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Face blindness
Prosopagnosia is also called face blindness. We are all guilty of forgetting people's names, but their face is what reassures you that you know that person. However, there are some people who are not able to recognize their own family. They have to make noted cues about a person to help them recognize who that person is. For example, red hair, tan skin and facial features could help someone reassure them of that person. Sometimes people with prosopagnosia have trouble identiying objects as well as faces, and other times their main difficulty is face recognition. There is acquire prosopagnosia, which is something you can get after an injury or a stroke. Developmental prosopagnosia is something that starts early in life and seems to be genetic. The sad thing is there is no cure for it. I would say that acquired prosopagnosia is probably harder on everyone because you spend so many years with people and one day you can't even recognize who they are. It is all sad to handle. This book really opened up my eyes to how fortunate I am.
I never heard of prosopagnosia before now, maybe that is what I suffer from. I often think that I am experiencing an early onset of alzheimer's. I am going to do a little more research into "face blindness" because it is possible. My family just thinks that I need a bigger hard drive in my brain to store all the information I have collected over the years. My sister says I need to forget the "usless" information I always retain in my brain. But like I tell her "knowledge is power".
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of prosopagnosia before reading the text either. I cannot imagine developing such a disorder and not being able to recognize the faces of those close to me. Hearing of those suffering from such a hardship is really eye opening and makes all of us realize how lucky we are just to recognize the faces of those close to us or even people we have only met once or twice. Also, the fact that there is no cure yet probably leaves victims, their friends, and families feeling hopeless which makes all of this even more sad.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post I sat and thought about what it would be like to not be able to remember someones face! That has to be an extremely scary feeling. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to go through that every single day!
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this post, I really understood my friend better. We've been friends for years, but even so he still sometimes doesn't recognize me. Its definitely not because of simple things like a changing hair style. He does it to everyone and now I can finally understand what he's sort of dealing with. Thanks!
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