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The guy REALLY looks like the police sketches too. Almost perfectly the same, except for maybe a slight difference in nose width.

• partiallypro 5y ago
  The police sketch is from a 2 children that watched from across the street at night. I have never believed the sketch is accurate. The sketch also shows a skinnier person but everyone described him as a bit overweight.
• gremloni 5y ago
  Does anyone else have issues with identifying and describing facial features. I have no problems recognizing people, but there’s no way I can verbalize them on a specific features basis. What kind of disorder do I have?
  • davidholdeman 5y ago
    I don't know whether your experience is similar to mine, but I can't visualize faces at all, even of someone I have just been looking at. I have no issues recognizing people or visualizing things other than faces, so neither aphantasia nor prosopagnosia match.
    • nhumrich 5y ago
      Aphantasia is a spectrum.
    • gremloni 5y ago
      This comment describes me perfectly.
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      I can’t visualize anything really. It’s like I just think about its shape in an abstract since but I don’t actually visualize anything it’s all words and thoughts in my head, no images.
      • neuronic 5y ago
        I heard this very often and am always quite curious about it, as I cant relate. Whenever I imagine something it's a mix of abstract, foggy stuff and vivid clear images. I don't "see" them, I think/dream them like replaying a visual input without involving the eyes.
      • gremloni 5y ago
        Can you close your eyes and visualize a red, three dimensional star rotating?
        • neuronic 5y ago
          Yes until I also visualized a derpy dog orbiting it whose tongue was hanging out.
        • arthurcolle 5y ago
          What is a 3 dimensional star? A star is a 2D shape, so this statement is ambiguous
        • edgyquant 5y ago
          Nope I just think about a star and it rotating but there is no visualization or images involved
      • jikbd 5y ago
        There was an article about this here on hn some time ago. People who don’t have a mind’s eye.
  • tails4e 5y ago
    I took think id be terrible at this. I doubt I'd describe my own face to a sketch artist well, let alone a fleeting meeting with a stranger..
  • abandonliberty 5y ago
    Part of the sketch artist's job is to work with people who aren't familiar describing images.
  • jahnu 5y ago
    Perhaps the artists are trained to ask questions of witnesses that reveal details you wouldn't be able to give up unprompted?
    • gremloni 5y ago
      I’ve had this exercise with my wife and I couldn’t even describe her nose, mouth, forehead or ears even though I see her everyday.
      • FPGAhacker 5y ago
        That’s fascinating to me. How would you describe your dreams (as in rem sleep dreams)?
    • codezero 5y ago
      I remember a podcast (I think it was Every Little Thing) where someone described being a police sketch artist and it very much involved a lot of question asking, a lot of experience with identifying specific traits that stand out, and refining it over time. Draw a nose, was the bridge wider or thiner? With a lot of experience they seem to be able to get the "right" details close-enough that it can identify say, a large handful of people for whom those that might report them can feel more confident in say, calling the FBI before reporting their uncle. This casts a wider net than say, directly identifying them, but it helps isolate the possible suspects well enough to be worth doing when you've got nothing else.
  • jwuphysics 5y ago
    I think that's fairly typical for people who aren't used breaking down images into their constituent parts. In the language of computer vision, it would be like saying that our visual cortexes don't need to know how to segment a face into detailed descriptions of eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc., in the same way as it is necessary to be able to segment a wolf from a forest scene. But it can also be trained. See, e.g., Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
    • e9 5y ago
      Thank you for the book recommendation. My internal visual system is impaired unless I’m on certain drugs. I’m super excited to hear it can be trained.
  • austinjp 5y ago
    Have a search for "aphantasia" and see if your experience matches.
    • bradrn 5y ago
      I’d say it sounds more like prosopagnosia.
      • gremloni 5y ago
        I doubt it’s either of those. I can recognize a person at a distance but ask me to describe if their nose bridge is wider or narrower and I literally wouldn’t be able to tell you unless it’s significantly exaggerated.
        • webmaven 5y ago
          The question should be, if shown an example nose drawing could you say whether the bridge should be wider or narrower? Or if shown two noses with different width bridges, can you point to the one that is closer to being right? Police sketch artist scenes in movies and TV shows are incredibly abbreviated compared to reality, which often features a lot more iteration and discarded sketches precisely because a lot of people are in the "I'll know it when I see it" group.
          • bserge 5y ago
            That explains it. Yeah, I'd be able to point to something that's closer to what I saw.
