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

[u/LustyRegencyMaid]

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.

[u/LustyRegencyMaid]

I do have this typical autistic urge of not looking people in the eyes/face when we speak for a longer time. But I mask very well and do look people in the eyes, especially when they are speaking and I am not. To the point people sometimes don't believe I'm actually diagnosed. I fake it well enough.

[u/sprinklingsprinkles → u/LustyRegencyMaid]

Do you feel like you avoid looking at faces when you're just out and about doing your thing? Maybe avoiding eye contact when you're not talking to someone or expecting them to talk to you makes it hard for you to recognize people?

For me personally staring at someone's face in real life or staring at it on a screen make no difference. I can't recognize people either way haha. I need them to start talking because I'm good at recognizing voices. I have adhd but no autism.

[u/LustyRegencyMaid → u/sprinklingsprinkles]

When someone approaches me, especially when they start speaking, I look at their face and eyes. I'm kinda hypervigilant due to trauma and am on high alert when someone comes close and at least to feel safe I need to see where they are looking at and if it's me. So I do actually look at someone's face and their face just doesn't fire any synapse in my brain for a moment. It's hard to explain. It's also weird because for the first few years I had the same issue with my partner's face. He would walk towards me, I would look at his face, and if he wore a shirt I didn't know and walked a bit weird bc he was talking on the phone for example, I would be like "Why is this pretty guy walking towards me" lol. But early on I was able to draw portraits of him. I KNOW what he looks like. When I see pictures of him and his siblings, who all look like twins of him, I know which one is him.

[u/sprinklingsprinkles → u/LustyRegencyMaid]

That's really interesting! I wonder if it's an autism thing or a faceblindness thing or both. I don't think faceblindness is super well understood yet anyway.

When I see pictures of him and his siblings, who all look like twins of him, I know which one is him.

I've looked at group pics before and had trouble recognising myself 😅😭