Reading a post on face blindness, watching a yellow lab in the back yard, and it occurred to me that my difficulty recognizing faces may be less face blindness and more another symptom of my inability to visualize.
This dog (next door at Devon's grandfather's 80th birthday party) was a handsome yellow lab which looked remarkable but for the longest time I could not figure out why. It took half an hour of idle gazing before I was able to describe the distinction as broad. It was a big handsome male yellow lab, which isn't all that unusual; but it was very wide, very broad, a big barrel chest and a wide panting mouth. I grew up around labs, they're some of my favorite dogs, in short I am intimately familiar with their general appearance and the variations within. But it took me a good while to figure out what made this dog uniquebecause while I know labs quite well, I can't conjure up their image in my mind and so I had no image of "default lab" to use as a comparison.
This is certainly one reason that I have a difficult time recognizing people. (Other reasons include my poor visions sans glasses, making faces a blur from a few paces, and my poor memory for names.) I can't conjure up the mental image of someone's face, no matter my familiarity with that person. Seeing someone for the first time, I can't mentally compare their features to those I've seen before and put together unconscious mnemonics for recognizing their face again. When seeing someone for the second time, I can't leaf through a mental book of faces for comparison or identification. When I've seen someone a number of times it gets a bit easier because I can recognize voice, posture, movement, and I can recognize their face when I see itbecause I know it outright, and don't need to compare it against a remembered image of their face.
But still, even with someone I know as intimately as the boy, I can't pull up a mental image of that person's face.
Oddly it's hair that often saves me. Hair is less indistinguishable when I'm without glasses, and I have a general fondness for it. Because it's easier to see, because my brain is more likely to notice it, it's what I look for first in a person, to categorize them and to identify them later. As a result, however, I find haircuts incredibly disorientatingso much so that when Devon cuts his hair I draw away from him for a day or two while I adjust. (My own haircuts don't disorientate me, in part because my hair is always long, even when I cut off six inches; in part because I always find my own face disorientating, haircut or no.)
I may still have a mild case of face blindness, which is apparently not too rarebut I've not found enough about it to know just what symptoms and at what severity it entails. But my inability to place the physical variation in that yellow lab wasn't face blindness. I expect that my inability to form mental images has more of an impact on my life than I've previously been aware of. It impacts how I imagine characters and settings and likewise how I write them, it renders a some written horror ineffective and some visual horror hyper-effective, it makes it difficult for me to approximate distance or imagine anything in 3D, big and little things like that which I keep noticing, these days.
Curious, interesting, perhapsat least it is to me. (Randomly searching this subject: I'm not the only one! I even found a personal account of a man that thinks with words in place of images. I've never run into another person with this particular quirk, and so this quite interests me. Not that I needed reassurance but, well, companionship is nice.)
This dog (next door at Devon's grandfather's 80th birthday party) was a handsome yellow lab which looked remarkable but for the longest time I could not figure out why. It took half an hour of idle gazing before I was able to describe the distinction as broad. It was a big handsome male yellow lab, which isn't all that unusual; but it was very wide, very broad, a big barrel chest and a wide panting mouth. I grew up around labs, they're some of my favorite dogs, in short I am intimately familiar with their general appearance and the variations within. But it took me a good while to figure out what made this dog uniquebecause while I know labs quite well, I can't conjure up their image in my mind and so I had no image of "default lab" to use as a comparison.
This is certainly one reason that I have a difficult time recognizing people. (Other reasons include my poor visions sans glasses, making faces a blur from a few paces, and my poor memory for names.) I can't conjure up the mental image of someone's face, no matter my familiarity with that person. Seeing someone for the first time, I can't mentally compare their features to those I've seen before and put together unconscious mnemonics for recognizing their face again. When seeing someone for the second time, I can't leaf through a mental book of faces for comparison or identification. When I've seen someone a number of times it gets a bit easier because I can recognize voice, posture, movement, and I can recognize their face when I see itbecause I know it outright, and don't need to compare it against a remembered image of their face.
But still, even with someone I know as intimately as the boy, I can't pull up a mental image of that person's face.
Oddly it's hair that often saves me. Hair is less indistinguishable when I'm without glasses, and I have a general fondness for it. Because it's easier to see, because my brain is more likely to notice it, it's what I look for first in a person, to categorize them and to identify them later. As a result, however, I find haircuts incredibly disorientatingso much so that when Devon cuts his hair I draw away from him for a day or two while I adjust. (My own haircuts don't disorientate me, in part because my hair is always long, even when I cut off six inches; in part because I always find my own face disorientating, haircut or no.)
I may still have a mild case of face blindness, which is apparently not too rarebut I've not found enough about it to know just what symptoms and at what severity it entails. But my inability to place the physical variation in that yellow lab wasn't face blindness. I expect that my inability to form mental images has more of an impact on my life than I've previously been aware of. It impacts how I imagine characters and settings and likewise how I write them, it renders a some written horror ineffective and some visual horror hyper-effective, it makes it difficult for me to approximate distance or imagine anything in 3D, big and little things like that which I keep noticing, these days.
Curious, interesting, perhapsat least it is to me. (Randomly searching this subject: I'm not the only one! I even found a personal account of a man that thinks with words in place of images. I've never run into another person with this particular quirk, and so this quite interests me. Not that I needed reassurance but, well, companionship is nice.)