Better Living Through Literature

I learned the terms prosopagnosia–or face blindness–probably in my early thirties (I think because I was reading about Oliver Sacks, who both had it and wrote a book about an extreme case). A few years before then, I was talking to my BFF about a dream, and said, “You know how people’s faces in dreams are never really faces, they’re just a blur?” and he said, “No, that’s not how most people dream faces.”

I’m entirely self-diagnosed and in my 30s, the main tests out there were to check for the appercetive type, in which you don’t recognize ANYONE. I can recognize people but most of it’s from external cues–beards, hair, voices, clothing style, they’re where I expect to see them, etc.

I randomly decided to read the Wikipedia article about face blindness last night and learned that there’s a developmental type of prosopagnosia, too, which sounds like my case: It’s not an utter inability to recognize people, it’s just hard; it’s been around from birth; and it might even be genetic?

There’s even a newer test out there to screen for the milder types and wow, did that confirm my self-diagnosis:

There’s nothing to be done about it and, because my brain doesn’t know anything else, it’s not bothersome; it’s just an interesting neural thing (maybe something didn’t develop in the fusiform face area of my brain? Yes, I went on a deep dive last night). But thinking of my own history and just assuming everyone was like this, I thought, “Let’s talk about it!”