Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24385650

Face blindness: Seeing but not seeing

Imagine that suddenly you cannot recognise your mother, your partner, your child. You can see them but your brain cannot process the information - you don't know whether they are smiling, or understand their emotions.

That is what happened to David Bromley, after he suffered a brain injury that left him with face blindness.

David has prosopagnosia. People with this condition can see the eyes, the nose, and the mouth, what is known as the context - but they cannot see them as a whole. They do not recognise gestures or emotions.

"I can even recognise my wife if I walk into the house and know that she is there," says David.

"But if I'm in the street and she passes by and I don't know that she is going to be there, I wouldn't recognise her."

David, who lives in Essex, had unknowingly been living with eye damage since birth - the arteries and veins were mixed up. This eventually caused a partial loss of sight and damage in the brain which caused the prosopagnosia.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this condition is that people do not notice right away that something is wrong with them.

(continued)

[JacksSmirkingRevenge]

Interesting.

Sort of related, I suppose... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

[mistermack]

I've had that for years. Almost as bad as he has it.

I can get over it after I've met someone about fifty times. But without the context of the expected location, I still miss people all the time.

It's not that I don't recognise the face, it's that I don't even look at the face. Too intimate. Can't do that.

[pErvinalia]

Interesting. I have an uncanny ability to recognise faces, but total inability to put a name to it (unless it's someone I know well). Almost every face I see, I can name (figuratively speaking) another person with what I perceive to be a similar face. I wonder if I have the opposite of what this guy has.

eta: this "ability" works across sexes and across races.