Me being semi-face blind, useless with my left and right, AND unable to remember names would mean I stand there just sweating profusely with anxiety as I try to not be rude.
Mr. Fisher’s daughter showing you how to definitely not be rude at all
Tags:
#art #prosopagnosia #storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
i think that the “i do not control the ____” memes are generally tame and do not lend enough credence to the genuine absurdity of the original line that is
Tags:
#I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this meme before #but I looked at this picture and went ”is that…Josh…Peck?” #and I looked at TagViewer and to my surprise I was actually right #so I am reblogging in honour of that #Drake and Josh #prosopagnosia #death mention
I’m cleaning out my notepad program in preparation for a move to a new† laptop††, and I found this Tumblr draft dated March 10th, 2016.
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One of the worst non-obvious things about prosopagnosia is that it *reduces the amount of serendipity in your life*.
All else equal, I have far fewer chance meetings with old friends and colleagues than a non-faceblind person would. I have witnessed my mother having chance meetings that I would not have had in her place. I abandoned Orphan Black partway through the first episode because it disturbed me too much, knowing that if they’d based the clones’ on *my* genetic structure instead of hers, the entire show would never have happened. Sarah and Beth would have walked right by each other and never known. How many plot hooks (let alone easter eggs) have I missed out on in my own personal narrative?
(I went bowling on my 22nd birthday. In the group playing on the lane next to my family, there was a girl who looked just like I would if I didn’t wear glasses. I assume it was a coincidence. I assume she was not a secret clone or long-lost twin. If I am wrong in that assumption, I will never find out. If one day I passed someone I assumed to be a stranger, and they were actually a former acquaintance who would have given me some life-changing piece of information had I struck up a conversation with them like old times, I will never find out. Almost certainly, I have at the very least passed by acquaintances who would have given me non-life-*changing* but life-*enhancing* pieces of information, had I only known it was them.)
(This post inspired by CORDYCEPS [link], another story whose plot is dependant on one person recognising another’s face. I like the mystery and I like Benedict’s writing, so I’ve been reading it anyway for now.)
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†And by “new”, I mean “seven years old, but significantly higher-spec than my current seven-year-old laptop”. Dad’s laptop broke, so we agreed that I would buy a “new” one for me and hand my old one down to him. Back in the day, *I* used to get *his* hand-me-down computers, but my computer requirements have now outpaced his (fortunately not to the point where my usual laptop budget of ~USD$300 is an insufficient amount of money), so.
††My backups are generally pretty thorough, and it wouldn’t have been a disaster data-wise if I’d woken up this morning to find my laptop permanently unable to boot (which did happen to me one morning in my mid-teens! no warning, no particular reason AFAIK why that motherboard chose that night to fail, it just did!), but I’ve found a couple overlooked spots.
Yeah, I find that plots that depend on recognizing people’s faces under extreme conditions are so weird to me. Like… humans can do that? Really? You saw this guy one time on the news and now you run into him in real life and you know who he is? Just because his face was shown on the news once? How is that even possible? I often question the legitimacy of such plot points even though I know my personal experience is not normal for human beings, because it just seems so completely implausible. Meanwhile, here I am not recognizing my own daughter when I drive past her on the street. (Or worse, walking up to her guests at her birthday party and addressing them as if they’re her.)
Honestly, I’ve never wondered how people could not realize Clark Kent was Superman. Take your glasses off and wear tights and a cape, and I wouldn’t recognize you either. Also I’d be too busy staring at the cape because WHEE CAPE! :P
One thing I find unrealistic about stories is when someone is telling someone else about a conversation they had and they remember everything WORD FOR WORD, in the exact order that it happened. If it was me, I’d be like “and then we talked about penguins for a while, and then he told me this story about…oh wait, before that, he told me someone broke into his office and moved a bunch of stuff around!” I’d make a horrible detective.
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know
On the one hand, unagingness is very good and worth grabbing. On the other hand, I like having an older-than-preteen body, both for personal “I enjoy the results of estrogen-puberty and would rather have a body which lets me have them rather than not” reasons and for social “being seen as a kid by people who don’t know me would lead to assorted interpersonal difficulties” reasons. Ultimately, though, the unagingness consideration is a Very Big Deal and wins out over the downsides, and so while it’s not my favorite choice within the space of possible unaging bodies it’s pretty clearly worth it relative to my current baseline (which is how I’ve been rating these).
Loophole hacking, maybe? They didn’t say pre-*adolescent*, they said pre-*teen*.
Me aged 12 years and 364 days is a *little* less physically developed than me aged 25, but close enough to be believable as an adult: most of the difference between 13 and 25 is experience, and I assume you’re keeping the ability to gain experience (unagingness wouldn’t be any fun if it gave you anterograde amnesia). You might not pass for adult *at first glance*, but people routinely mistake me for 17 as it is, and I doubt being physically reverted to 13-less-one-day would make it that much worse.
