Prosopagnosia: Face Blindness

While there are many people out there who claim that they never forget a face, there is also a segment of the population which has a great deal of difficulty remember faces of individuals that they have just met or even people that they have known for some time. This condition is known as face blindness, or prosopagnosia, and it is thought to affect a sizable portion of the population. The topic of face blindness is far from being purely academic, as such an impairment could greatly effect the reliability of witnesses in the court room and early diagnosis of individuals with such a memory impairment could allow individuals to adopt coping mechanisms at an earlier age.

Prosopagnosia is not to be confused with the common difficulty that all people deal with with remembering names and faces. Instead, individuals who have face blindness cannot readily recognize people that they have met on a variety of occasions if they are only going by a face. Instead, they rely on other identifiers to recognize acquaintances, such as clothing, voice and body language. According to the Prosopagnosia Research Center, one of the most common problems that people who are face blind encounter is difficulty watching television or movies due to confusion in recognizing the characters.

Face blindness is not caused by an impairment of an individual's ability to see. Rather, prosopagnosia is a disorder of facial perception that limits a person's ability to effectively remember the relatively minute differences that separate one face from another in a crowd. While extreme cases of face blindness limit an individual's ability to easily recognize even their closest friends and family members by face, most prospagnosiacs learn to simply make an extra effort of consciously memorizing specific features of new acquaintances. Such coping mechanisms are so effective that most people with the affliction are unaware that they even have an impairment.

The presence of face blindness raises a curious question regarding how the human mind works. Given that people with prospognosia are usually quite health in all other neurological respects, it seems that we are wired to perceive faces differently than we perceive the rest of the world. This view is bolstered by the fact cases of individuals who have become face blind later in life due an injury to the brain. Such people were still able to think and see properly, but lost the ability to effectively recognize faces.

If all of this has you wondering just how well your own perception and recognition of faces matches the rest of society, there is an intriguing little test available at faceblind.org. By taking the test, you'll be participating in a study that will hopefully shed light on the science behind face blindness and facial perception

Sources:

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/

http://www.faceblind.org/research/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia