new thread
Hello everyone, it has been said that face blindness is much more common in longhair men than in the general population. Probably less than 1% of the general population has this condition.
What is face blindness?
Face blindness is a cognitive deficit characterized by the inability to recognize people by face alone, and/or to distinguish faces from one another. I have this condition, and yet, did not know it until fairly recently. In its most severe form, people may be unable to recognize their own children when picking them up from school.
Probably the most notable feature of this condition is being unable to recognize a "face out of place". Here is an example: Let's say you go to the pharmacist once a month to pick up a prescription at the drug store. That same pharmacist sees you out in public, says hi to you, leaving you scratching your head, trying to figure out who this person is. Similar situations have happened to me on countless occasions.
For those who are not shy, how many of you out there also have this? Also, face blindness often occurs with Asperger's.
Absalom
Also, thank you Bill, for helping me to understand this condition better.
I have never experienced anything severe related to what you described, but I have had trouble remembering people's faces. It's not quite as bad as it used to be, but in my mind the picture of their face will be fuzzy, or I can tell that something about their face seems.. out of place, and it's because I'm not remembering them quite how they look.
It seems that you may have this condition, very mildly. On the other end of the spectrum are people who can't recognize their own children when picking them up from daycare.
Absalom
This is one I can relate to, I had no idea such a thing existed as such (had an official name) until someone on this board told me about it earlier.
I have trouble recognizing someone out of place, as you said it. Usually the other person will be the first to say hello if we meet somewhere or I might have gone right by them.
Also people who look similar to each other can throw me off, differences that other people use to tell people apart must be too subtle for me. I suppose if I made a great effort to associate a certain feature with a certain person that might help, but the very fact that it takes special effort to do what comes so easily to others must mean I have this problem.
I always knew I was just "bad with faces", but had no idea anybody else was or that it was a recognized (no pun intended)problem.
Thanks for bringing this up Absalom, it might help others to know about it.
Hi ChrisG. I had no idea it had official name either, until I met Bill Choisser. He has been very helpful to me in understanding this condition.
This is probably the number one trait of face blindness. This has happened to me on countless occasions.
Same here. I have developed ways to cope, though. To identify someone I will use:
height
hair
scars
tattoos
moles
gait
In school I did not realize I was bad at faces. In retrospect, I can remember obcessively studying the faces in the school yearbook. Studying faces and the names attached to them for 30 minutes or so nearly each day was a coping mechanism. This helped me to survive school.
Thanks for your input.
Absalom
i wonder why people with longer hair are more likely to have it
Hey muffinman. You are putting the cart before the horse. Men with face blindness are more likely to grow their hair long. It is believed that men with this condition want to stand out from the crowd. Remember, the majority of men out there have similar short hair styles and look pretty much alike to us.
Absalom
I never knew this existed and have never thaught about it...but since it was brought up i actually do realise that when i meet family or friends, they are the first ones to recognise me before i regnise them. Odd how i never thought about this...
This is pretty normal for this condition. Many who have it don't even know it, or discover they have it at 40 or 50 years of age. The human brain is remarkable. In your case, without even knowing it, you may have used hair, height, gait, clothing, voice, or other means to recognize people.
Absalom
What the-? is this thing serious?
Yes, this is a very real condition, and I have it. Not recognizing people has gotten me into embarrassing trouble in the past.
Absalom
As Absalom said, I have it. I even passed my own mother on the sidewalk once in our small town's business district, and I did not recognize her.
As little kids, when you're still young enough to become savant with stuff, many of us need something that works since the face doesn't, and we become savant with hair. This can definitely shove a guy in the direction of being a "born longhair". No one finds clones attractive; who wants to look indistinguishable from everybody else?
I'm far better at telling longhaired guys apart than I am at telling apart anybody else. I have a few longhair neighbors and I recognize them anywhere I see them in town. I can't recognize the lady next door unless she's standing on the porch of her house. We've been neighbors for 24 years.
A team from Harvard, M.I.T., and U.C. Berkeley with federal research bucks to spend put me in a functional MRI machine, which shows what your brain is doing. They found when I am shown faces, my brain does nothing. Face blindness is real.
And it is probably quite common among longhaired men, because face blind guys are often driven to have long hair. If there's a "longhaired men's disease", face blindness is it. Good question to pose here, Absalom.
Bill
I have never heard of this disorder, Bill.
It sure sounds serious though. To not even recognise your own mother walking down the street! wow!
Yes, i can see how this disorder can be indirectly linked with long haired guys. They canno't recognise or distuinguish people's faces so they identify people by their hair instead.
Thus they grow their own hair because it feels most natural to them.
The brain must just be lacking a certain chemical imbalance or something to fail to read peoples faces. Very strange indeed.
I suppose there has been little documentation of prosopagnosia across time and cultures but I wonder if hair length of a person with face blindness would be different from the mainstream in a long haired culture.