(And it does occasionally have its advantages: one time–it was the day after my birthday, I think I was either 21 or 22–I was in a grocery store and the attached bank had a guy trying to talk passersby into signing up. He started trying to talk to me, but when I turned around and looked at him, my face pinged to him as “too young to sign legal contracts” and he stopped.)
((While seeing whether I could look up which year it was, I found another relevant quote in my diary (age 21): “She tried to take only the parents’ cards†, reading me as underage. (Most of the museum cashiers did. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)”))
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†Note from present-me: the cards were a citizenship gift from the Canadian government, granting free museum access for one year. Only adults get cards: children merely accompany their parents.
it’s pretty nuts that some people are almost the same size they were when they were 13 for their whole life
I was probably only like 2/3rds of a person when I turned 13! kind of short and very lacking in upper body strength
It’s pretty great! One of the nice things about estrogen is that the physical effects are often very front-loaded: you get them out of the way when you’re about 10 – 12 and then have, like, 20 years of looking pretty much the same. I love how stable my appearance has been for the most recent half of my life: even with prosopagnosia I can look in a mirror and get a visceral sense of “yep, that’s me!”, because I have *so much experience* with this face that general object recognition is enough for that.
(I didn’t feel a visceral sense of recognition in the mirror until I was at least 17, maybe 18! Before then I’d never had the same face for long enough to really deeply get to know it!)
Dyscalculia: Dyscalculia is difficulty in learning or comprehending arithmetic, such as difficulty in understanding numbers, learning how to manipulate numbers, and learning facts in mathematics. It is generally seen as a specific developmental disorder.
Prosopagnosia: an inability to recognize the faces of familiar people, typically as a result of damage to the brain. (”face blindness”)
Alexithymia: an inability to identify and understand emotions and their subtleties and textures. (”emotional blindness”)
Alexithymia added by me!
~James
Actually, most prosopagnosics are born with it. (I know that study’s pretty small, but I knew of it off the top of my head, and it is proof of concept.) I’m not sure whether the crossover point has happened yet, but certainly early on most people known to have prosopagnosia got it from brain damage; however, that’s because those people had memories of not being faceblind to compare their current state to, so they knew what they were missing. Congenital prosopagnosics are far more likely than acquired ones to have a “so that’s what that is!” moment.
Also, it’s not all-or-nothing. Only the most severe prosopagnosia causes a total inability to recognise faces; the rest of us “just” take months or years of exposure to learn a given face as well as normal people would learn it immediately, and have a much greater tendency to forget faces over time.
thanks for the correction! i didnt know what prosopagnosia was so i googled it and copied + pasted the definition google gave me!
Crazy Stuff! I’ve revamped my YouTube Channel! You might even say it’s “New” and “Improved”. I now have a legitimate director with multiple episodes in the works! So excited- check it out! I really appreciated your feedback last time and would love to hear from everyone again.
Yeah, the first thing that hit me when I saw it was “Wow, this looks a lot more professional”. I think you’ve improved your talking speed, too.
The nametags on the photographs were a nice touch. Part joke, part genuine reassurance, part practising the awareness you preach. A lot of things about unusual conditions (even relatively common ones like prosopagnosia, synesthesia, or autism) have this assumption that nobody with that condition is actually in the audience: they’re all over *waves vaguely* there somewhere, not here among us. (Like, I can understand explicitly aiming a 101 thing at people who don’t have it, but it never seems to be a deliberate choice to concentrate on a particular segment of their audience, rather just forgetting there are any other segments than that one.) The nametags make me hopeful that you’re not going to fall into that trap.
(I actually watched the video before you posted this, because I was still subscribed to your YouTube channel and it alerted me. Things like this are why I never unfollow someone for inactivity alone.)
Thank you so much! We’ve put a lot of work into polishing it, so it’s great to hear the effort was noticed. My director is here for an unknown limited time, so we’re going to try to get as many info-based videos up as possible to maintain the professionalism, but when I’m back to just myself, the quality will probably dip a bit (I just don’t think I could do as good a job editing as he has done).
And thanks! The name tags are going to be a permanent feature, though they might be mixed up a bit, like in the 1st full episode. I want to make sure anyone can start watching on any episode and still follow who’s playing any characters or know who’s in the photos.
