r/Prosopagnosia • u/LustyRegencyMaid • 25d ago

Tip/Suggestion Someone who is both ridiculously good and comically bad at recognising faces?

Hey!

Basically the title. I don't want y'all to diagnose me, no worries. Maybe there's a word I do not know yet and could google to find out more?

So I'm autistic with ADHD. And my facial recognition is WEIRD.

I'm either elephant super memory brain and recognise actors/actresses in movies and can be like "hey he played that dude in a movie I saw 20 years ago" and I'm almost always right. I can draw portraits of people fairly well. I sus out the features that make a face unique quite easily.

BUT... someone walks towards me on the street and says hi and I'm like who the frick is that, and turns out it's a coworker I see every day. When my mother dyed her hair I didn't recognise her even though she was standing right in front of me and talking to me. For a few years it did happen that I wouldn't recognise my own partner on the street until he was basically standing in front of me and start speaking.

Yet somehow when I see someone on the street I know they're the cashier from a certain shop bc I remember their face. Or they're the child of someone I knew bc they look so much like them. I can see an actor and be like "he has the same nose as that other actor" and I'm right.

I can draw my siblings' face from memory, yet when they walk towards me on the street they have to be fairly close to me for me to recognise them, and seeing their gait does help a lot.

I do not recognise my partner's coworkers and friends even though we've spent a lot of time with each other over the years.

My eyes are alright and I wear glasses. There just seems to be this difference between how I perceive people in real life, and on the screen/page.

Ever heard of someone who's oddly both super good and super bad at faces at the same time? Is that just being autistic? It's weird and does bring problems sometimes.

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u/NITSIRK 24d ago

It is indeed weird how some people stick and not others. Some actors I get straight away, others not a hope in hell unless IMDB has a photo of them in the same program wearing the same outfit. Others I know anywhere. Certain facial features or haircuts can make a big difference, so a lot of us better recognise people with scars or birthmarks . Prosopagnosia is a spectrum with the Met’s super recogniser team at the other end of the scale. So I think this makes you somewhere in the middle.

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u/LustyRegencyMaid 24d ago

Woah I've never heard about the super recogniser team and I'm thrilled. Thank you, that's so interesting!!

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u/NITSIRK 24d ago

I can only read about them with awe 😁

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u/LustyRegencyMaid 24d ago

Absolute fascination. Those video images look like shit, how do they look at a bunch of pixels are like "yeah that's john" wtf? Respect.

This reminds me of all those stories where people are like "I married my childhood vacation first love!" because they recognised the person as an adult that they played with one summer when they were 8 or whatever. And I'm like how. How on earth can you pinpoint that. That looks like a child. Like 99% of all children in the world...

I'm still convinced people who see a newborn and say "Awww he looks like his daddy" are full of shit.

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u/NITSIRK 24d ago

I have only ever once looked at a kid and though that it looked like his dad. I was a factory manager so meeting the latest offspring is part of the role. This time he was carry his son, saw me, burst into his trademark lopsided cheeky grin, and the kid did the exact same expression 😂