As an aside, the subject of prosopagnosia is fascinating to me and find it would have been helpful to have heard about before teaching. This board is the only place I have encountered it and find it answers a lot of questions for me about a child who never seemed to know the names of his classmates or recognized me in the hallways.
Elizabeth
All these while, I was seemingly struggling with socializing and making friends and such... I felt that, as I grow older, my close friends seemed lesser, and my closer friends from childhood drew farther. I couldn't put a reason to all these except for, maybe, I'm becoming all the more self-conscious the older I grow, and is increasingly less open in front of others, lest I reveal too much of my weaknesses in front of them. My lack of "openness" actually caused me to sometimes feel "imprisoned" by my own actions in social situations, and inevitably, made me feel frustrated easily during socializing. It's also difficult for me sustain a meaningful conversation with others and, as a result, making new close buddies is virtually impossible. I thought I was having a problem, and Asperger's seemed to describe it relatively well. I have all the so-called "symptoms" listed in the previous thread except for the one that "keeps precise records". I've also done an online test and the results seem to indicate positive (although I'm not sure if my responses were perfectly unbiased or not, after reading the thread).
The funny thing is, I only noticed and felt my gradual change after I made the decision to grow my hair long. I'm not sure if this is coincidental, or consequential. But nevertheless, I was far more "socializable" and felt more at ease in social settings during my first 2 years in uni (1996 - 1997), but became gradually reserved and introverted from then on. Although I'm not sure if I could say that I'm completely at ease and love socializing before that, but I'm sure that I currently feel terribly uncomfortable at wedding dinners, conferences, annual dinners, meetings etc. I just enjoy the times when I'm alone, with myself (or with my fiancee), and no one else. I could say I hate making friends at the moment :(.
My fiancee's also sometimes aghast with my inability to recognise people that I've just met over the reception counter or somewhere else. I can simply approach the person as if I've never knew him/her even after I had a short conversation with him/her 5 minutes ago. I was puzzled by this symptom as I was quite good with facial recognition when I was young, and even for now, I could still remember the face of an exceptionally long-haired lady/guy after cursory glance once before, but not for short-haired ones. Could I call this "selective face-blindness" ;)??
I'm not sure if I was swayed by your initial thread but my very first response after reading that thread on the relationship between Asperger's and longhair is "Yes, yes, I couldn't agree more."
As a final note, I could say that I'm at least more self-aware of my mental situation now.
Mine's just like that, so you're not alone. Well, except that long hair only works on men for me. A researcher suggested I was using a chunk of my brain normally used for "sizing people up", and she said that part of the brain only jumps in if someone is of the sex you're attracted to. Maybe you're using a different part of the brain to do the job, or maybe you're 'bi'. We all get our own flavor of this condition.
I've found I actually do remember parts of faces if they are near to hair, and the more hair I see, the better. Bangs help me to see the eyes, and beards help me to see the mouth. I don't see those things as face parts, deep down inside, though, I see them as "stuff going with the hair". If the man changes the looks of his hair, I won't recognize the face parts with the "new" hair.
For guys who I see often with two styles, such as "ponytail" and "down", I soon learn both of their looks and I recognize them both ways.
Bill
Hello Everyone,
Have you noticed how people with good abilities do read faces, tend to really enjoy a kind of movie or theatre that can be very boring to us, especially the kind of movie that relies on non-verbal emotions for its humour and its plot.
Conversely, I love sci-fi, rather than "drama" or "sentimental comedies". I love movies where landscaping is beautiful, and that have lots of long-haired men, like LOTR, or some history movie, like The Man in the Iron Mask. In those movies costumes, hair and landscaping make the movie interesting. Non-verbal language is there, but not essential to understand the movie.
A lot of people will say that I am not subtle, since I do not notice subtle fashion changes, or cannot appreciate the subtleties of life. Everything has to be obvious and flamboyant to get me interested. That is why I love costume movies, and as for humour, I love Monty Pythonesque absurd humour.
Have a nice day,
Georges in Montreal
Yes! Yes! Yes! I can follow the plot of such movies, and they are beautiful!
In my case, the researchers found the part of my brain that is supposed to recognize faces is not dead. It goes to work on geographical places instead, so I have two brain areas working on evaluating those. When watching TV, if there are no longhaired men in the scene, I'm often more interested in the place (what moviemakers think of as the "background") than in the characters. For me, it is the foreground if the characters shown are boring.
Another good thing about this situation is it is VERY rare for me to ever get lost. [grin]
A large number of face blind people, though, are very bad with places. The face and place areas of the brain are right next to each other, and both are commonly impacted together. It can be quite bewildering to go through life knowing neither who you are with or where you are. A lot of face blind children are terrified of getting lost - they can't spot who they are with in a crowd, and if they get separated, they realize they won't be able to find their way home!
Bill
I couldn't agree more Georges and Bill
I love the same kinds of movies too, mainly because they are bold and dramatic and not too subtle!
I am not great with places either, so thats an interesting point I didn't know about, Bill. Glad you are.
