I remember names, I remember faces, just fine. What I miss is the ability to tie them together. Especially people I haven't smelled in a while or at all.
My wife is a bit worse; she gets names mixed up but in a deep way. So when we watch a movie she'll insist (fr example) that we're seeing Robin Williams in "Anaconda", he's the same guy was in "Mission Impossible"... or "You know, the guy that was Gimili and Sallah in Indiana Jones, Dom DeLuise."
She'll come out with something like that; I know she's talking about someone else, and can bring the face to mind; but not the name. or vice versa.
Makes for fun discussions about "what we want to watch tonight," and the occasional pause a movie to go track down who someone is and where we saw them before.
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.
I'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...
It'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 :)
Funny, 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 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.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 34.7 ms ] threadMy wife is a bit worse; she gets names mixed up but in a deep way. So when we watch a movie she'll insist (fr example) that we're seeing Robin Williams in "Anaconda", he's the same guy was in "Mission Impossible"... or "You know, the guy that was Gimili and Sallah in Indiana Jones, Dom DeLuise."
She'll come out with something like that; I know she's talking about someone else, and can bring the face to mind; but not the name. or vice versa.
Makes for fun discussions about "what we want to watch tonight," and the occasional pause a movie to go track down who someone is and where we saw them before.
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...
I didn't know it wasn't like this for everyone.
Don't remember faces or names.
Remember a face but can't put a name to it.
Remember names but can't put a face to it.
Remember names and the faces that go together. (Lucky Bastards!)