Have We Met?: Life with Face-Blindness

Oh, I HATE when that happens

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:37:13 GMT

I was walking into work this morning, my mind on my to-do list for the day, when a woman turned around, saw me, and said, "Hi, Heather!"

As I'm sure you've guessed, I had no idea who this person was. At all. None.

The fact that she greeted me by name helped a bit, but wasn't conclusive because because I was wearing my ID badge, which has my name on it. However, her tone suggested we knew each other, so I slipped immediately into "casual acquaintance" mode.

"Hey, how are you?" I asked, smiling. Meanwhile, inside, I was pleading, "PLEASE! Give me a clue to work with!"

"Doing good. Here for training."

Ah! A clue! So this wasn't someone from the building, but someone from another office. Okay, good, good. I can work with this.

"Well, it's good to have you here," I told her. "My training is next week."

"So you guys are upstairs, huh?"

Oh goodie. Another clue. This was someone familiar not just with me, but with my group. There are only three of us in my group who work out of this building, and the fact that she knew we existed meant she knew my group pretty well.

I started sorting rapidly in my head, trying to come up with any ideas. IT? Could be... The on-boarding group? Oooh! Definitely possible. Her voice was very familiar, so this was probably someone I had interacted with on the phone often, but not face-to-face that commonly.

"Yeah," I answered her. "Three little ducks in a row up there." Please, a hint! Please!

No hints were forthcoming. Time to dig a little.

"So what's new? How are you doing?" Nice generic question.

"Really good, thanks. You?"

Drat. Highly generic answer. That bought me nothing. Abort! Abort!

"Well, I should get up there. Have fun with your training!"

"Thanks. You have a good day too."

Okay, search for an appropriate way to end the conversation. What have you learned? Ah, that she doesn't work here. I point to the abandoned cafeteria, which we're standing outside. "Sorry the cafeteria isn't up and running, like back in the days." People love to reminisce about that old cafeteria. It's a good generic topic for someone who doesn't work in this building.

"Yeah, shame. See ya!"

And so I escaped without too big a blunder, but couldn't come up with who I had just spoken with.

About three minutes later it hit me. This was "C," a woman IN MY GROUP who works out of a different office. I've interacted with her MANY times, and we are sort of buddies. She even asks to see my vacation photos, and we tease each other fairly mercilessly. I talk to her at least three or four times a month, and I've seen her face-to-face at least seven or eight times. She and I are the only full-time female employees in my entire group, so you'd think I'd remember her! But I guess not.

I paged her an apology, saying that I didn't place her and that I'm sorry. She was in training all day and never called back. I'll try again tomorrow.

Ugh. I really hate moments like that.

Look what's back!

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:23:35 GMT

Sorry it's been so long between updates. I shall attempt to make this a more regular deal.

I suppose the big update is that I went to my doctor about the face-blindness, and she knew exactly what it was. This was the first time in my life I had been able to talk to someone about it without having to explain what it is first. It was a wonderful experience.

She arranged for an MRI of my brain, with and without contrast, which meant I got to face my two biggest fears at once: needles and confined spaces. I did all right. It wasn't the most pleasant experience, but the radiologist was very friendly and funny, which put me at ease, or at least at as much ease as I could be.

The MRI showed nothing unusual, which we all expected. Since there are no structural abnormalities with my brain, that leaves prosopagnosia as the only conclusion. Functional MRIs might be able to verify this a bit more, but after talking with my doctor about it, who in turn had consulted with a neurologist a couple times, we all decided it was pretty pointless to pursue it. We all figured it was face-blindness, and since there's no treatment for it, no cure, there's little use running more test.

I'm glad I went to the doctor and got the MRI. It's nice to know that there's nothing wrong with my brain structurally. I'm just face-blind. I figured as much, but I'm sure this is as close to an official diagnosis as I'll ever get, and it's a bit of a relief in a weird way.

