anything stays.
Unfortunately, even with fairly mild face-blindness, I'm in a job that often necessitates quick facial recognition, and that's part of why face-blindness has been on my mind so much lately. Assigned seating at school and working in a call center worked in my favor in the past, but now I'm sitting at the front desk of a small business that has a number of clients in a similar age range who could drop in at any time. I've had panic attacks during networking events because I'm so terrified of accidentally reintroducing myself to someone I already know and offending them. Not only that, but because of the intrinsic relationship between facial recognition and semantic memory, I have a harder time coming up with information about the people that I should know. [Source]
I'm nervous about the repercussions this may have for my future as a writer as well. Because I've self-published, I need to handle most/all of my marketing, which, to be honest, involves a lot of schmoozing. I can't afford to let my face-blindness make me shy in settings where I must promote myself or be lost in the crowd. I also can't afford to insult important connections because I can't tell the potential agent I've been chatting with apart from a complete stranger wearing the same blouse.
I could certainly have it worse. There are even celebrities I recognize pretty consistently, though I wonder if that has to do with their celebrity status in the first place (do certain facial traits correlate with fame, either because they're more attractive or more memorable than most?). I question whether I even have this admittedly self-diagnosed condition sometimes.
Until, of course, I lose sight of my wife in the grocery store and wonder if I'll ever see her again.
The solution for now is to work on my other memory tools and, as uncomfortable as this makes me, to be forthright with my acquaintances. My boss has encouraged me to note my face-blindness to people who I may meet again. The risk here is that I'll be taken advantage of (fat chance I'll pick an assailant out of a lineup, for example!), but in my business circles, it's a risk I need to take.
All this to say: next time I try to introduce myself to you for the eighth time, please know I'm trying my best, even though my best is a cartoon office fire in my brain-pan.