What Is It?

The technical name for faceblindness is prosopagnosia. This is quite a mouthful and means nothing to most people. It means little enough to most doctors. "Faceblind" is more descriptive and more easily understood. It is a condition once thought to be rare. Current investigators now believe that faceblindness is more common, but often goes unrecognized. Many people attribute it to poor vision, laziness, or forgetfulness, but that is not the problem. The problem is that a faceblind person cannot recognize a face, or has significant difficulty recognizing a face.

Face recognition is such a basic skill that most people take it for granted. It happens automatically, unconsciously, effortlessly. If you meet someone a few times, you will recognize him even if you meet him unexpectedly, even if he's just had a haircut or has changed his style of dress. You will recognize photographs of him, even old ones taken years ago. You may forget his name, but you will likely remember his face for a long time.

A faceblind person does not recognize a person's face. He sees the face, every detail. He simply doesn't have the necessary equipment to match what he sees with faces he's seen in the past. Somewhere along the line there is a breakdown in the system, and the face he sees is unrecognized.

To understand this puzzling concept, consider the beautiful ideograms of the Chinese language. Each one of those characters is a word. There are similarities between some of the characters, but they are each unique.

If you were told that one of these characters was "Bob", and another was "Sue", and a third was "George W. Bush", you would probably still be at a loss to recognize them the next time you saw that character. You could see every stroke and curve of the character, but it would require much effort and time before it would click that this character was "Bob". If the characters were similar enough, you might never be able to tell them apart. If they had subtle changes - perhaps written by a different person - you might not realize they were the same characters. Over time, some faceblind people are able to remember faces they see frequently. Others, though, cannot, no matter how often they see the person.

Perhaps you can get an idea of what it's like to be faceblind, if you try to recognize faces in photographs that you have turned upside-down. As you look at the features of these upside-down faces, you will find it more difficult to recognize the people. You can still see every feature - eyes, nose, mouth, and so on - but now your brain has trouble pulling it all together into a meaningful way so that you know this is so-and-so. A faceblind person has a similar problem, but it exists even when the face is right side up. If you imagine having this problem all the time, with every face, then you can see that for us, looking at the face is useless. We do much better using other clues to a person's identity.