On Prosopagnosia

[gaudior]

Oh, hey, look, it is an opportunity to explain how people look to me!

As I've mentioned before, I have prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. I think it's hard for people who don't have it to understand what that means. I mean, Hannibal had a character who had it, and tried to replicate the effect by always blurring everyone's faces whenever they

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[nightengalesknd]

So I am probably not the target audience for this question because I have a combination of prosopagnosia and pop-culturagnosia. So I have no idea who John Malkovich is.

By the way, I think there's a range in prosopagnosia. In Oliver Sack's book/essay "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" the person in question literally couldn't distinguish between his wife's head and a hat, and reached out to her head and tried to remove it from the hatrack on which it wasn't, being her neck. Then there are people who know a face is a face, not a hat, but can't learn ANY faces, ever. I'm a step down from this, in that I can learn to recognize familiar faces but it takes a lot more time and exposure than is considered OK. In my case I think it ties in with more general visual perceptual issues, but there are prosopagnostics who have otherwise good visual perceptual skills.

I recognize my close family members. In work contexts, I recognize my co-workers. In social contexts, I recognize familiar people with whom I socialize. I usually recognize my patients in the waiting room IF I know they are there that day. Like, if I know Johnny has an appointment I can usually look in the waiting room and distinguish him and his mother from the other 4 year old boys and their mothers in the waiting room, but if Johnny is in the lobby for physical therapy I may not recognize them.

I don't recognize most of the iconic pictures. I know who Albert Einstein was, but not really what he looked like. Some white guy with light colored hair? The only picture of Marilyn Monroe that I would read as her is the one with her in a white dress blowing up around her, and I think she had blond curls in that image. So I'd probably accept any slenderish person with blond curls in that dress. . .

If the question is, could I tell the difference between the iconic and doctored picture, the answer would be yes, if I saw them side by side with sufficient time to go back and forth comparing details. (There are lots of people in my historical Real Life who I only learned to distinguish by seeing them side by side and comparing details. For example teachers at my school where I wasn't sure which was which seeing one at a time, or sometimes thinking both were the same person for months. On the other hand, I have gotten REALLY good at distinguishing between identical twins this way)

The only picture that I recognized AND knew was wrong was the American Gothic one. First for the obvious reason that the real painting has 2 people in it. And second for the non-obvious reason that the person in the doctored version doesn't have the atrophy of the temporal muscles of the two people in the original. My genetics professor told us that the original subjects were siblings (not spice) with a form of muscular dystrophy that causes the temporal muscles to atrophy, leading to an elongated face. So I've previously spent some length of time scrutinizing the faces on that painting, in an attempt to become a better genetic diagnostician. Somehow I think this supports, rather than refutes my point. . .