Ok, so here's the avatar Joel made for himself. Very serious. But he has got the hair and the eyebrows exactly right. He hasn't done the face recognition test yet, but was looking over my shoulder at a distance the other night and saying things like "I know who that one is", with great confidence, and he is always recognising actors in the movies, etc. Lucky I didn't pass this problem on to him.
And really, it's hardly debilitating. Though I am a bit shocked to see how well other people have done on the test!
Update:
And here is Pavlov's Cat's glammo avatar of me, done from memory, no less, based on the photo on my home page. Charitably, she has portrayed an avatar of me of at least two decades ago, but she matched my favourite black top pretty well. Though I must say, I am often pretty good with remembering and recognising textiles myself: no clothes-blindness for me! For the record, I am also very good at remembering menus. In the old dinner-party days in the 80s, I could always remember what I had served, and what I had been served, for years afterwards. It's not really a memory problem, this prosopagnosia thing.
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4 comments:
Actually, I find the younger version of you far more recognisable! And it can't be just the black top.
I know what you mean about prosopagnosia not being a memory problem per se. My brain functions similarly with regards to interpreting conversational aural input - sometimes I just can't hear what people say properly. I KNOW it's not a hearing problem, or I'd have had a good deal more difficulty with the complicated polyphonic choral singing that I used to do in Adelaide. It mostly occurs with strangers (whose speech patterns and vocal habits aren't familiar), or in stressful situations where my ability to read other people's body language deteriorates so I can't use that to compensate.
I suppose it's a similar sort of thing as the facial recognition question - a slightly underdeveloped ability to recognise patterns, aural or visual, in a way that most people assume is just completely normal and instinctive.
Yes, nice analogies, I think.
By the way, J. got 97% and 85% for the facial recognition tests. Nothing wrong there!
That's an interesting comment, about below-average ability to recognise conversational aural input. I think I may suffer the same thing. It's odd to hear someone say something, and be paying full attention to it, and yet almost feel the meaning of the words failing to sink in. It's a good way to annoy some people! And it certainly made oral exams in French a pain.
I too sometimes have problems with memory and people talking, but I think the stress/anxiety factor comes in here as it tends to be specifically about taking instructions -- if someone is trying to give me directions on the road or explain something I really need to know about the computer, my brain just shuts off and I have to beg them to write it down so I can peruse it in a calmer moment at my leisure.
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