It’s Oddly Hard for Me to Recognize Faces

Our psychology professor showed us a video about a woman who had trouble recognizing faces.

Her disability made it hard to maintain relationships with other people. It sounded like a nightmare. I felt so sad for her that I teared up.

Her condition was called prosopagnosia.

So imagine how stunned I was when the clip ended, and my classmates burst into laughter!

“BBC shows are so melodramatic,” they said. My prof agreed with a smile.

What the hell? How could my classmates be so callous? No matter how much the BBC dramatizes things, what the woman went through was still real.

Prosopagnosia? What Prosopagnosia?

I never thought I could have this condition, though, since I could recognize my friends’ faces. Right?

My friends Brittany and Daniel were my lunch buddies in my undergrad. I saw them twice a week.

One day, Brittany had her glasses off.

When I got to the table where we usually sat for lunch, I saw a stranger next to Daniel. I wanted to be friendly, so I held out my hand to her. “Hi, what’s your name?”

Brittany and Daniel were shocked. But they laughed.

Of course, I laughed along with them even though I was embarrassed.

Months later, I told a cousin about this incident, joking that I must have issues with remembering faces.

My cousin didn’t look amused, however. He looked concerned and judgmental.

Years later, I told another friend about my facial challenges, since I thought it was funny, and my friend was a standup comedian — no, I’m not joking.

But I was startled when she told me it was a problem and that I should get it checked.

I ignored her advice. She was taking it too seriously. Sure, it was mortifying sometimes, but it was no big deal. I would just apologize to the person and we would laugh it off.

There is Definitely No Prosopagnosia Here

Thomas, another friend, bumped into me several times. I could never recognize him and had to ask him to re-introduce himself every time.

Thomas kept changing his hairstyle, so I could never pin him down. But as soon as he spoke, I would recognize his voice and know who he was.

Yet, voice recognition didn’t always help me. A trans guy friend, Jake, had taken testosterone for some months. When we met again, he looked different and his voice was lower.

So I was confused about who Jake was until I paid attention to the lilt of his voice, and how he liked to say “humans.”

Jake laughed when I explained why I was clueless about who he was at first.

There were other times when I recognized a friend by something external. Lara had those dangly earrings. Anna wore a green jacket.

They were much harder to recognize when they stopped wearing those earrings and that jacket.

More Facial Recognition Mayhem

In my undergrad, I kept running into my friend Freda. Every time, she had to tell me who she was. I just could not recognize her.

But I finally recognized her when she became my roommate.

Locations are a big clue for who the person is. In grad school, I had a classmate, Arnold, who once shaved his beard. I had no idea who this guy was, until he sat down in the seat where Arnold always sat…

With my colleague Layne, I was used to him with a beard. When he came into the centre one day with a clean-shaven face, I thought he was a stranger. Until he opened his mouth.

This happens with celebrities, too. My friends thought it was obvious that Twilight’s Edward Cullen was played by the same actor as Harry Potter’s Cedric Diggory.

But I didn’t know. I had to closely compare their faces before I could see. As you can imagine, Edward the vampire and Cedric the wizard look pretty different and come from disparate universes.

How can you expect me to see the same actor when Robert Pattinson was playing such different roles? His makeup, clothing, and hairstyle were completely distinct as Cedric vs Edward.

The Moment of Truth

Nevertheless, I wasn’t too concerned. Most of the time, I had enough external cues to help me. I could make mistakes, but they’re more comical than anything.

Few people were offended when I couldn’t recognize them. Sometimes I would tell people in advance that I have trouble remembering faces, and ask them not to take it personally.

In any case, this is completely normal and harmless. I still recognize people, as long as I have enough clues. I totally don’t have prosopagnosia, I’m sure.

Out of curiosity, I googled this condition, and read about people’s experiences on Quora.

Oh no…I really do have prosopagnosia!

It turns out that people with this disability have to rely on external cues, such as clothes, hairstyle, a beard, glasses, their voice, etc.

Next, I tried this online test where you see a celebrity’s face, with all their hair and clothes cropped out of the picture. Their image was put beside an artificial face with similar features.

You have to guess which picture was the real celebrity. If you’re not familiar with a celebrity, click the button to say that you don’t know them, and you won’t be tested on their face.

So you may or may not be surprised to hear this, but:

I got most of the answers wrong.

Even for the ones I got right, most were random, lucky guesses. I was quite lost. There were only a few celebrities that I was confident about and got right: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Watson, and Barack Obama.

When I told my therapist about this (I’m seeing her for something else), she thought this was because these celebrities had striking features.

Now I was confused. What striking features?

Jennifer Lawrence, Barack Obama, Emma Watson, and Leonardo DiCaprio just had faces. I didn’t see anything different about them compared to other celebrities.

The test results said that I scored higher than 0 out of 10 people. I wasn’t offended by the bluntness of the evaluation.

But I do feel foolish for not knowing that I had prosopagnosia, even when the evidence was staring me in the face — no pun intended.

It was like how I assumed for decades that I didn’t have autism, despite how much I could relate to autistic characters in stories.

Autistic folks are also statistically more likely to have prosopagnosia than non-autistic folks.

Maybe that BBC clip really was melodramatic. My experiences don’t necessarily reflect everyone else’s, of course, but prosopagnosia doesn’t have to be a tragedy. We can learn to cope, too.

Thankfully, the people around me don’t change their hairstyles or shave off their beards too often. And I usually only see them when I expect to, such as in a meeting or outing.

Hmm, I wonder if my prosopagnosia is related to my horrible visual imagination of people. Even in my memory, people’s faces are blurry. It’s like my brain doesn’t compute, and doesn’t care, about facial features. Maybe that’s why I struggle to draw human faces, too. Facial proportions just don’t make sense to me and they seem arbitrary.

How about you? Do you have trouble recognizing faces too? If so, do you also rely on external cues such as their hairstyle or clothing?

UNRELATED LESSON: When you dream about someone you know in real life, you’re probably not thinking about them. At least, according to Jungian dream interpretation. People in your dreams usually symbolize something else, and they could represent a part of you.

So when I dream about my friend Cordelia, she could represent my wilder, more free-spirited side. When I dream about Gordon, he might be my more ambitious and hyper-focused side. But who knows?

An important thing about dream interpretation, is that the dreamer is the ultimate authority on what their dream means. So if you feel like your dream was literally about that person you dreamed about, then I don’t have the right to tell you that you’re wrong, either.

Note: this piece was to make fun of my blunders in not recognizing faces. But not everyone who struggles to remember faces must have prosopagnosia. David B. Clear recounts his own experiences with facial recognition, and shows that for some folks, it may not be prosopagnosia, but something else entirely.

Originally published on Badform on Nov 17, 2022