Life continues on as it always has. I started a new job about five months ago, so I'm having to learn dozens of new faces. I'm doing well with some and poorly with others. It will come. I just have to be patient. Most of my coworkers I see once every month or two, so it's difficult to learn their faces with such intermittent exposure to them.

I'd like to trade for a day. I'd like to be able to see what non-face-blind people see, just for a little while. I don't understand how people can recognize each other so easily, and it would be absolutely fascinating to test-drive a normal brain for a bit. Anyone wanna swap? :)

I'm working on some ideas for what to post here in the coming days, but if there are particular topics you'd like covered, please let me know. Meanwhile, I think I should be offering up some links, so here's one to a great article Wired Magazine did about prosopagnosia. It's a bit rare in that it also touches on the less interesting, more recently-discovered "developmental prosopagnosia," which is the kind present at birth, like I have.

"Face Blind" at wired.com

Enjoy and thanks so much for reading! I'll try to make this place more interesting from here on out!

A Field Guide to Human Indentification in the Wild

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:58:43 GMT

I can't use faces to ascertain people's identities unless I've known them long enough, and have seen them consistently enough, to learn their face. Thankfully, there's more to a person than just a face, so I'm left with many tools at my disposal. They're not fool-proof, but they almost work. Here are some of the main ones, presented in order of usefulness (in my case) from most useful to least useful.

(A note about the examples I might give in this or other entries: Sometimes I'll mention interactions with minor celebrities or musicians. The vast majority of these people you won't recognize by name because their following is small, with perhaps one expection. Using them as examples is not at all meant as name-dropping or bragging or anything of the like. But these minor-celeb encounters make great examples because I'm interacting with people who I should be able to recognize, but often fail to. In fact, some online prosopagnosia tests actually use celebrity-identification as an indicator of whether a person is face-blind or not. And let's face it, "I met a musician" is somewhat more of an interesting read than "so there was this guy at work." So please don't interpret the blog as a "Heather brags about who she has met" site. I've never met any A-list movie stars or anything like that. The vast majority of the names won't mean a thing to most readers . And if you do recognize a name, well, I grew up in Los Angeles County and I still live just a few miles outside of it, so... these sorts of encounters sometimes happen.)

Voice
I tend to be very good at recognizing voices, and it's often how I first recognize a person I don't know well. Voice is, for me, the best way to know who someone is. I'm pretty quick at placing a voice.

Examples:
A couple nights ago the TV was on, but I wasn't looking at the screen. I heard a familiar voice and thought, "Kutner." I looked up, and yes, it was a commercial for a movie starring Kal Penn, who plays Kutner on House. He had only spoken one sentence, but I placed the voice immediately. To confirm, I looked up the movie on IMDB. Yes, that was him. There's no way I could have possibly placed his face as quickly.

The same thing has happened with Bones and Roswell, where I've recognized a guest-star immediately by their voice. With the actress on Bones, I was almost positive it WASN'T her, because her face just looked completely wrong to me. It had been 20 years since she played the role I remembered her from and she looked very different, but goodness, did she sound the same. I looked it up online, and yes, that was her. My voice recognition skills are much stronger than my face recognition skills, so if the two conflict, I really should go with voice.

When it fails:
It's not a fool-proof system. Sometimes a voice isn't enough. A couple weeks ago, in one day I had two five-minute conversations with two different people at work. Both people seemed to know me, and called me by name. They both implied that we had spoken before, both knew a bit about me, and both spoke of topics more personal in nature than people speaking for the first time would broach. Four minutes into our conversation, I finally figured out one guy was the office mail delivery person, but only because of something he said. He himself was not familiar to me. I never did figure out who the second guy was. It's obvious we had spoken at least once before these interactions, but I couldn't place the voice or the face.

Body Language/Mannerisms
I learn people's mannerisms very quickly, even if I'm not fully aware of them. I may not be able to tell you that so-and-so walks like this, but I'll know it when I see it. This is particularly useful when I'm too far away to see other distinguishing features of a person, or to hear their voice, but I'm close enough to see how they're moving.

