Riding the social short bus
I have this problem. Always have, so far as I can tell. I can't recognize faces.
Yeah, yeah, I know, you sometimes don't remember someone right away, either, but I'm saying this is really bad. Like, bad enough that I wonder if I have some sort of very specific visual-based mental retardation.
No, really.
Personally, I blame it on the fact that I didn't get corrective vision until I was 16. As a result, I learned to recognize people by their voices (I can recognize someone's voice on the phone when I haven't seen them in 10 years) and by the way they walked. Faces, however, were just a blur. By the time I got contact lenses, it was too late--my brain just never fired up those particular synapses and never learned to. There's actually some scientific research done on people who got their eyesight late in life that backs up my theory.
You think I'm exaggerating. But I seriously have to have met someone at least seven times before any sort of visual recognition kicks in. I try to compensate for it by noting people's purses and friends and accents, so that hopefully I'll have something to remind me of who they are the next time I see them, but I spend a lot of time with my foot in the mouth, introducing myself to people who have met me already--sometimes, several times. It's humiliating, and makes me feel like I must be a bad person because I don't pay the same amount of attention to their faces as they do to mine, but it's not something I've been able to overcome. It's just my (almost literal) blind spot. Some people can't do math; I can't do this.
All of which is my very long way of saying to
fightscrime that I'm really sorry I behaved like we had never met before when I, uh, "introduced" myself last night. I'm a jerk.
Yeah, yeah, I know, you sometimes don't remember someone right away, either, but I'm saying this is really bad. Like, bad enough that I wonder if I have some sort of very specific visual-based mental retardation.
No, really.
Personally, I blame it on the fact that I didn't get corrective vision until I was 16. As a result, I learned to recognize people by their voices (I can recognize someone's voice on the phone when I haven't seen them in 10 years) and by the way they walked. Faces, however, were just a blur. By the time I got contact lenses, it was too late--my brain just never fired up those particular synapses and never learned to. There's actually some scientific research done on people who got their eyesight late in life that backs up my theory.
You think I'm exaggerating. But I seriously have to have met someone at least seven times before any sort of visual recognition kicks in. I try to compensate for it by noting people's purses and friends and accents, so that hopefully I'll have something to remind me of who they are the next time I see them, but I spend a lot of time with my foot in the mouth, introducing myself to people who have met me already--sometimes, several times. It's humiliating, and makes me feel like I must be a bad person because I don't pay the same amount of attention to their faces as they do to mine, but it's not something I've been able to overcome. It's just my (almost literal) blind spot. Some people can't do math; I can't do this.
All of which is my very long way of saying to
fightscrime that I'm really sorry I behaved like we had never met before when I, uh, "introduced" myself last night. I'm a jerk.