3 ms·
People often don’t believe me when I say I can’t remember faces. I can compensate mostly by remembering the shape of someone’s hairline/hairstyle, and also ears
by Quinzel 3y ago
People often don’t believe me when I say I can’t remember faces. I can compensate mostly by remembering the shape of someone’s hairline/hairstyle, and also ears. I also recognise people by voice much easier and I pay attention to the way people walk. That is usually enough information to recognise people. I can’t visualise faces, and even in my dreams people don’t even have faces, they have fogginess where a face should be.
I had an awkward moment at the supermarket a couple of months back when I didn’t recognise a person I was dating who waved to me, and I was confused so looked behind me thinking they were waving to someone behind me, and then continued shopping and ignored them. They texted me afterwards annoyed that I snubbed them. They did not believe me when I said I didn’t recognise them. We’re no longer dating… lol.
It also used to cause me anxiety as a kid because I would get lost in crowds and in queues because I couldn’t recognise my mum, and I hadn’t yet learned strategies for telling people apart.
I otherwise have a perfectly good enough memory. It’s just some weird brain thing. I always used to think it was because I just didn’t care what people looked like.
- klyrs 3y agoI'm on this spectrum, and despite the drawbacks, the workarounds are superpowers. I always know when people get haircuts, or have an injury. I know when somebody's wearing new clothes, or spent the night with somebody new. Especially in nerdy circles, this level of social awareness is considered freakish. It's fun. But then, the flipside is annoying. If somebody is wearing different clothes in a different context, they feel snubbed when I look right past them. I'm glad that's never happened with somebody I've dated! So awkward...
- noman-land 3y agoYou gotta start telling people this up front! So it's not a surprise when it happens.
- wkat4242 3y agoIt's funny, I hang out in a community with so many misfits now and it's really common. People often ask me "hey what was her name again?" or remind me how bad they are with names. It's either a lot more common than people think, or it's that people with this issue have more chance being a misfit :)
- wkat4242 3y agoFunny, in my dreams people don't even have a a manifestation, it's really weird. It's like the whole visual part of my brain is skipped and it goes right to the part where my brain interprets that someone says xyz. That's the part where the dream takes place. Though environments can be visual, people are not. I didn't know it wasn't like this for everyone.
- Quinzel 3y agoI find dreaming pretty fascinating. I like hearing about other people’s dreams too, just because they can be so wildly different to mine. I don’t have a strong visual mind I don’t think. My dreams tend to be in black and white, and sometimes they’re emotionally intense, but the visual stuff is pretty sketchy, but there tends to be a lot of internal dialogue which I also have when awake. What I find most interesting about my lack of visualisation in my “minds eye” is that I can do some really cool artwork sometimes - but it’s almost always in black and white.