Examples:
I went on a missions trip for a week with my church a while back. I met many people on that trip, but absolutely couldn't learn everyone's faces in just one week. The first day back at church after the trip, everyone who went on the trip was eager to greet one another and swap stories. I wanted to join in the fun, but there are 5,000 people at any given service at my church, so picking the few I met on the trip out of thousands was nearly impossible for me. At least, by face, that is. Quite a ways away, across a patio, I recognized a man from the trip. He was talking in an animated way with someone else, and I could tell by the way he moved his hand and his head who this was. And it wasn't a bizarre movement, or anything that would attract attention, but just by the particular way he moved, I knew it was him. So with confidence I went up and greeted him. I was right.

Another example would be seeing Robert Sean Leonard. I went to a play of his a few months back. I arrived a few hours early for the play in an attempt to get a ticket to the sold-out show. (I was fortunate enough to do so.) As I waited and walked around town, I kept my eyes peeled for RSL. I kept thinking I saw him everywhere. Every car that drove by with a dark-haired man was RSL in his car. Every man seated at an outdoor café with roughly the right body shape was him. I became convinced I wouldn't know the man if I met him. Later, while I waited outside the door of the theater, RSL walked out and even though looking for him was foremost on my mind, I did the classic double-take because I simply didn't recognize him. He was standing a mere fifteen feet from me, if that, and I wasn't completely sure it was him. It wasn't until he spoke that I certain. Again, I'm good at voices, and that was most assuredly Wilson's voice.

However, later on, everything changed. When he was on-stage and performing, then all his RSL mannerisms kicked in. Arms tomahawking as he drove home a point. Hand rubbing the back of his neck. Hands planting on hips. Fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. And then the more subtle stuff too. An expression, a glance, a way he'd walk or move his head... I ended up spending a lot of the play with a running commentary in my mind. "He did that in 'Daddy's Boy.' That's just like in 'Merry Little Christmas.' Oh, wow, he gave House a look just like that in 'Safe,'" and so on. On-stage, far, far away, there was no doubt in my mind that this was RSL, because he moved like RSL. Close-up, until he spoke, I wasn't completely sure.

When it fails:
The problem with this one is that I have to spend a lot of time with a person (or watching him on TV) in order to learn the way he moves. And even if I do know how a person moves, identifying him by it later requires him to be moving! It's great for picking people out of a crowd when they're active and moving, but it's horrible for situations when there's little-to-no movement. I can't think of a time I've ever used this trick at my office job!

Clothes and Hair
This one is a short-term, emergency solution. Unless we're talking about a uniform, clothes change daily. And hair can change without notice. (People should seriously send out memos...) But if I have to memorize a person quickly, this is my default method of identifying them later.

Examples:
This one's pretty self-explanatory. Last week I met a woman at work who wanted me to come see her later. Oh dear... How would I ever find her again? When she said that, I quickly memorized what I could. She was wearing a black jacket with our company logo on it and she had hair that reminded me of Stacy. (Yes, Warner. What, obsessed? Me?) Later, when I had to find her, I remembered these things and correctly identified her. Thankfully she was still wearing the jacket.

When it fails:
This one is so very hard to depend on, because it's so likely to change without warning. A woman can put her hair up or down and I won't recognize her again. One time I was at an outdoor concert and a girl asked me to save her spot while she left for a moment. Nothing strikes terror into the heart of this face-blind person like being asked by a stranger to save a spot. Not only does it require me to recognize the stranger upon his return, it also requires me to recognize that any other person who might come up isn't that person and isn't allowed to sit there. It's a scary thing! So I quickly memorized her shirt and she wandered off. A girl came up later and tried to sit in that spot I was saving. I told her it was saved. Well, guess what? Turns out she was the girl who asked me to save the spot in the first place! She had gone to the merchandise table and bought a new band shirt and put it on. Whoops... And of course, as I've already shared, I failed to recognize my own boss when he shaved his mustache, so facial hair isn't always a useful tool to rely upon either.