We’re expecting to get another video out late next week, but I’m recording my presentation on Friday, so it will probably be delayed so we can incorporate some of that footage into Episode 2
the troubles of a person with prosopagnosia and anxiety:
*sees post with pictures of very popular actor they look at pictures of all day*
*tags it with name of very popular actor*
*almost clicks the reblog button*
*checks pictures five times to make sure the pictures actually portray very famous actor and not someone who looks a bit like him*
*feels ashamed because they literally look at pictures of very famous actor all day so it’s very embarrassing not to be sure if it’s really him*
Would you like advice or do you just want to vent? I don’t want to go barging in here with tips if that wouldn’t be appropriate.
it’s okay! i wouldn’t mind advice :)
I’ve found the TagViewer extension for XKit to be very helpful for this situation. To give a relatively recent example (that I’m not sure whether I ever actually reblogged, but it’s still a good example of the process):
1. See gifset of person who may or may not be Taylor Swift playing with small fluffy animals.
2. Press TagViewer button on post.
3. Scroll through the list of reblogs with tags and what tags they used. See that the majority of reblogs with any tags at all contain the tag “taylor swift”, “tswift”, “tay-tay”, or other variations thereupon. See that nobody has tagged it with a name other than Taylor Swift.
4. Feel much more confident that the picture is of Taylor Swift now that you’ve gotten dozens of concurring opinions.
right! thanks :D
Tags:
#(April 2015) #(welcome–to–awkwardville and postmodernmulticoloredcloak are the same person) #conversational aglets #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #prosopagnosia #(the agletting project has made it very striking just how much I used to blog about prosopagnosia) #(I’m not sure why the frequency dropped)
I don’t think it’s rude at all, especially since I pretty much volunteered myself as an Example Prosopagnosic by answering your post (in first-person, no less).
I was born faceblind, so I don’t know what it’s like having a functional facial recognition processor. That makes it trickier to describe, since all I have to contrast it with are second-hand descriptions (which, in turn, were also tricky for them to make).
It’s not that I don’t see faces. That’s a common misconception. (To the extent that having any conception about prosopagnosia is common, though I think there’s been a lot of improvement in general awareness lately.) I just looked at my brother’s face, sitting over on the other couch, and it’s all there: pink-red lips, pale skin, nose, pimple, brown eyes, bangs. Thinking of that fresh memory, I can almost picture it. Sometimes, just for a moment, I can grasp it, but mostly the memory is blurred and lacking in detail.
(It feels perfectly natural, having it blurry like that. So natural that I didn’t even notice I was doing it until I read other prosos’ descriptions of it. There are hardly ever faces in my dreams, and that feels perfectly natural too.)
Note that my brother is one of the easiest people to picture. I’ve known him for all sixteen years of his life, and when you’re reliant on general object processing to recognise faces, experience with a given face counts for a lot. After knowing my friend Jacqueline for four years, I was able to successfully recognise her when I bumped into her in a mall*. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I’d had less experience with her and her appearance. It took me about a year, maybe a year and a half, to reliably tell her two teenage daughters apart, but after six years of knowing them I’m not sure how I ever managed to have trouble.
(It’s good that they were teenage. Children are tricky. They change quickly, so by the time you’ve built up enough experience with one face to recognise them semi-reliably, they’ve gone and gotten themselves a different one. When my brother was six, I couldn’t distinguish him from the other boys in his Cub Scout den. I didn’t feel a sense of recognition at my own face in the mirror until my mid-teens, 2 – 3 years after my face stopped developing. (Even now, I can still tell which other faces I would have trouble distinguishing from my own, had I less experience with mine. Plus, I’m not entirely sure how much of the ease is due to my large glasses.))
If you want to read more, try looking through my prosopagnosia tag or dhalim’s blog. For another, very detailed perspective, Bill Choisser’s classic book, Face Blind!, is freely available on the Internet. (I haven’t read that book since I was first learning about prosopagnosia seven years ago, so I don’t remember at exactly which points my mileage varied. I do remember it being interesting, though.) The general prosopagnosia tag on Tumblr (which I track, and is how I found your post) sometimes has good stuff in it, though there’s also the occasional non-proso using us to make Profound Statements about Seeing People for Who They Are Rather Than What They Look Like and artworks depicting faceless people (see paragraph 3).
*Malls are tough. Absolutely anyone could be in the mall, so you can’t use context to narrow the list of potential suspects. (“She’s really tall and she’s at my Girl Scout meeting, so she must be Jenny, because Jenny is the only really tall girl in my troop.”)
I honestly didn’t expect such a brilliant and detailed answer. Thank you so much for the answer, and for your patience! You’re great!
And I’ll definitely take a look on the links you shared with me.
Tags:
#(October 2014) #((but only a day after the previous post: they were right on the Sep-Oct boundary)) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the more you know
Even though I love this idea of Gallifreyans as a species having prosopagnosia, I’m still not sure if it’s actually true, since the Doctor has the habit of commenting his face and it’s distinct features (the chin, the eyebrows, i.e.) relatively often. I don’t know much about prosopagnosia and therefore I’m not sure whether it’s possible for people having/suffering from it to make such remarks. Does anybody know something more about that?
We can totally do that! In fact, things like distinctive eyebrows or sticky-out ears (the focus of Nine’s comments) are a big part of how we tell people apart.
Oh so it means that these comments don’t get against that brilliant idea! Thanks for the information!
Tags:
#(September 2014) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #Doctor Who
Brinens and Things 
