Face Blindness Is The Inability To Recognize Faces

A recent search on Google Trends brought me to a very troubling concept. Prosopagnasia. This is a disorder where the ability to recognize a face is impaired, and can also be accompanied by other recognition impairments, such as places, cars, or facial expressions.

While the thought of not clearly visualizing someone’s face seems utterly incomprehensible to most us, this is an everyday struggle to those challenged with Face Blindness. Face perception is something that we often take for granted.

And what is truly amazing, even contradictory in nature, is a person with this problem being able to be a photographer. For example, a person can photograph their own mother and not be able to recognize her in a photo. That means for some that any face is unrecognizable, even one’s own self.  Here’s a short clip of a woman with Prosopagnasia.

There are different degrees of severity and different types of  varying conditions. More information can be found  here.

For instance, take Capgras Syndrome – the delusional belief that familiar acquaintances have been replaced by imposters. Or another example may be Fregoli Syndrome – the belief that different people are in fact the same person changing appearances.

If you’d like to assess your abilities, you can take the test here at faceblind.org.