Location, Location, Location
Sometimes people have places they're supposed to be, and that makes me very happy. I'm glad to be a cubicle dweller for many reasons, but one of them is that everyone has their own little stationary box, usually with their name on it, and typically the person in the box is the person whose name is shown. Not always, mind you, but typically.

Examples:
Context is everything. Everything. The short, blonde woman with the astoundingly-tall dark-haired man who sit right there at church are my friends, J and C. By now I think I'd probably know them out of context, but maybe only just barely, and I certainly couldn't have done so a few months ago. The person sitting in this cubical is my acquaintance C, with whom I've had several lengthy conversations about that week's House. I'd never, ever know her out of context. If she isn't sitting right there in that cubicle, I won't be able to recognize her. Time can be a location too. The man who comes into the building at such-and-such time every afternoon is the security guard.

When it fails:
Sometimes people aren't where they're supposed to be. I can walk to up A's cubicle, only to find that the cubicle is empty, or maybe that A, B, and C are all in the cubicle and I have no idea at all which one of them, if any of them, is A! Depending on context can work well if everything goes as it should, but if anything deviates from the script, I'm sunk.

At church we have a worship team led by three people. I see these three people on-stage every single Sunday morning. One of these three is Steve Wiggins, former lead singer of the now-defunct band "Big Tent Revival." I've seen this man in countless music videos and in-person at concerts. I knew of him well before he came to our church. His should be a familiar face.

There was a mid-week meeting at church a while back, and there was some confusion over where the meeting was to be held. I wandered around in the wrong building and a man came up and asked if he could help. I didn't know him, but he seemed to have an air of authority about him and he had a name tag, which read "Steve," so I figured he was somebody. I asked if he was on-staff and he smiled and said yes. I asked him where the meeting was being held, and he walked me across campus to the meeting. We chatted along the way about items of no consequence. When we got to the meeting, we parted ways. I sat down... and he grabbed a guitar and got up on-stage. It was Steve Wiggins, of course. Without the guitar, I simply didn't have a clue who he was. He was ever-so-slightly out of context and my brain failed me completely. I kicked myself, because had I known I had this talented musician all to myself for a few minutes, I would have been asking all sorts of questions about the band and touring and recording. Oh well. Lost that opportunity!

So those are the main ways I can identify a person. There are others, I'm sure. I can identify a person by their footsteps, or even, with practice, the sound made when they open a door. Each person makes a different sound, believe it or not. I can figure out from the content of a conversation who someone is. I might recognize a prominent scar, a tattoo, or an unusual piercing. The mystery person might be wearing a name badge. He might have an accent. He might have a "prop," like a particular backpack, or a service dog in-training, or a toolbox. There are several ways to tell one human apart from another. While I may be mostly missing out on the main way to do it, it's still manageable. Sometimes it doesn't work at all, and I have no idea who a person is, or I guess wrong, but by and large, it sort of works to get me through our interactions until I've seen the person enough to learn his face.

Taub does not equal Brennan? Seriously?

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:54:03 GMT

Oh, season four of House. You are a confusing thing... For the first four episodes, I thought House had one less fellowship applicant than he actually had. I knew something was amiss when a coworker and I were discussing "97 Seconds." She insisted House was down to X number of men. I was just sure that House actually had one less than that.

Uh-oh. I watched it again.

So as it turns out, get this: there's some character running around named Brennan! Who knew?! When Wilson mentioned to electrical-outlet-adventure!House that "Brennan" had come up with an idea, and House asked who that was, I was really hoping Wilson would answer, because I wanted to know too! Brennan? Since when? I guessed that it was someone's first name (though it did seem odd that Wilson would be so familiar with the fellow applicants as to be on a first-name basis with them), and figured it didn't really matter, because other than Amber and Stacy, no one on that show ever goes by their first name anyway. I decided to tentatively make Taub's first name "Brennan" and carry on with life.

