I didn’t realize face blindness was a thing until I got glasses at age 36.
I could always see faces, and I could tell this face from that face. But I couldn’t get a face to stick as belonging to a specific person until I got glasses. I’m not sure what strange mental wiring problem causes this. I can see without my glasses, I can see well enough to read.
This caused problems for me when my wife lost weight. She didn’t look the same and I struggled with it. She’s always been beautiful but she’s lost 90 pounds and now I’m worried my wife is going to come home and find me with this hot milf.
I love reading this kind of thing. That’s fascinating, and that last bit is really wholesome. How does glasses play a part in this?
I can’t visualise things in my head, and my memory doesn’t have any visual aspect to it at all. For the longest time I didn’t realise that when people said to “picture this” or “picture that”, they literally meant to conjure up that image in their head. My mother used to spend long amounts of time describing changes she’d like to make to the garden, structures she’d like to build etc. and I just could never follow her descriptions.
Nowadays I mostly notice that when trying to compare things. Unless something is really familiar to me, I cannot really pinpoint changes to it unless I’ve a kind of before/after right in front of me.
Sometimes it saddens me a little. I’ve a dear friend who lives quite far away and we don’t get to see one another often. I’m very fond of them, but I don’t remember what they look like at all, beyond general, vague descriptions.
I don’t think I have face blindness, but if a woman that I don’t know particularly well changes her hairstyle, sometimes I get confused.
Like my wife will be watching her housewife shows and I’ll be like, “Who’s this lady? She’s new.”
And my wife will be like, “That’s the same woman. She changed her hair for the talking head segment.”
Anyway, the prince wasn’t the one going around looking for her. He had people for that, which is why they needed the slipper.
I don’t think I have face blindness, but if a woman that I don’t know particularly well changes her hairstyle, sometimes I get confused.
I mean, if you’re not intimately familiar with someone there’s going to be things you don’t notice. Late night, at the club, they just call this “Beer Goggles”. Everyone starts looking hot because you lose your ability to focus on more than “You’ve got tits and hair, that’s close enough”.
Like my wife will be watching her housewife shows and I’ll be like, “Who’s this lady? She’s new.”
And my wife will be like, “That’s the same woman. She changed her hair for the talking head segment.”
I’m faceblind.
The way we identify people is simply by triangulating between their voice, their gait, their clothing, their habitual-things, their assoicates/pets/whomever, their locale, their immediate-context, their habitual-actions, etc.
The single most-terrifying social-situation I ever experienced, was meeting a friend in a context that was in a different locale, so I had no idea who this person was, whom I knew that I knew. They knew me, & I simply had no idea who they were, from where, or anything.
Had I met them in the right locale, then I’d have known who they were.
Force-rewiring one’s brain is possible, but takes damn years of working on it…
( :
_ /\ _
( yes, that’s my actual-face, above ; )
PS: yes, it is possible to identify some people by their spirit, which isn’t material, so that gets added to the list above, too!
TIL I’m helping out by never changing my wardrobe.
Sidenote: I’m not face blind (I struggle with names instead), but I also sometimes struggle with recognizing people I only met once if I see them in a new context. Possibly because my brain doesn’t fully commit people to memory unless I meet them at least twice. This is a problem, because people recognize me after meeting me once, and it makes for awkward second interactions.
Oh man I can’t remember names for shit. I think I’m whatever the opposite of face blind is, like I remember people’s faces forever after just seeing them once and can usually remember the context I saw them in days or weeks later even if I never interacted with them. I think this really colors how my memory of people works because I basically don’t ever think about people’s names in my head, I sort of refer to them by face, which probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. It also means I pretty much always have to actively try to remember people’s names, otherwise I’ll hear it and immediately forget, like 2 seconds after someone tells me their name if I don’t repeat it in my head I’ve already forgotten it. I’ve learned to mask both of these things because I find it’s embarrassing to forget peoples names, especially someone I interact with a lot, and people are sometimes unsettled being remembered with clarity by a stranger.
I actually used to learn names by associating the face with the faces of other people I knew with the same name. In the area I lived at the time, it wasn’t uncommon to know multiple people with the same given name, so this helped quite often. Now I live in an area where there is very little overlap, and my brain seems to have fully abandoned that approach, even when I meet someone sharing a name with someone I know.
Thankfully, hearing someone’s given name often jolts my memory and I suddenly remember the full name. That’s at least somewhat redeeming after the initial awkwardness.
Also face blind - I use voice as primary clue, not just pitch but intonation and vocalization patterns. I’m a big language nerd and a natural mimic, so vocal qualities stick out nicely for me and are often the only clue I need. After that I keep a list, basically, of feature descriptions that “are” a person, because oh joy, I also am aphantasic and can’t just pull up some reference image, even if individual features (possibly somewhat related in my case)
I get a LOT of false positive hits on sight alone, but with vocal cues I’m rarely mistaken.
Going missing in crowds because I don’t remember/know what the person is supposed to be wearing so I can’t recognize them on sight is the worst, and I’m short so I only see a few options at a time in a sea of people. It’s super un-fun. Fortunately by now everyone I know is fully aware that I don’t actually recognize them most of the time, and so they go looking for me.
The worst for me is when I see someone who flags all the descriptor traits for a person I haven’t seen in a while, and I don’t know if I actually know them or just have that feeling, so I feel compelled to talk to them to sort out why they feel familiar. It happens kinda a lot, especially with women who resemble my late mother, which is a uniquely uncomfortable feeling, so I don’t actually talk to those people knowing I’m probably wrong, but man that compulsion…
Well, some people find others attractive because of their faces… and then some people find others attractive because of the size of their feet.
Like, unless Cinderella had really weirdly shaped feet, the only thing Prince Charming was looking for were small feet. I don’t think he cared who they were attached to.
prince charming has had enough and decides on policy that everyone must wear a standardized name tag
“When The Clock Strikes…” by Tanith Lee.
Dark retelling of the story.
Meh, the original Cinderella stories were pretty dark too. And honestly I think in a creepier way. Nothing like a saccharine story where the sweet singing birds peck out the eyes of the stepmother and her daughters.
If a shoe is a perfect fit, why is it falling off?
Been there.
