From Wikipedia: Hi, my name is [Euler] and I'm face blind. I look forward to introducing myself to you again in the future. In face blindness news: some smart people have written a new diagnostic quiz for more effectively identifying face blindness. According to the paper, it seems highly accurate when used in conjunction with a visual test e.g. the Cambridge Face Memory Test. If you want to know where you fall on the facial recognition scale, or suspect you might be face blind, you can take the quiz here and the CFMT here.
Yeah so I wasn't sure if I was face blind or just 'bad at faces' (like, the difference between being autistic and being kinda socially awkward), but I got ~70 on that diagnostic test sooo yeah. Even just now I was thinking 'well, I recognise my family members' and then I remembered that my main identifier for my dad is 'big bald dude' and just recently it took a minute for me to recognise him in a crowd with lots of big bald dudes (I think my thought process was 'identify big bald dude in crowd' > 'check face against memory' > [whirring sounds] > 'dude waves at me' > 'Dad!'). Like, I think I can recognise faces eventually, but it takes a lot of effort and I end up staring at the person for ages before I recognise them. Does that sound like what you guys have?
i got a bad score on both of the tests -_-. i actually didn't consider i had faceblindness for years until i learned the "identical" twins i knew weren't actually identical or really even close to identical, and i was one of the few people who still couldn't tell at a glance after knowing them for a super long time. @An Actual Bird that sounds pretty familiar, yeah. i go by hair or wait for people to talk/look like they recognize me if i'm extra unsure.
Yay indeed. Yay for big eyebrows and angular jaws. I've got it pretty mild: generally I can recognise people I know well (e.g. family members, old friends), but it takes me a long time to be able to confidently recognise acquaintances unless they're really distinctive-looking. I have a lot of difficulty telling new people apart, and learning their names (apparently this might be related? Since memory of faces is a strong visual cue for memory of other personal details, so if your recognition is crap then it's harder to remember.) When I was a kid I found most live-action films confusing because I couldn't tell the characters apart. I assumed this was something everyone experienced as a child, since I've gotten better at it now...then I realised I'd just gotten better at using other cues to recognise people, and most children don't actually have that problem. I think there's a not-insignificant correlation between face blindness and autism, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a higher-than-average proportion of face blind people on the forums.
Oh and like the most terrifying experience of my life, experienced daily for about three months: collecting two tiny French children from French nursery when I was doing childcare in France. All French children have the same haircut. I looked after those kids for two hours daily for months, and picking them up was still incredibly stressful for my myopic face blind ass.
Argh, yes, this is still a problem I have! My most notable experience to date was recently watching Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy, where all of the plot requires knowing who is spying on whom and infiltrating whom, but everyone is an old white guy, what do. I think that's also one of the reasons I like Marvel films a lot; people have superhero suits! :D (Plus, they are still somewhat different in appearance, as opposed to Yet Another Blond Guy, or whatever. Though I did not know that Rhodey changed actors between films until someone told me. >_<)
OH MY GOD SAME. The person who told me thinks I'm racist, now. The one I remember best is the LotR films: I was 6-8 when they came out, and it took me years to be able to tell Aragorn and Boromir apart. Looking back, that seems really weird.
i actually had the same problem, even though they don't look alike at all? same with merry and pippin. side to side the differences are super obvious, but they've got super similar jawlines and that same fluffy brownish hair that i was often confused about who was where.
Yeah! And I had the same situation IRL a few months ago. I met a bunch of new people, was having dinner sitting opposite two guys I'd met that afternoon. I could see the obvious differences in their faces (different features, colouring, everything) but I realised if they got up and switched places, I wouldn't know who was who. That same evening a group of us went out to the pub, and I failed to recognise the guy who'd been conducting us all afternoon because he'd changed his shirt. NB he was conducting, so I had just spent literally 3+ hours staring at his face. Er, that is, I often don't know who's who. But this was a memorable "two guys who look different but still look the same" case.
Same with Aragorn and Boromir :P Also I've taken the Cambridge test twice now and it just always reaffirms to me that I am so awful at white guys. Like, so awful.
My dad shaved him mustache when I was in elementary school and I didn't know who he was to the point I wouldn't go home with him.
I have fairly mild face blindness and bruh this is a problem when teaching. I just started my prac for this semester and I am lost in a sea of mostly small blonde white children. I will get there eventually. At my last prac I had finally sorted out three boys from each other and then over the weekend one of them got a haircut and nope I was lost again. Also my current pracn teacher looks like a girl in my course and when I look at her, her face kinda morphs into that girl's face and I'm like *yells*
I'm actually really excited because the final project for my digital studio class is to make an autobiographical one-page comic, and one of the prompts is "the most embarrassing moment of your life". I get to finally explain to people how my brain works and maybe they won't think I'm an asshole for forgetting who they are?
I just walked up to group of choir people. One of them said "there's a spare cup of tea if Rick doesn't want it!" I turned to Rick, who had a cup of tea in front of him, and said "do you not want it?" That wasn't Rick. Of course.
"I'm remembering something..."* Has anyone read The Devil Wears Prada? At one point the protagonist is given about four hours and a book of headshots and told to learn all the names of the people in the book so she can point them out to her boss at a party. Or something like that. Anyway, it occurs to me that this task is perhaps not actually completely 100% fucking impossible as I previously assumed, and instead is maybe just very difficult. If you're not face blind. *- Fun Home, which is a good musical.
I've not read the book, but I've seen the film and I remember that, yeah. I think it would be really difficult for someone who has no trouble with faces and names, but perhaps doable. Still a dick move of the boss though :P
