I didn’t realize face blindness was a thing until I got glasses at age 36.
I could always see faces, and I could tell this face from that face. But I couldn’t get a face to stick as belonging to a specific person until I got glasses. I’m not sure what strange mental wiring problem causes this. I can see without my glasses, I can see well enough to read.
This caused problems for me when my wife lost weight. She didn’t look the same and I struggled with it. She’s always been beautiful but she’s lost 90 pounds and now I’m worried my wife is going to come home and find me with this hot milf.
I love reading this kind of thing. That’s fascinating, and that last bit is really wholesome. How does glasses play a part in this?
I can’t visualise things in my head, and my memory doesn’t have any visual aspect to it at all. For the longest time I didn’t realise that when people said to “picture this” or “picture that”, they literally meant to conjure up that image in their head. My mother used to spend long amounts of time describing changes she’d like to make to the garden, structures she’d like to build etc. and I just could never follow her descriptions.
Nowadays I mostly notice that when trying to compare things. Unless something is really familiar to me, I cannot really pinpoint changes to it unless I’ve a kind of before/after right in front of me.
Sometimes it saddens me a little. I’ve a dear friend who lives quite far away and we don’t get to see one another often. I’m very fond of them, but I don’t remember what they look like at all, beyond general, vague descriptions.
Would it be possible to ask your friend to send you a picture of themselves? It can be a little awkward to bring up, but they’d probably understand “I’m starting to forget what your face looks like” (for me I can’t visualize a face the second they turn around, but it’s pretty normal for people to forget facial details over time)
Oh my friend is fully aware of how my brain works, and they’re really understanding. Thank you for the tip, though!
My friend likes to joke that I don’t have object permanence. Neither of us like sending images of ourselves out there, so that’s a no-go. However, we do video calls from time to time.
Im really not sure how the glasses made a difference. But I noticed an immediate difference with faces. I got the glasses before work and I remember in the morning meeting being uncomfortable because I hadn’t noticed that my supervisor was so cute before. Then I got home and saw my sleepy wife and I literally had the thought “wow. Is that my wife‽” Which was such a shock I had to learn about the interrobang to properly frame the question.
I didn’t realize face blindness was a thing until I got glasses at age 36.
I could always see faces, and I could tell this face from that face. But I couldn’t get a face to stick as belonging to a specific person until I got glasses. I’m not sure what strange mental wiring problem causes this. I can see without my glasses, I can see well enough to read.
This caused problems for me when my wife lost weight. She didn’t look the same and I struggled with it. She’s always been beautiful but she’s lost 90 pounds and now I’m worried my wife is going to come home and find me with this hot milf.
I love reading this kind of thing. That’s fascinating, and that last bit is really wholesome. How does glasses play a part in this?
I can’t visualise things in my head, and my memory doesn’t have any visual aspect to it at all. For the longest time I didn’t realise that when people said to “picture this” or “picture that”, they literally meant to conjure up that image in their head. My mother used to spend long amounts of time describing changes she’d like to make to the garden, structures she’d like to build etc. and I just could never follow her descriptions.
Nowadays I mostly notice that when trying to compare things. Unless something is really familiar to me, I cannot really pinpoint changes to it unless I’ve a kind of before/after right in front of me.
Sometimes it saddens me a little. I’ve a dear friend who lives quite far away and we don’t get to see one another often. I’m very fond of them, but I don’t remember what they look like at all, beyond general, vague descriptions.
Hello, fellow aphantasic!
Would it be possible to ask your friend to send you a picture of themselves? It can be a little awkward to bring up, but they’d probably understand “I’m starting to forget what your face looks like” (for me I can’t visualize a face the second they turn around, but it’s pretty normal for people to forget facial details over time)
Oh my friend is fully aware of how my brain works, and they’re really understanding. Thank you for the tip, though!
My friend likes to joke that I don’t have object permanence. Neither of us like sending images of ourselves out there, so that’s a no-go. However, we do video calls from time to time.
You and your friend are aware that video calls work by sending a continuous stream of images to each other, yes? :)
Obviously. It’s encrypted end-to-end and goes via my own server.
Nice!
Im really not sure how the glasses made a difference. But I noticed an immediate difference with faces. I got the glasses before work and I remember in the morning meeting being uncomfortable because I hadn’t noticed that my supervisor was so cute before. Then I got home and saw my sleepy wife and I literally had the thought “wow. Is that my wife‽” Which was such a shock I had to learn about the interrobang to properly frame the question.
For what it’s worth, I have astigmatism.