On Prosopagnosia

[gaudior]

Oh, hey, look, it is an opportunity to explain how people look to me!

As I've mentioned before, I have prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. I think it's hard for people who don't have it to understand what that means. I mean, Hannibal had a character who had it, and tried to replicate the effect by always blurring everyone's faces whenever they

Comments

[apintrix]

Some yes, some no - the ones where he's been superimposed over somebody jowly, or has been heavily made up, or is in profile I don't think I would recognize. (Makeup can really transform a person.) The others, totally.

I have pretty decent facial recognition, but it's depressingly racist: I find it generally much more difficult to tell Asian faces apart than white or black faces. I always have to work harder to learn my Asian students' names... from what I've read, that seems to be one of those cognitive-development things (depends on what kinds of faces you were exposed to in childhood - kind of like language depending on what words you were exposed to during the critical period) that no amount of good intention or adult exposure can wholly remediate.

However, it has the odd effect that I CAN tell when my fusiform gyrus has caught up. Suddenly the faces of my Asian students are as particular and distinct to me as those of the rest of my class. It's just delayed, not fully automatic.

Anyway, /tangent...

[nightengalesknd]

I have the problem where my prosopagnosia can be mistaken for the racial cognitive-development problem. Like had to have help distinguishing between little African-American boys when I rotated on a psychiatry unit in Philadelphia and couldn't pick my patient out of a line-up. And I am sure that people thought it was a racial thing because I'm white and the kids and the people I asked for help were African-American. I would have had exactly the same problem had my patient and all the others been little Caucasian boys.

[mrissa]

Yes, I can. They look like John Malkovich, and I have seen him in enough things that I know what he looks like. It might take me a minute to identify him specifically, but to my non-faceblind eye it's clearly him.

[nightengalesknd]

So I am probably not the target audience for this question because I have a combination of prosopagnosia and pop-culturagnosia. So I have no idea who John Malkovich is

[sovay]

I'm curious-- can other people identify him from these pictures?

I cannot answer your question honestly, because I know all of the original portraits, so the only ones that are even faintly confusing for me are the ones with either extensive makeup (the Karsh Hemingway) or the ones without a clear view of Malkovich's face (the Leibowitz Lennon), although in both cases I could tell you that neither picture looks quite right. The Dalí might confuse me if I saw it without context, because it's easy to recognize Dalí by his mustache and move on. The rest I know the faces that should be in them, so I know Malkovich isn't it.

That's a fascinating effect, no matter what.

[q10]

i recognize some of these photos as not the originals, because the i'm sensitive to some technical details, and for some of the cross-gender ones i recognize various cues that make me think i'm looking at a male-type person.* but do i recognize these all as photos of the same person without a lot of staring and checking back and forth and guesswork? nope.

*i do not know the appropriately inclusive way to frame this.