Inspired by something that happened to yours truly this morning.
How good are you at recognizing faces? Are you a super recognizer, a relatively average person on the scale, or do you have prosopagnosia - also called face blindness, an inability to process faces or associate them with names? And if you have problems, how do you go about pinning down who's who?
I suspect I might be face blind to some degree myself. It's a "chicken and egg" dilemma - am I not good at recognizing faces because I'm not a people person, or do I avoid interacting with people because I fear I won't recognize them? Nevertheless, today I had trouble recognizing two people - my neighbor on the same floor of my block, and a delivery guy who just brought me groceries. The first one I quickly figured out was him because he was with his wife, whom I remember because of her bright hair color. The second one, though... I'm still not sure if it's the same one. I kinda suspected it was him by his silver hair and height, but the tattoos, short beard and sunglasses threw me off. It isn't the first time it happens either; for example, when one of my classmates had a haircut and showed it off in a Zoom class two years ago, I almost asked out loud who she was... until I read her name tag and was forced to keep quiet.
My problem is not limited to real life encounters. If two characters in a live-action series dress too similarly or have similar distinctive features, I tend to mix them up until my mom points out to me that I'm making a mistake. I even failed to recognize Ewan McGregor, whom I like a lot, when he showed up in an interview with his head shaved! I also swear Jason Isaacs's face looks different to me in every picture/video for some reason, even in the same damn series. I know for sure I find him really sexy, but sometimes I have trouble believing it's the same person in all pictures and it makes me so mad! Oh, and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've gone "wait, is this [insert actor here]?" only to find out it's someone else whom I knew was similar in appearance to the one I was thinking of.
How good are you at recognizing faces? Are you a super recognizer, a relatively average person on the scale, or do you have prosopagnosia - also called face blindness, an inability to process faces or associate them with names? And if you have problems, how do you go about pinning down who's who?
I suspect I might be face blind to some degree myself. It's a "chicken and egg" dilemma - am I not good at recognizing faces because I'm not a people person, or do I avoid interacting with people because I fear I won't recognize them? Nevertheless, today I had trouble recognizing two people - my neighbor on the same floor of my block, and a delivery guy who just brought me groceries. The first one I quickly figured out was him because he was with his wife, whom I remember because of her bright hair color. The second one, though... I'm still not sure if it's the same one. I kinda suspected it was him by his silver hair and height, but the tattoos, short beard and sunglasses threw me off. It isn't the first time it happens either; for example, when one of my classmates had a haircut and showed it off in a Zoom class two years ago, I almost asked out loud who she was... until I read her name tag and was forced to keep quiet.
My problem is not limited to real life encounters. If two characters in a live-action series dress too similarly or have similar distinctive features, I tend to mix them up until my mom points out to me that I'm making a mistake. I even failed to recognize Ewan McGregor, whom I like a lot, when he showed up in an interview with his head shaved! I also swear Jason Isaacs's face looks different to me in every picture/video for some reason, even in the same damn series. I know for sure I find him really sexy, but sometimes I have trouble believing it's the same person in all pictures and it makes me so mad! Oh, and I can't even begin to count the number of times I've gone "wait, is this [insert actor here]?" only to find out it's someone else whom I knew was similar in appearance to the one I was thinking of.