Faces

Yes! I've mentioned this somewhere on the forum before. Someone can walk away and seconds later I get their details wrong! I dread ever witnessing any crime as I'd be useless@ the worst was my husband was standing next to me in a busy shop (lush which also smells super strong) he text me to say I'm next to you but I got it after I'd left! He thought it was hilarious

It occured to me when I woke this morning, to try and picture the faces of people I know. I can get a mental image of some, but my husband ended up as a picasso type image of his left eyebrow and cheekbone, his nose and beard.  It made me think that I am remembering detail rather than the whole picture. Another aspie trait.

I don't think it is down to not looking at people. I have instances of making a real effort to remember a particular person, I have to meet later, and really worrying that I won't. If in doubt, I have to approach carefully, and hope they show signs of recognising me. 

There are certain people I meet locally whom I recognise from the dog they walk, rather than themselves. I'm scuppered if the dog dies.

I have taken to telling people I know reasonably well, that I get preocupied when out, and they should give me a prod as they pass to wake me up.

I really like knowing odd people who are 6 foot six, or have a wart on their nose. Seriously though some faces are easier than others. Some people I just don't recognise at all, some I confuse but many are fine. It's not reading the face, I have a problem with in this instance, it's more remembering what a person looks like.

PS Laddo, would you necessarily know if there were a few people you were not remembering? I am a bit bogged down in the idea that so many aspie traits are to do with what we miss. So if you have missed something, how do you know you have unless someone points it out. NT people are way to "polite" to tell us we got something wrong, they tend to drift away and avoid us. 

en.wikipedia.org/.../Prosopagnosia

Me too. I realised I suffered from this before I worked out I had Aspergers. I often get confused between two similar (to me) people in a context. So, there are pairs of people that I really struggle to differentiate. If you always see them together or in the same place at work then I really struggle. It takes me a while and a lot of conscous effort to remember which is which.

I believe that this is related to our gaze aversion, if you avoid looking at faces then remembering individuals is tricky.

Hi I know what you mean.I struggle to fit in and also enjoy my own company.I struggle to read facial expressions but that just part and parcel of being a aspie.

Years ago worked in a video shop. Useless at remembering customer's names but bizarrely good at remembering numbers, despite being rubbish at maths. Bumped into one customer in a pub 4 years after I left, had forgotten his name but remembered his number. Which he checked as he still had the card on him. Cue much hilarity amongst his mates :-) 

Laddo: Ha, not sure.  Wait till I have a diagnosis and I'll see if I can spare it.

Know what you mean about not fitting in anywhere. Luckily I quite like myself, even when I'm depressed! So I'm ok with being on my own most of the time.

Going back to topic... I don't know if I've heard anywhere that being bad with names and being bad with faces is linked. I just always thought it was. Maybe it is for me, but not everybody.

Yup, faces get me confused too.  I try to categorise folk by noting they have long brown hair or wear glasses, but then they go and change their hairstyle!

I'm not even great with voices and accents.  We have a heavily accented guy at work but I just didn't notice until others pointed it out. 

I didn't know the difficulty had a name! A kind of dyslexia of humans!

What I wonder about is - how much have I missed out on and not noticed and don't even know I've missed.  There have been difficult people in my life and some of them have been really random in their responses to me over time, but of course I now know THEY were probably the normal ones and it was in response to something I did or said, but I'm blowed if I know what.

I just have to shrug my shoulders and admit that there goes another non-relationship.  'Cos I don't even know how to put it right.

Can we swap? I'm diagnosed Asperger's but so many traits don't seem to apply for me. Sometimes talking on forums like this makes me feel a bit lonely as it's like I don't fit in with autistic people or NT people! What a world eh?

I haven't heard that being bad with names is linked with being bad with faces but it would make sense. After all people are primarily defined by both their names and faces

Laddo, you actually make me feel really good by sort of saying I'm more autistic on this than you. (I'm undiagnosed, and don't want to feel I'm a 'fake'). But I'm sure you are more autistic than me on other things!

I'm bad with names too.  I thought that was linked to being bad with faces (sort of no point learning a name if you are not going to recognise them anyway) but maybe I'm wrong about that.

God, I feel like such an alien among ASD people. I'm generally quite good with faces in real life. Terrible with names, but good with faces.

This is actually the one autism related symptom I have had tested: I had some memory tests after a head injury a few years ago and it confirmed I have a bad memory for names and faces.

I'm fine with people and family I've known a long time, but often have difficulty recognizing people out of context

I've been a tutor too, on short courses with groups up to 8. First lesson with a new group I'd write a crib sheet with who was sitting where.  I could then usually remember who was who for the length of the course.  If they came back for another course a few weeks later though I'd often have problems.

Most tv shows I'm ok, though there's might be a few characters I lose track of, and I quite often couldn't tell you the characters name (I might recognise it if I saw or heard it).  One time I was watching a documentary on Scottish none-identical twin brothers, one of whom was 'black' and had been suffering racism. It didn't seem to be making sense to me.  Then I realised that I had the twins the 'wrong' way round: One twin had negroid features (broad nose, curly hair) and the particular pale cream skin and brassy red hair you sometimes get with mixed race. The other had mediteranian looks.  The thing is to me the 1st looked more like a black person, but it was actually the one I thought looked mediteranean that was getting the racism. So apparently NT's see skin colour before everything else that I see?

In real life there's a guy I've been seeing and talking to every now and again for years while I'm out walking dogs. He has a small dog with him (sometimes a friend's too) and we've had some good discussions. Then recently I realised there were actually two of them. What's more now I've realised they look TOTALLY different! One has glasses, grey hair and square face and the other has red hair and is balding! I can see them fine but for some reason I'd just never classified them in a way that distinguished them before.

By the way I have seen one representation of total prognoposia (ie being unable to recognise anyone) on a tv show: in the 1st series of the program 'Hannibal'.  In that they represented it as the person seeing faces as a blur, which is definitely not what I see. I think it's ok if you see that as a metaphor, but maybe some NT's will take it too literally (LOL). (Also a warning: Hannibal is a brilliant program if you don't mind horror. Very intelligent and creative. But it is extremely gruesome so don't watch if you don't like that)

Me2

I'm very bad with faces in other contexts. This is a real handicap for a lecturer. I couldn't recognise tutees out of context, and had many embarrassing moments being totally unable to recognise a student who felt hurt by this. Often they were asking for something, and I had to ask who they were.

I recall many difficult episodes of total recognition failure

I frequently don't recognise people in the street, even though i know them well in another context.

I've had to learn to bluff it out. I'm forever meeting people and chatting to them, even going to sit down for a coffee in the hope of resolving the problem. I've just had to hope my responses to the conversatiion made sense.

Being spottable/recognisable myself, I guess it is much easier for the other party to identify me.

As to films, similar looking characters cause me great problems following the plot.

I have problems with war films or gangster films, where they are all dressed the same. Remember getting half way through one very confusing film before I realised the one main character was actually two people! 

Too many embarrassing incidents to list where I have not recognised people, usually work colleagues in the street, eg one I had been working with a week earlier in a temp job, and another I worked with for a year and didnt recognise six months later. Recently it was a colleague I bumped into with her family and mistook her for a neighbour - they all looked totally baffled. Had she phoned me I would have recognised her voice immediately though. 

I'm not sure if this is necessarily linked to the ability to read emotions though, as I seem to do OK on those tests. And am usually painfully aware if I am p- ing someone off!