I have this condition. I’ve written about it at length in my own personal archives, and even penned a song or two about it, but it has never been mentioned on this page. It is a problem that I am forced to confront on a daily basis, and one that continues to baffle the few friends I have trusted enough to tell. It deals with facial perception and recognition. I am completely and utterly unable to picture the faces of any and all friends, relatives, and acquaintances. I cannot draw people from memory. Sometimes I see glimpses of features that are either prominent or special in some way. For example, I can remember the precise location of a birthmark, scar or wrinkle. I can remember the color of somebody’s eyes, the contours of their lips, or the general shape of their hair. But I can’t remember multiple characteristics for the same person. I see the birthmark, the nose, the eyes, and that’s it. The rest of their face is a blank canvas.
Sometimes people even take on different shapes or forms all together when I try to really focus on remembering what they look like. The first time I noticed I this was in high school, when my friends and I were talking about a girl named Julie. Upon hearing her name in conversation, I tried to think about her face. Instead of her, I saw a baby in a bonnet with giant eyes. At the time I thought it was really unusual, and did not tell a soul about my condition. Now I’m not so scared and confused when I draw Ilya from memory and he looks like Splinter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, or Phoebe, who looks like a Banana with Mr. Potatohead arms and legs, or Nicci, who looks like a little yellow LEGO man in a sailor outfit, or Sari, who is but a cameo…a darkened shadow of a face. Even my parents are not immune. I can see my sister’s hair and mouth on an empty, overly-fake-tanned face. I can see my mom’s hair, but nothing else. She’s a peachy, thin, totally blank face with a mop of blond hair resting atop it. My father is a pair of large, black wire-framed glasses and squinty eyes on an olive-skinned, ovoid face. His eyes are squinty, but they don’t contain eyeballs. It’s just the shape of two eye sockets.
If I think too long about a face, features distort, shapes change, unnatural transformations occur in rapid succession. Weird, huh?
Wikipedia offers an entry for a disorder called Prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, but after reading it over several times I realized that the particular disorder is characterized by a conscious impairment. That is, the afflicted can not recognize faces. It has nothing to do with being able to memorize or accurately render a face in one’s mind. When it comes to diagnosis this problem of mine, I am left to Google to help me find answers. Unfortunately, the only result that seemed similar to my situation is an excerpt from a book called “Cognitive Psychology” by Ronald Thomas Kellogg. On page 220, Kellogg references a study about “A patient with bilatereal lesions in the ventral occipitotemporal areas known to be involved in face perception.” The patient “had trouble imagining faces well-known to him. For example, when asked to imagine the face of Abraham Lincoln, it appeared to him as a short round face.” So, according to the author, I’ve got lesions in my brain. Great, that’s cool. I can live with that.
Luckily, a simple Google search for “can’t remember people’s faces” has temporarily alleviated my worries. It seems I am not alone in the world, as two pages of results for that string of words point to websites, blogs, and journals belonging to folks who share my problem. One girl writes that she can’t remember people’s faces but can immediately recognize voices or describe clothing. Someone named Bobby says he remembers the impression of seeing a face, but not the details. Another journal writer defines the problem as “short-term photographic memory loss.” I like that. Only for me it would have to be long-term, because I can never remember a face, no matter how badly I want to.
