What is prosopagnosia?

Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a failure to recognize facial features. This disease is accompanied with multiple types of problems in recognizing, such as facial expressions, emotions, objects, places, etc., but it is closely related to facial identity.

Because of the difficulties that it causes, people who experience prosopagnosia experience serious social problems. They cannot recognize friends, family members, and even themselves sometimes.¹

Studies have shown that prosopagnosia is not as rare as it seemed like a few years ago. Results from tests indicate that 1 in 50 people may have this condition. If these numbers are right, it means that at least 1.5 million people have congenital prosopagnosia only in UK (place of the research).²

Symptoms

Prosopagnosics (people with prosopagnosia) have a hard time recognizing people in general and even the people they see on a daily basis; their problem is related to recognizing not remembering. It is normal for one to forget the name of an acquaintance, but it is abnormal for one to forget his/her own mother’s name.

If you have prosopagnosia, most likely you have been forgetting names and faces of people, even if you have spent a lot of time with them throughout your life. Prosopagnosics use hairstyles, voices, clothing, and other characteristics to recognize the person he/she is talking to.

One of the main complaints of prosopagnosics is that they can’t follow movies and TV shows, because they inevitably forget who the characters in the series were.³

Below is a short clip in which Hilary Doyle interviews Jeff Wasserman, a journalist who lives with prosopagnosia. The comments are from Dr. Morris Moscovitch, Glassman Chair in Neuropsychology at the University of Toronto: