prosopagnosia

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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dhalim:

My first ProsopAnonymous video is up! Tell me what you think!

Note: these will get better over time. I have a friend of mine working on an intro song for the show, so I’ll be able to add one by episode 2 or 3

It’s promising, but I suggest you try talking a bit more slowly. Your speech struck me as kind of rushed in a lot of places. This isn’t a conversation: nobody’s going to butt in and cut you off if you give them the slightest pause. (I swear I read somewhere that people actually do expect recordings to speak more slowly than live people, but I have no idea where.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag

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Prosopagnosia Dream

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

dhalim:

The dream itself was kinda ridiculous. I was among a group of magicians who was having to battle an invading magician army from taking over this labyrinth-like town, and battle was supposed to happen outside the city gates which were at least 30 feet tall. However, the gates were set up on an incomplete grid just outside the town, and in my dream, it made complete sense that if someone was having trouble defending one side, we just moved it further back and defended it there (??? I don’t get it either). Anyway, we took our positions on top of the gate, balancing on what was ultimately this fence only a couple inches across, and somehow expecting to throw magic down at the invaders? Except the invaders wound up coming up to us, and I was forced down to ground-level where the invading force was closing in.

I ran off to the side, to this little shack and on my way, I nearly ran into a woman who had bleach blond dread locks, who I didn’t recognise. Looking at her, I couldn’t decide if she was friend or foe, but when I didn’t attack, she kept running. The battle was hardly fierce, mostly just people running around, and I can’t be sure if I actually saw a face, or just dread locks and told myself a face was somewhere in there because it was supposed to be. Either way, in the dream itself, I suddenly felt overwhelmed because I literally couldn’t tell if anyone running around me as I went into the shack to hide was on my side or the invading side, and I didn’t want to attack anyone in case I guessed wrong. What if someone attacked me and they just couldn’t tell if we were on the same side or not, and I defended myself and killed them?

Worst of all, when I entered the shack, the man inside told me to get back out there and defend the town, but I couldn’t because I no longer knew who I was defending, and had to try to explain my perceived cowardice. I wound up waking up half way through my crap explanation, but I tried for several minutes to go back to sleep so I could finish telling him why. Sometimes dreams really suck.

And that is why we invented military uniforms.

Tags:

#after a while of population growth battles get to be large enough that even non-prosos can’t keep track of who’s on their side #prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #reply via reblog #embarrassment squick

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

pervocracy:

netlfix:

imagine bumping into 2007 you at the mall

“it’s all going to work out okay!  here is a list of people not to date!  you are a guy!  buy Apple stock!  you are allergic to Levaquin!  okay, gotta go!”

“…?”

Past!me: *no reaction beyond that of bumping into a stranger; has not put in the necessary time spent staring into mirrors to feel sense of recognition at own face*

Present!me: Huh, never met a face-clone who also wore big glasses before. Weird. *shrugs, moves on*

(I mean really, what’s more likely: that she’s me from another part of the space-time continuum, or she’s just someone who looks enough like me to fool prosopagnosic visual processors?)

P.S. …although, come to think of it, if I bumped into a face-clone with big glasses wearing a yellow-on-black Hogwarts-crest baseball cap, a belly bag with a red “First Aid Kit” pouch attached to it, and/or a T-shirt I remember owning/still own, I probably would get suspicious enough to overcome the no-talking-to-strangers taboo and strike up a conversation. She might, too, depending on what I was wearing.

Tags:

#imagine posts #prosopagnosia #sometimes I think about all the moments of serendipity I must have missed due to my faceblindness and I get very sad #and then I think about all the moments of serendipity I must have missed for all the various reasons and get even sadder #and then I think about how now I know why there’s an exclamation point in past!me and I cheer up a bit

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lennat:

Which one of you was it that came up with the idea of a face recognition app on google glasses?

I don’t think I got the idea from anyone else, but it’s such an obvious idea that I expect plenty of other prosos have come up with it independently.

I was just talking about this earlier today. (That post in turn links to the post before that, which links to the post before that, which I think was the first one.) I’m not sure if this is news to you: for all I know, you wandered by my Tumblr and that’s what prompted you to post this in the first place.

(I was discussing this with my family recently, and my parents think I should start a letter-writing campaign to pressure Google to allow facial recognition. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but I don’t think I’m the one to do it. Even assuming I figure out how to go about such a campaign, it’s a lose-lose situation: either it fails, in which case…you know, it fails, or it succeeds, in which case as its founder I’m the one who gets stuck dealing with the media and whatnot, and I don’t think I could cope with that.)

(I also learned recently of Lambda Labs, which was working on a black-market facial recognition Glass app. (They started working on it pre-ban, but said they would continue with it post-ban.) However, all of the news articles I found about it (such as this one) were slightly over a year old, and it seems that nobody has heard from the developer(s) in an official capacity for six months. I don’t have high hopes for it.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #reply via reblog #overenthusiastic parenthesis use #(although really that last one could apply to nearly every post I make) #(you see what I mean)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

prostheticknowledge:

GLASSHOLE.SH

Code script put together by Julian Oliver which detects Google Glass devices on a WiFi network and blocks them:

This script is a response to a comment by Omer Shapira that the presence of Google Glass worn by audience at an ITP graduate exhibition left him feeling understandably uneasy; it was not possible to know whether they were recording, or even streaming what they were recording to a remote service over WiFi.

The … script will find and detect Google Glass on the local network and kick them off.

More Here

Still bitter about how the obsession with privacy concerns of Google Glass has completely ruined the device’s potential.

There is always the possibility that someone is secretly recording you. That MP3 player I appear to be absent-mindedly holding in my lap? Totally has an audio-recording function, and you have no way of knowing whether I’m using it. Just because people tend to forget the recording possibilities of smartphones unless they come in Glass form, doesn’t mean those possibilities aren’t there. They’re always there.

Using a facial recognition app that scans the faces of everyone you pass by and compares them to a database (a mixture of owner-taken photos and photos copied from Facebook) of people you know to check for matches is perfectly legal and polite and all those other ways of saying “permitted”, but only if you’re running it on a carbon-based computer. People whose carbon-based computers can’t run the app (or can technically run it, but can’t do anything with it due to problems with their on-board cameras) can go fuck themselves.

(It does kind of fascinate me how thoroughly the ban on facial recognition has been spun as “yay privacy” rather than “Google spitting in the faces (so to speak) of disabled people”.)

Tags:

#Google Glass #prosopagnosia #my usual tag for high-tech stuff is #proud citizen of The Future #but in this case it’s more like #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #currently in the stage of citizenship application where #they bog you down in red tape forever

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theforestcat:

I have prosopagnosia, which means “face blindness”. I have had it since birth, and I think it accounts for some of my neuroticism. When I was little, I was often scared that I’d accidentally go home with the wrong parents. Over my lifetime, I’ve learned to identify people in other ways, so it almost comes as naturally to me as someone without facial processing difficulties. I still make mistakes and people get frustrated with me quite often. I’ve also begun to recognize the body language of someone who recognizes me, although I’ve messed that up when someone has just been “checking me out”, which has lead those people to believe that the attraction was mutual… oops. Luckily the bus usually comes in time. xD

However, with movies, I often have difficulty following the plot because I cannot tell the difference between many actors, even if they are of different ages or ethnicities. (It helps a lot if they have different hairstyles.) This is why I prefer cartoons, although I have the same problem with a lot of anime where the characters look similar. I think I would enjoy anime a lot more if I did not have this mental deficit.

Although I haven’t seen this movie, the two men on the left would look identical to me, and I probably would not enjoy this movie due to that.

The first one from the left has brown hair (what’s left of it) and the second one has silver hair (ditto). God help you if they ever wear hoods, though. (And having to rely on a single trait like that would likely make it harder. You’re always having to do “Okay, so it was the brown one that did x and the silver one that did y…I think”.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #tales from the prosopagnosia tag

Someone meme this, this shit is fucking priceless

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

lennat:

IF WE’RE NOT ASHAMED OF OUR NEUROLOGICAL DIFFERENCES THEN WE DON’T’ REALLY HAVE THEM, GASP!

WE DON’T HAVE A RIGHT TO REACH OUT TO OTHER PEOPLE WITH THE SAME DISABILITIES THAT JUST MEANS WE WANT ATTENTION, OH NO!

WE’RE FAKE IF WE TALK ABOUT IT SO WE CAN’T MENTION IT EVER!

WE SHOULD ALL JUST HIDE AWAY AND WALLOW IN SHAME BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY WAY WE’RE ACTUALLY REAL

IF YOU DON’T THEN WE WILL GET TALKED DOWN TO YOU USING DEMEANING AND SEXIST LANGUAGE LIKE ‘DARLING’

I shudder to think what would happen if I dared express an opinion on the explicit denial of technologically-assisted facial recognition to the general public (read: us) due to privacy concerns.

(It was bad enough when I thought they were just dancing around the edge, but no, now they’re dancing away from the edge. And where Google goes, the world follows.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #tales from the prosopagnosia tag #(I’d make an analogy here about hearing aids and eavesdropping) #(but I can never tell which analogies about this sort of thing you’re allowed to make and which will get you yelled at) #(and anyway turns out the people who make those hearing aid commercials that *advertise* the potential for eavesdropping) #(are commonly considered terrible people) #(so that’d probably backfire) #proud citizen of The Future #but only by birth #not by residency #next year in Waterloo

Just Curious…

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

where-am-i-and-do-i-know-you:

Ok so how many of you out there with Prosopagnosia also have other issues like synesthesia or no sense of direction or other? The 2 specific examples are additional issues/quirks I have. I don’t recall the source but remember reading somewhere that this was common with Prosopagnosia? Also does anyone else also have social anxiety either aggravated by or as a direct affect of Prosopagnosia?

Thanks!

Me too. I’m mildly sound-colour synesthetic, and I have a pretty terrible sense of direction. I never had much cause to notice the latter until I started learning to drive (I live in the kind of small town where all the places worth going to are on the same street), but the more I drive the bigger a problem it’s going to be. I really need a GPS.

I’ve also been meaning to practise navigating the nearby city with Street View. That way if I get thoroughly lost I have the option of giving up without being forced to find my way back home first, and I will have neither the stress of trying to both drive and navigate nor the stress of it all happening in real-time.

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #synesthesia #reply via reblog #sense of direction #I do not do well with real-time #ask anyone who has ever had a spoken conversation with me

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Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

jtotheizzoe:

What’s better at facial recognition, Facebook or your brain?

Ever wonder how your brain can recognize and remember so many faces? Ever wonder how we train computers to do the same? Vanessa from BrainCraft looks the science of recognizing faces square in the… face?

Bad: It joins in that annoying way that many things about relatively-unusual conditions have of assuming their audience doesn’t contain anyone who experiences it (a falsely-inclusive “we” to refer to “normal” people).

Good: Finally a non-proso who’s noticed that facial recognition technology cries out to be used in assistive tech. (I swear to god, it’s like the people in charge of this sort of thing are deliberately trying to come up with every possible use for artificial facial recognition except the obvious one.)

(Come on, The Future, you’ve been a good home to me. You’ve given me those lovely photographs of Martian desert, full of colour and detail, the next-best thing to being there. You’ve given me multiple pieces of tech that are literally out of Star Trek. Give me a glasses-mounted HUD that flags passing acquaintances with their names. I know you can do it. Google Glass has been dancing around the edge for, what, a year now? I’d prefer an attachment to the glasses I already have, but as long as I can get them in prescription and they cost less than, oh, say twice as much as regular prescription glasses, I’ll settle for buying a new pair. Please, let me have this.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #(cell phones and e-readers) #(and I suspect you could turn a smart-watch into something very like a combadge without much tinkering) #the power of science #with power comes responsibility #and that responsibility takes many forms

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

aflightygrim:

a romcom where the main character has prosopagnosia and has no idea they’ve been wooing the same person for months b/c the other character keeps changing their clothes and hairstyle

#i promise it would be great #but uh probably only … to people who don’t …….. yeah #i don’t know how this would play out to people who can recognize faces lmao #actually the likelihood it would confuse and piss of people without stupid visual agnosias like #makes it better tbh 

Have you heard of Faces in the Crowd? (Note: I haven’t actually seen it, just read about it.) I read some of the IMDB reviews a while back: many of the non-prosos thought it was neat how they portrayed it by having several similar-looking-but-different actors play each part, and the prosos were like “wait, they what now?”.

Similarly, I expect a movie like that would play out better to people with normal facial recognition, both because they are more likely to notice that anything strange is going on at all and because cringe comedy is worse if there’s a layer of “it could happen to you”. (Or would that actually make it better for someone already inclined to like cringe comedy? I wouldn’t know.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog

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