      • cobalt 5y ago
        i have partial aphantasia (I think) and I am quite good at recognizing faces, but I couldn't necessarily visualize one to describe it if not looking at the face
    • kordlessagain 5y ago
      Unfortunately, "aphantasia" is now labeled as "the inability to voluntarily create a mental picture in your head". That's from Google. The primary problem with this label is that this could include some people who see involuntary imagery (like people), but don't do what is essentially creative visualization. For those people, they "know" the experience of seeing things in mind. Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all. For the people I've found with this ability I would say none of them could hear things internally either. Not everyone has the ability to "rehear" things. I spent a lot of years asking people about how they saw things internally and it just got weirder the more I asked. Eventually, I just decided that everyone thinks differently, with various "side models" that allow them to see, hear, think and even smell things that aren't real.
  • nhumrich 5y ago
    Sounds like you have asphantasia. (I also have it)
  • teorema 5y ago
    Not a disorder. Totally normal. This is why cognitive models distinguish between visual and verbal processing.
  • schoen 5y ago
    I've always had a similar experience to this and also don't believe it is the same thing as either aphantasia or prosopagnosia. I can consciously imagine things (and people and places) that I'm not seeing right now. I'm not super-great at it, but I can certainly do it. I can also easily and reliably recognize individual people. But the idea of describing any individual detail of people's appearance even while looking at them (let alone from memory) seems extraordinarily difficult for me, and has since childhood. My stepmother was an artist and would sometimes try to question me about this, suggesting that I could learn to do it but hadn't. I think I agree with other comments in this thread that conscious awareness of visual details in a scene is a separate skill from any form of recognition or recall -- especially, or most dramatically, for faces, but really for any visual percept as well. Maybe for any sensory perception: for example, I could imagine someone who can recognize individual voices, or musical instruments in a performance in which several different instruments are present, but who can't describe what makes one different from another (perhaps not even at the level of which instrument or voice has a higher-pitched fundamental tone than another's?). I think I rely a ton on my visual system's chunking and abstraction and usually have little to no conscious awareness of any individual visual detail (especially for faces, but really for anything), unless I make some active effort to bring visual details to consciousness. I remember telling a friend in high school that I usually experienced visual scenes in a kind of wireframe summary by default (although this is just a metaphor, since I don't mean to deny that I noticed colors or textures), which she also found surprising and unfamiliar. Edit: Like another commenter in this thread, my stepmother often recommended Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to me, so maybe I should work through it and try to develop my ability to notice visual features without interpreting them. :-)
    • gremloni 5y ago
      I couldn’t describe this any better. Especially the visual chunking and abstraction.
    • rjbwork 5y ago
      I very much feel this way as well. I've never quite articulated it as well as you have and it has given me some insight into my own behaviors. I think this is why I'm what is described as a "power gamer". When I play video games I'm always looking for optimal strategies, the most powerful combinations of items and skills, etc. While I definitely can at times enjoy the scenery and graphical beauty of video games, I often feel as if I'm "staring through" the game as presented right into the game as actuality when playing, hardly processing the graphics at all past being some kind of representation of the game itself.
  • bserge 5y ago
    I have literally had this thought yesterday for the first time. If I had to describe someone's face to police... I couldn't. I mean, they've got 2 eyes, a nose, lips, that's the best I could do :D
  • kbos87 5y ago
    I feel the same way. I know there are purported to be disorders that affect the ability to recognize different faces, but I have to ask myself whether or not I’m much worse than the average, or if everyone is bad at it and I’m just more aware of that. Study after study since the 1960s has all but proven that humans just aren’t good at this and eyewitness testimony is very often wrong, yet we still insist that we “know what we saw.”
  • tremon 5y ago
    This isn't an activity many people have to do often (verbally classifying facial features), so it isn't that surprising to me that untrained people have difficulty with it. Obviously I don't know your specific experience, but I'd think your experience is the norm rather than the exception. In my mind, it's similar to musicians training solfege or chemists training in verbally classifying a smell: it aids both their understanding and their skill. It absolutely blew my mind to have a perfumist friend of mine describe smells to me as we were walking through the city. I'd never have guessed the depth and complexity of olfactory sensations that us humans are capable of with the right training.
• aaron695 5y ago
  > The guy REALLY looks like the police sketches too. Am I the only one who can see one wears glasses the other does not? You can't get a bigger difference. Either the police sketch should be thrown out, if the witness makes a mistake about the glasses. Or the suspect wasn't wearing them in his photo. In which case it needs to be mentioned, with a functioning 4th Estate the news should ask and hopefully answer obvious questions. (And in non-movies serial killers don't wear disguises, although this currently seems more reality TV)