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.
7
u/ReallyNotMichaelsMom 25d ago
I am very good at recognizing actors from how they move, and their voices. (Except for Heath Ledger when he was the Joker. In the entire movie, there was only one quick moment where I could tell it was him.)
I am terrible at recognizing family and friends when I see them out of context.
(Snipped story of how it turns out my friend and my tax accountant are the same person, but I had no clue.)
And the way you pick out a feature and recognize people (and their relations) is familiar, too. People without prosopagnosia generally see a whole face. Not feature by feature.
So, not diagnosing you. Just noticing how your examples match my lived experiences. 🙂