Poor at Remembering Faces? You Might Be 'Face Blind'
If you have a bad memory for faces, you might have prosopagnosia, also known as "face blindness." The word comes from Greek, where prosopon means "face" and agnosia means "not knowing."
There are two types of prosopagnosia. "Acquired prosopagnosia" is caused by brain damage, while people with "developmental prosopagnosia" just never developed the ability to recognize faces.
According to the UK's National Health Service (NHS), studies suggest that as many as one person in 50 has developmental prosopagnosia — and they may not even realize it.
People with severe prosopagnosia may not recognize the faces of close friends and family — or even their own reflection. So, to compensate, they may use different strategies to identify people, such as remembering how they speak, walk, dress, or wear their hair.
In a 2016 interview with the BBC, Evie Prichard, then 24, shared her experience of having severe prosopagnosia. She said she walked past her own mother in the street, not recognizing her because she had changed her hair from curly to straight.
"To me, a face is like a dream. It's incredibly vivid in the moment, but it drifts apart seconds after I look away," she said.
There are also milder forms of prosopagnosia.
For example, conservationist and chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall says she has problems recognizing people with "average" faces. "I find it very embarrassing! I can be all day with someone and not know them the next day," she said in a 2010 article published in The New Yorker.
Embarrassment can push some people with the condition to avoid social interaction. It can also make it hard for them to form relationships.
But how do you know if you've got prosopagnosia?
Doctors can use computer-based tests to see if a person can, for example, spot famous faces or memorize and later recognize faces they've never seen before.
The opposite of prosopagnosia is the skill of exceptional facial recognition. People with this ability are called "super-recognizers." Super recognizers can memorize thousands of faces — often after only seeing them once and just for a moment.
