Prosopagnosia
December 18th, 2006 by BifWe’ve all, I assume, gone blank at some stage when confronted with someone who apparently knows us or said hello to a complete stranger who we thought we knew. My experience of not recognising my own sister is probably a little to the extreme but not quite as far as some of those recounted in this fascinating article about Prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, is the condition whereby sufferers can’t distinguish between faces. Facial features just become so generalised that they can have difficulty recognising their own loved ones. Recent studies suggest that one in 50 of us could be a sufferer. If you’d like to test your face recognition, go here.
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December 18th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Well, I thought I might not do too well but 100% accuracy proved myself wrong? I like visual puzzles so I guess that helped. My main issue is putting a name to the face. There is nothing worse than when someone you kinda know says Hi! and you speed up your pace and mumbel Hi Mbu…wan…kdna… Quickly insert smile… keep walking… they’ll never know…
December 18th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
Did you do both tests? I got 80% in the old/new faces test which is just below average. I have an awful habit of just saying ’sorry, I don’t remember you’.
December 18th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Yeah, I got 100% in the famous one and 80% in the old/new one.
Didn’t take the longer one, might try that some other time.
December 18th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
If you can do those you’ll probably get around the same on the longer one. 94% myself and it gets a bit complicated. You can make money on MSN games playing symbol based match games if you’re fast enough.
December 22nd, 2006 at 9:40 am
They all look the same to me.
April 10th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
I have prosopagnosia. For the sake of comparison, the second time I took it I scored under 60%