my doppelganger has literate friends

[lunacow]

I may have to stop going to the library. Twice now, in as many months, some random guy (a different random guy on each occasion) has talked to me in the library because he thought I was someone he knew. I have a near-prosopagnosic inability to remember faces (hyperbole, yes), so in both instances I've been open to the possibility that this person

Comments

[jellyfrog]

Oh man, how uncomfortable for you! Whoever this other person is who is going around looking like you needs to stop it.

As long as I can still remember who the people in the photos are.

Heh. :D

I'm going to go look up prosopagnosic now.

[windral]

i have a similar problem with not remembering people's names. i learned about it in second grade, and learned how to eliminate the vocative tense from my vocabulary then. i've been considering carrying around a polaroid camera memento-style. i think that would be fun.

[tahnan]

I actually tend to look familiar. I'll often meet someone at a party and they'll say "You look familiar", but it'll turn out we've never met. And not infrequently, someone'll turn to me on a bus, or in a coffeeshop, and say, "Is your name Joe?" or the like. I have no idea why this is. I just, well, look familiar.

[lunacow]

I guess I also look familiar. And I look like many other people in the world, because I've often had someone say, "Oh, you look so much like someone else I know". I suppose those would go hand in hand.

Interestingly, my initial reaction to your saying you look familar was surprise, because you seem to me rather distinctive looking, while I believe that I look rather generic. However, with both of the random library guys, I thought there was something familiar-looking about them, and I'm starting to think maybe everybody looks familiar. There just aren't that many different combinations of facial features and hair, so everybody looks like lots of other people. Or maybe this is my prosopagnosia spectrum disorder talking.