Prosopagnosia

Last week the subject of Prosopagnosia came up on another friend's journal, and I've been paging through articles about it in my spare time ever since. I hadn't run across the term before, but I was aware that there were centers in the brain devoted to facial recognition, and I've long wondered if there wasn't something wrong with mine. Reading up on it, a lot of what was being discussed sounded familiar... but on the other hand, I wasn't having trouble, say, recognizing close family members. And everyone has these issues, right?

And then again, as often happens, I was walking along the trail, and saw someone jogging by, who looked a bit like a relatively new friend of mine. As I walked, I could watch her for an extended period of time, and darn, if I was inclined to think it wasn't the same person because she didn't seem to recognize me, I really wasn't sure. This kind of thing happens to me frequently -- daily, if I'm out and about.

For instance, a few weeks ago I was sitting in on one of Craig's Chen classes, and one of the students looked a bit like dianthus. Now, technically speaking, I was sure it couldn't be. But I couldn't tell, just by looking. Keep in mind, dianthus and I have been close friends for something like thirteen years now. (Actually, now that I think about it, I had a similar experience with someone who I eventually deduced was not my mother just a couple of days ago. So perhaps I do have trouble with close family members, but it's more likely to be false positives than otherwise.) When people stop and smile and wave at me, I always smile and wave back, and much of the time I really don't recognize them at all. And I don't know how many times people have recognized me from years ago, and yet I've been unable to recognize them. I suspect at times it's come across as me being quite rude, or perhaps, charitably, absentminded.

Over the last several years, I have gotten better at recognizing people. It used to be very difficult for me to follow movies, for instance, because it was hard for me to tell the actors apart if they didn't have major differences in coloring. (This used to really irritate me, because *everyone* else seemed to be able to follow these bits without problem.) Now, not so much, though it still comes up. I've always relied at least as much on voice and how people move, but I've gotten better at picking out faces as time has gone by. On the other hand, it seems to me to be the exact same process I use to recognize cats, plants, mushrooms, or rocks. (A dear friend used to joke that the section of my brain that was supposed to dedicated to facial recognition was actually being used primarily for mycology, which was why I was good at spot checks of mushrooms. While it is generally easier for me to identify flora, fauna and fungi to species than to tell people apart, I suspect this is because it's a different kind of pattern matching -- it's not, afterall, as if I were in the habit of mistaking humans for other apes.)

And I'm pretty much as good at identifying people from the back as I am from the front, which says something about facial recognition right there.

*shrug* If it is something that I have, it's not a particularly severe case. I thought it was interesting, though. And I wonder if it is somehow related to the minor and narrow variety of dyslexia that I do have, though I've long since learned how to compensate around that. (That's a pattern recognition problem, too, though it mostly seems to have to do with sequence.)