See, my mind had magically merged Brennan and Taub into one entity for the first several episodes of the "Survivor" arc and had dubbed this entity "Taub." (Or perhaps now "Brennan Taub," if that really was his first name.) It even merged their backstories. Taub was a third-world-country doctor who gave that up and went into plastic surgery. A bit of an odd transition, I thought, but Taub isn't the youngest in the bunch. He's plenty old enough to have made a career change. It wasn't until "Mirror, Mirror," when the two men got their own, individual time with the patient, complete with cheap, ultra-rushed character-development-cum-backstory, that I realized what was going on. Then Brennan had his swan-song in "Whatever It Takes" and I finally, finally got to the point where I could tell him apart from his "twin," Taub... just in time for Brennan get the axe. Oops. Well, at least I won't have the Taub/Brennan confusion anymore!

Looking at them now, I can see the difference, but I can also see why I confused them.

Taub:

Brennan:

Two white males with dark hair and a receding hairline, both running around in lab coats and ties. (Okay, so maybe Brennan's hairline isn't actually receding, but it does start pretty high on his head...) I read about another face-blind person who thought Cameron and CTB were the same person. And when I started watching the show, I thought Wilson and Chase were the same character. Once I figured out they were two different people, I had to let Chase's accent tell me who was who. I dreaded when Wilson would show up for a DDX. Having them both in the same scene was too confusing! I'm glad I got it straighted out before the third season began, or the Tritter arc would have really perplexed me...

Anyway, kind of a pointless story, but it gives you some idea of what TV viewing is like for me. Movies too. Anybody seen "The Prestige"? That movie was absolutely impossible for me to follow, and I've read it drove other face-blind people crazy too. Maybe that's why I like books so much. No confusion there, as it doesn't matter what anyone looks like!

A Brief Introduction

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 04:33:58 GMT

Welcome! I had a little intro post below, but it wasn't exactly... explanatory. I suppose it would be helpful if I talked a bit about what face-blindness is, huh? :) Here's what I've experienced with it.

I can see faces. There's no problem with my vision. (Well, there is, but it's corrected with glasses and not related to this issue.) What I can't do is recognize a face, or distinguish faces, until I've had repeated, prolonged exposure to the face. Like with many things, there are degrees of face-blindness. At one end you find people with face-blindness so severe that they cannot recognize their immediate family, spouse, or close friends. I have no problem identifying those people in my life, because I do have the ability to eventually learn a face. I'm sort of in the middle of the face-blindness scale, I suppose.

A couple examples might help illustrate how well I do (or don't) remember faces.

When I was in college, there was a semester when I had a three-hour lab class on Wednesdays and a six-hour lecture class on Fridays. The semester began and I went to my Wednesday class, and later my Friday class. Then Wednesday, Friday, and so on. It wasn't until just over two weeks into this schedule, after having sat through nine hours of the lab class and twelve hours of the lecture class, that I realized the woman teaching the lecture class was sitting next to me in the lab class! It took almost twenty hours of exposure to her face for me to finally put the two together. And the context wasn't even very different between the two scenarios. I was still seeing her on-campus at the college. It wasn't like I was failing to recognize my teacher at the grocery store or something.

Another more recent example is from work. My boss retired and a new boss was hired in his place. I saw him for hours nearly every workday. One day, two months after he started working in our office, he shaved his mustache. That was it. No new hair-do. No sudden addition of glasses. Just shaved his rather unassuming mustache. When I came in to work that morning, I saw a coworker chatting with a man at the far end of the room, near my desk. As I approached, I wondered, "Who's that talking to my coworker? I guess we have a visitor today." It wasn't until the "visitor" waved at me and said good morning that I realized it was simply my boss, sans mustache. Even after working with him for two months, I hadn't yet learned his face well enough to recognize him without the mustache.

