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- Apr 12, 2005
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- 420
Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, is an impairment in the recognition of faces. It is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments (place recognition, car recognition, facial expression of emotion, etc.) though sometimes it appears to be restricted to facial identity. Not surprisingly, prosopagnosia can be socially crippling. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing family members, close friends, and even themselves. They often use alternative routes to recognition, but these routes are not as effective as recognition via the face
Symptoms of Prosopagnosia
Everyone sometimes has trouble recognizing faces, and it is even more common for people to have trouble remembering other people's names. Prosopagnosia is much more severe than these everyday problems that everyone experiences. Prosopagnosics often have difficulty recognizing people that they have encountered many times. In extreme cases, prosopagnosics have trouble recognizing even those people that they spend the most time with such as their spouses and their children.
One of the telltale signs of prosopagnosia is great reliance on non-facial information such as hair, gait, clothing, voice, and other information. Prosopagnosics also sometimes have difficulty imagining the facial appearance of acquaintances. One of the most common complaints of prosopagnosics is that they have trouble following the plot of television shows and movies, because they cannot keep track of the identity of the characters.
source
I would be interested to know if anyone on the board suffers from this condition. When I found this website I was delighted to find out that there might be an actual reason for my inability to recognise people despite having seen them a number of times. Of course, it might not be this at all, I might just be unobservant. But I have enormous difficulty following tv shows because I can't keep track of the characters, I have to meet people about five times before I might recognise them and I often find myself talking to people I've never met because I think they might be someone I know, but I just don't recognise them and am afraid of snubbing them. I do find it socially debilitating. It must be awful for severe cases.
Also, I'm assuming that this must be a problem with spatial perception, in a sense...and I wondered if it was relevant to other spatial perception syndromes, particularly Alice in Wonderland syndrome which is up on the board somewhere.
The reason I mention this is because recently I found out that my cousin suffers from both of these things to a mild extent, like I do. I might be completely barking up the wrong tree, but does anybody have any ideas?
(please bear in mind that this is quite a personal issue for me, so if you think I'm making leaping assumptions please break it to me gently!)