Facial Blindness

I recently saw a report on a man who lacked the ability to recognize faces. He could not tell if a person walking up to him was a stranger or someone he'd known his entire life. Some brain abnormality made it impossible for him to pick out the face of even his mother. You can imagine the frustration and embarrassment such a disorder could bring.

When I first heard of this issue, I couldn't help but relate to it. Apparently, there is a broad spectrum of face blindness, with minor recognition troubles being more common than previously thought. People with mild face blindness may use clues like hairstyles, setting, clothing and voices to recognize people instead of instantly knowing the face. While I generally have no trouble recognizing my friends and family, I am easily thrown off when trying to locate them in a crowd. It often takes numerous encounters before I recognize a new face, and I have trouble picturing anyone's face in my mind.

I have a slight knack for drawing, but, no matter how hard I try, I have great difficulty drawing someone's likeness. I can draw a perfectly respectable picture of a face, but if I try to copy from a photo or a model, something doesn't add up. The face just does not match. If I sketch from another drawing or painting, however, in which the likeness has already been transferred from "real life", I am able to reproduce that certain combination that makes each face unique and recognizable.

I also occasionally have trouble figuring out who's who when watching a movie, a problem I've inherited from my mother. We find it especially hard when there is a large cast of white men who all have short brownish hair and wear boring clothes. The two of us recently tried to watch the film "The Good Shepherd" and could not keep track of the characters. It irritated me that Matt Damon's character wore glasses the entire time. I thought it was quite unfair that they gave a notable prop to the one actor whose face was most recognizable to me, and did nothing else to distinguish between the other guys. I mean, was an eye patch or a hideous scar asking too much?

I went online to do some research about this condition and found a very interesting website Faceblind.org which included some tests to assess the problem. Surprisingly, I did okay on the tests, especially the one recognizing famous faces. I guess I've seen too many "People" magazines in my lifetime to not know Brad Pitt on sight.

So my inquiries have just left me with more questions--which always seems to be the case. Whenever I start with just one question, I end up with exponential growth (but that's another issue altogether). So now I wonder if I have a mild brain abnormality (well, one of many, I guess), which would be genetically supported by my mother sharing the same difficulty. Or perhaps I just don't remember faces well due to lack of interest (it was quite a dull movie on a boring topic). That would transfer over to the real world, as well (not that I'm saying I encounter a lot of uninteresting people on a daily basis...). Maybe I don't remember faces on the first few meetings because I don't bother to look too closely. Perhaps if I just tried harder I would recognize loads of people and be quite friendly and social.

I'd rather just blame my brain.