Face-blindness

Face-blindness
Imagine that you are walking down the road and collide with your best friend. While your friend watches astonished, you politely apologize to her/him and walk away. I am sure that many of you couldn't imagine that. All of us, if we see our friends on the road would always speak to them. But this is precisely what a small percentage of us would have done. This small percentage of us would be suffering from a neurological condition known as Prosopagnosia or face-blindness. Prosopagnosia is derived from the Greek word proso which is face and agnosia means without knowledge.
Face-blindness literally means inability to recognize faces. People who suffer from face-blindness can see just like normal people do, but they cannot distinguish the difference between faces. It is difficult for them to remember a face. Just like some people have the habit of forgetting names; face-blind people forget faces. More than forgetting, it is more that they cannot see anything in a face worth remembering.
Prosopagnosia was never an unknown phenomenon. It is known to have happened to people having strokes or some kind of head injury. It is a condition that is known to neurologists. But they always assumed that face-blindness happened only during a stroke or a head-injury. No-one believed that there would be cases where it would be found on birth.
But incredibly, it was. People were born with this condition. And they continued as though nothing was wrong with them. For them, not remembering faces was how it was from the beginning. They assumed that it was how it was and continued through life. But then one of them decided to be different and wrote about it on the internet. And rest as they say, was history.
The 'discovery' named face-blindness is fairly new. In fact, it is one of the first disorders I believe which was discovered on the internet.
Our brain is supposed to be a supercomputer. But supercomputers can also fail. There is a small part in our brain which allows us to recognize faces. This part is dedicated only to recognizing faces. There is another part which recognizes other objects like buildings, fields, etc. In people suffering from face-blindness, the part that recognizes faces is damaged. So, even though they can see a face just as well as us, they cannot understand it or recognize it. But they can recognize other things just as well as normal people.
How do face-blind people then deal with it? They cope with new methods. They use new methods to recognize people. Non face-blind people's primary mode of recognition is the face. But for the face-blind person, that option is closed. So they use other methods like hair, body shape, gait, clothes, etc. Therefore, whenever they meet someone, they are trying to memorize the way they move, the way they talk and their voice. This is nothing special for them, face-blind people are used to identifying people from this method, and it is just as natural to them as is recognition through face for non face-blind people.
There are some other problems faced by prosopagnosiacs. The most important being the loneliness that they face. Imagine talking to someone and hitting it off and then the next day when you meet the same person, he fails to recognize you. Friendships can be hard to keep if you fail to recognize your new found friend every time. This is what most face-blind people undergo at one time or the other.
The one feature or trait that face-blind people can easily recognize is hair. Choisser argues that when a face has some amount of facial hair on it like a beard or a moustache, the information about the face goes not into the area of facial recognition but on the other things recognition phase. This other part is used to recognize things like buildings, houses etc. So when the facial information goes to this area, it can be recollected by the face-blind person. (Face blind!, 1997).
Normal people take their vision so much for granted that they can never imagine how it would be to not be able to recognize a face.
Next time when someone tells you that they cannot remember faces, don't disbelieve them. There are many people out there who need your support and your help, mostly children.
Give them your undeniable faith so they can cope with their difficulty.



References
Choisser, Bill. Faceblind. Available from http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/