Prosopagnosia Means All Faces Look Alike to Me
Face blindness robs me of the ability to remember you.
I’m at a networking event and meet someone named Teresa.
“Teresa, what do you do?”
“I own my own accounting firm. How about you?”
“I work from home as a virtual assistant. Actually, I should let you know that I have prosopagnosia. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s a brain condition that means I can’t recognize faces the way most people can.”
“Oh, well I’m bad with names, so we’re even.”
“Actually it means that the next time I see you, I’ll have no memory of having seen you before, so please don’t be offended if I introduce myself again or walk right by you.”
“Oh, no problem.”
This is a typical exchange for me and a few things about it are very frustrating. First, it’s extremely frustrating to suffer from prosopagnosia. It’s also called face blindness and it’s a serious social handicap.
All faces look alike to me. Unless I’ve seen you maybe 25 times in the space of a month, your face will look the same to me as all the other faces of people who are your gender, race, age group and who have roughly the same hair color…
