A friend once got a haircut and it took me weeks to figure out who she was. I just thought she was a new person hanging out with someone there and wanted to be my friend because she kept talking to me.
Many years ago I looked right at my (now ex) partner at an airport when I was picking her up and kept on looking for her. We lived together at the time.
I ran into my lead singer at the store. He was wearing the same thing he always wears but had his hair pulled back. He stopped and talked to me and apparently I looked like I was trying to escape. He was telling the story at band practice when I had to admit I didn’t recognize him.
This is an ongoing problem in my life. I probably have a dozen of these stories that I can remember off the top of my head and a hundred more that I could dig out. I wouldn’t even want to guess how many people have talked to me that I don’t realize I knew them. Clark Kent taking off his glasses and suddenly becoming unrecognizable is totally reasonable to me. Dude could look me in the eyes, take off his glasses, and it would be like a whole new person appeared.
That’s prosopagnosia. We have hardware in the brain, wired to recognize faces — which is probably why pareidolia, aka ‘Jesus on a toast’, is a thing. Only, for some people this chunk doesn’t work as it should.
I myself have poor memory for faces if I don’t hang out with a person for a while. This presented challenges when I worked from home, but occasionally showed up at the office and was greeted by people with whom I only communicated through chat and saw on minuscule userpics.
It’s an awful thing but also amusing in its own way. When I used to go out with my ex I always had to memorize what he was wearing. One time we were at the grocery store and I forgot what shirt he was dressed in. I went off to get something from another aisle and when I came back he was gone. Eventually he physically grabbed me while I was walking past and found it very funny to tell me that he been laughing while watching me walk right past him about 5 times in a growing panic because I couldn’t find him.
I have stories! I never recognize anyone.
A friend once got a haircut and it took me weeks to figure out who she was. I just thought she was a new person hanging out with someone there and wanted to be my friend because she kept talking to me.
Many years ago I looked right at my (now ex) partner at an airport when I was picking her up and kept on looking for her. We lived together at the time.
I ran into my lead singer at the store. He was wearing the same thing he always wears but had his hair pulled back. He stopped and talked to me and apparently I looked like I was trying to escape. He was telling the story at band practice when I had to admit I didn’t recognize him.
This is an ongoing problem in my life. I probably have a dozen of these stories that I can remember off the top of my head and a hundred more that I could dig out. I wouldn’t even want to guess how many people have talked to me that I don’t realize I knew them. Clark Kent taking off his glasses and suddenly becoming unrecognizable is totally reasonable to me. Dude could look me in the eyes, take off his glasses, and it would be like a whole new person appeared.
That’s prosopagnosia. We have hardware in the brain, wired to recognize faces — which is probably why pareidolia, aka ‘Jesus on a toast’, is a thing. Only, for some people this chunk doesn’t work as it should.
I myself have poor memory for faces if I don’t hang out with a person for a while. This presented challenges when I worked from home, but occasionally showed up at the office and was greeted by people with whom I only communicated through chat and saw on minuscule userpics.
It’s an awful thing but also amusing in its own way. When I used to go out with my ex I always had to memorize what he was wearing. One time we were at the grocery store and I forgot what shirt he was dressed in. I went off to get something from another aisle and when I came back he was gone. Eventually he physically grabbed me while I was walking past and found it very funny to tell me that he been laughing while watching me walk right past him about 5 times in a growing panic because I couldn’t find him.