Faceblindness?

How does your theory work for cartoon people? I can easliy recognise Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin etc. But not real people I've known for over 20 years.

I think when I first tried to do that was when I realised quite how big a problem I had! My not being able to form an image of what I look like has even extended to not recognising myself in photos. 

It's fascinating that you can do it in your dreams though. I definitely can't, quite the opposite in fact. What I get is for example there will be "my sister" in the dream, she will sound like my sister, and all of the people in the dream will relate to her as my sister. BUT she will look like someone else entirely, often not even anyone I know. I am aware that the sister character has the wrong face on, but it's like my brain realises it can't get her face right so just stops bothering and puts completely random faces on instead!

I also have people speaking languages in my dreams that I know full well they can't speak in real life, but that's another story .....

Me too - I could recognise a Dell'orto pumper carburettor at 20 paces, and when I was a kid I was obsessed for a while with being able to identify every car by its tail lights alone. 

The solidity idea is interesting, but I am not sure it explains why faces are just fuzz - and I completely agree, that's what they are like for me too. About the only time I can get a brief flash of what someone's face looks like though is when I can picture their expressions..... and expressions are movable. My mum, and my partner's mum, both have some expressions that are very specific to them, and whilst I can't picture either of their faces, if I try to picture the expression, I get (for a few fleeting seconds only) most of the face. Strange but true :-)

I suspect it has something to do with us missing the specific software for face processing. I read some other research that said "normal" people often have difficulty processing an image of a face if it's presented to them upside down, whereas with any other object it makes little difference which way up it is. When the same test is done with a subject with prosopagnosia, the orientation of the image makes far less difference. We take longer to process it whichever way up it is, and tend to sequentially process the individual features rather than look at the face as a whole.

Yes i have this as well 

I'd never tried calling up pictures of faces in my head before today, but you're right; it is extremely hard. I don't feel sure I have it right at all. I seem to be able to in dreams, but a lot of weird stuff gets passed off as normal in dreams that blatantly isn't, so I'm not sure how trustworthy my brain is in that situation. 

"I was asked to get change for £10 by a female volunteer, then I could not find the right person to give the two £5s back to. Ended up giving the money to the wrong person, and then being treated as the object of everyone's amusement and derision."
Eek! This sounds like EXACTLY the sort of thing I would do, Sunflower. D:

But one odd thing is that i can identify every car, train, aircraft etc.ever made - I suspect it's because they are solid & never change - people have the habit of changing their hair colour & style, make-up, glasses, clothes, posture, facial expressions etc. There's nothing solid to be able to memorise them.

Oh yes, I am terrible for this. People who I see out of context I am likely to blank completely. Anyone who changes their hair, or the kind of thing they habitually wear, same, I wouldn't register it was them.

Like you, I rely heavily on indications from the other person that they know who I am, then have to hope that when they start talking, they give themselves away by mentioning people or something that connects them to a certain place. The best one I ever had was a bloke in a pub giving me the very obvious "why are you not acknowledging me" look, who did, to be fair, look vaguely familiar. The only thing that came into my mind was an association with bikes (I am a biker). In the end I got so frustrated, I went up to his table, explained my disastrous facial recognition skills, and asked him who he was. He looked at me with such amazement, then said "this morning???? you spent 3 hrs in my office having a meeting with me!!". I recalled a big fat zero about his face, despite having looked at him for 3hr straight, the only thing that stuck was as I walked in, I saw a crash helmet on a cabinet and said oh, you're a biker too!

It's a bit of a nightmare for film watching too. If a new character who is say a middle-aged bloke with dark hair is introduced in a scene, then in another scene a few minutes later another middle aged bloke with dark hair walks in, I often don't know if it's the same one or another new character, and have to ask my better half. He's used to this now, so doesn't get annoyed with me!

I have done some interesting experiments on myself with this. I can recognize my mother, but I can't call up a picture of her in my head. So I can't really say I know exactly what she looks like. Likewise my own face, I know it's me when it's reflected back in the mirror, but I have no real concept of what I look like, and I can't call up an image of my own face either, which is pretty weird really.

It's called prosopagnosia, by the way, and it is apparently more common in people with ASD than in the general population.

I saw an interesting article once which compared the way people with the condition looked at a photo which had 2 people in it, one facing the camera and one facing away. The researchers used eye following software to see where people looked when shown the image. The "normal" all looked at the face of the person facing the camera, then at the back of the head of the facing away person, then did a rough scan of the background. People like us just looked at the middle of the photo, then did a quick scan around. The faces didn't warrant any special processing. Plastic's comments are actually pretty close to their findings. Other people have special software, just for faces, that is quite specialized. We just use what we have for "general objects" which is not specialized at all ..... so it's just another thing, and one we forget quite quickly at that!

Hi Emma,

Yes, this happens to me all the time. Like you I have had some totally mortifying experiences when it appeared I was confusing someone purely because of their ethnicity. I am not diagnosed autistic yet so it's even harder to explain without feeling like I'm just making excuses. 

A recent example of face blindness was at a Macmillan Coffee Morning. I was asked to get change for £10 by a female volunteer, then I could not find the right person to give the two £5s back to. Ended up giving the money to the wrong person, and then being treated as the object of everyone's amusement and derision. 

I think I fitted more easily into academic roles I held back in the 1990s when a certain amount of eccentricity seemed acceptable, even the norm in certain departments. In my current people-facing role I feel like my colleagues are showing off their superior people skills then looking across at me as if to say "that's how you're supposed to do it!" 

How lovely to have a colleague who gets it... as you say he is an absolute star! 

Another thing that happens to me is I often don't notice when people have had their hair cut, so I don't compliment them. It sometimes applies to gadgets - my husband installed a new Freeview box without me noticing for several weeks. This sort of thing seems contradictory as I notice minute details about many other things. 

Seems like face blindness may be another fascinating but frustrating aspect of autism! 

Yep, this is totally me! I regularly walk past my own mother in town and even if I've spent hours in someone's company one day, I couldn't pick them out of a line-up the next :-/  Hope I'm never witness to a crime!! 

I do not recognise people unless there is something really distinctive about them - false leg, one arm etc. Everyone else boils down to 2 circles for their eyes and outside that is fuzzy nothingness.

I hate it.

It is one of the most annoying problems - if I'm lucky, some people stick in my memory, most fade out in a couple of hours - like the data swirling around the toilet bowl until it becomes unrecognisable.

They all look the same to me..