From what's understood of face-blindness, there are two varieties. One is brought about by head trauma and the other is developmental. The developmental version is present at birth. It also seems to be inherited. Mine is developmental, though I don't know who I inherited it from. No one else in my family seems to have it. Then again, it wasn't until a couple years ago that I realized I had it. I thought I was just "bad at faces." The coping mechanisms I had automatically learned to deal with social situations, I assumed everyone was using. It wasn't until I learned about prosopagnosia, face-blindness, online that I realized I was different. It was quite the relief to realize that there was an explanation for my troubles other than "Heather doesn't pay enough attention." It was nice to know that my failure to recognize a person wasn't my fault, because I had always assumed that it was.

What exactly is going on in my brain that's different than what's going on in an average person's brain? I don't know. One theory I read, which makes sense to me, is that while an average person can use the face-recognition portion of their brain to identify people, a face-blind person must rely upon the object-recognition portion. Since the difference between one face and another is subtle, forcing the object-recognition portion to distinguish between faces is a losing battle. It's simply not meant to perform that task.

There also seems to be a tie between face-blindness and a lack of a sense of direction. I don't understand the physiology behind that connection at all, but I do know it's true for me. I have absolutely no sense of direction. I lived in my parents' house for twenty years and I cannot draw you a floor plan of that house. If I wanted to run two errands in a row, back before I had my GPS receiver, I'd have to run the first errand, return home, and then venture out for the second. This was because I had the paths from my house to the various stores memorized, but because they were learned by rote, and without any understanding of how the two sites related to each other in space, I couldn't deviate from the memorized directions and add a detour into the trip. When people give me detailed directions how to get somewhere, if I'm expected to return after I get there, I have to ask them for directions back. I lack the ability to reverse directions. This seems particularly difficult for people to understand, so I get the, "Just... reverse them!" response a lot, as if I'm trying to be smart with them. Sorry. Can't reverse them!

So that's it in a nut-shell. I don't have it as bad as some, but it is present. It makes for some social awkwardness at times. It sometimes requires a bit of acting (lying?) on my part to pretend that I have a clue who is talking to me. It has led to some embarrassing moments when I fail to recognize someone, or I mis-identify someone. But overall, while it impacts my life, it certainly doesn't make it particularly difficult. It just makes it interesting.

Thanks for dropping by. I'll be updating more later on, including links to other face-blindness sites and a bit about how I do tell one person from another since I can't rely on faces.

Hello!

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 07:13:49 GMT

Hi. My name is Heather and I'm face-blind. I have prosopagnosia. I can visually see faces, but I have a hard time recognizing and distinguishing people by their face. I can eventually learn a face, but it takes me a long time and repeated exposure to get to the point where I can consistently recognize a person by face alone.

When I first learned there was such a thing as face-blindness, and I realized I had it, I ran around the internet reading as much about it as I could, saying, "I'm JUST like that!" repeatedly. It was fun and interesting to read other face-blind people's anecdotes and see how other people dealt with not recognizing faces. I figure I'm not the only face-blind person who likes to read about other face-blind people, and face-blindness in general, so I thought I'd set up a blog dealing exclusively with my experience with face-blindness. People who aren't face-blind might also find it interesting, as it is a somewhat unusual condition. I can't speak for all face-blind people, of course, but I can relate my own story and experiences.

I'll be sharing relevant anecdotes from my day, posting links to interesting research regarding face-blindness, talking about childhood experiences that make more sense now that I know about face-blindness, and discussing the coping mechanisms I use (with varying success), among other topics. I may also discuss my lack of a sense of direction, as studies are beginning to indicate that there may be a connection between the two. Feel free to friend this journal if you'd like. Also feel free to comment or PM if you'd like to add to the discussion or if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading!