Anyone Here With Prosopagnosia?

Monique

Thanks, good to know It happened to about half the faces that I have a complete mental picture of who they are and what they do, but I can't say the name.. even characters like Jerry Seinfeld ("friend of Elaine, the short, and weird guy").

zoobyshoe

It makes sense there's be degrees of it since there would be degrees of damage to the areas DiracPool mentioned. The Fusiform Face Area is a particularly critical location, but it's not the whole story.

They are behind in researching this particular disability, too, because of the long term resistance in believing a person's ability to recognize faces had a dedicated "circuit" apart from the ability to recognize any 3-D form. No one has explained why this should be the case, but it does, in fact, seem to be the case. People with prosopagnosia have no trouble recognizing books, cars, pencils, trees, etc. (There is usually, however, an associated trouble with recognizing places as a whole, strangely enough. Prosopagnostics(?) often get lost when they go out.)

zoobyshoe

Exactly. I 'cheated' on the face test in the sense that I had to google "Forrest Gump" before the name "Tom Hanks" would enter my brain. I also had to google one of Jerry Stiller's and Brad Pitt's movies, to get their names to come up. This happens to me a lot: I can see an actor's face, name a few movies they were in, but can't remember the actor's name for the life of me.

Edit: It's called Anomic Aphasia. (Perfectly normal for someone who has it to forget exactly what it's called.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomic_aphasia

Monique

That's very recognizable, sometimes it feels like I'm playing pictionary trying to describe an object and people trying to guess what I'm trying to say.

How do people with Prosopagnosia function in society? One would think they'd have a lot of trouble with functioning in social situations. Don't they feel the world is dominated by robots? At least people who've acquired it during their lifetime and think their loved ones are replaced by actors.

OmCheeto

That's how I answered many of the questions.

"that scientology dude from Mission Impossible"

but I never gave up... I went up and down through the ENTIRE alphabet (Albert? Nope. Bruce? Nope. Charley? nope.) twice before Cruises name popped into my head.

And since we're on a learning spree today, what is that called?

bp_psy

So I have brain damage?

The worst that happens to me is knowing a formula, its derivation and all of the theory behind it but being unable to say the name of the scientist that the formula was named after.For example the name of the individual Maxwell's equations or sometime even their collective name.


On the other had I don't have a problem memorizing images and faces
I only missed Oprah and Tony Blair on that test but I couldn't say half their names immediately.

zoobyshoe

Oliver Sacks' close friends and associates all know about it and announce who they are when approaching him. He also has an assistant who tells him who everyone is at social functions, and who warns people to say their name when they approach him. Beyond that, his life is often a comedy of errors, and he has spent it making a lot of excuses about 'having a bad memory for faces'.
That's not prosopagnosia. That's a completely different thing called Capgras Syndrome which involves damage to the amygdala/hippocampus. People with Capgras have no recognition problem. What fails to kick in is the feeling of familiarity. Capgras is like the opposite of deja vu, triggered by the sight of certain things that should feel familiar but don't. Whereas deja vu instills you with a false sense of hyperfamiliarity, Capgras Syndrome is a problem of false hypofamiliarity. Ramachandran discusses this at length in Phantoms in the Brain. He interviewed and examined a guy who was convinced his parents were imposters based on the fact they completely failed to evoke any feelings of familiarity in him. He could see them perfectly well, and had no problems recognizing people in general. There was another case where a woman believed her poodle was an imposter. It's often limited to specific entities, whereas prosopagnosia is universal.

zoobyshoe

I have no idea, of course. There's also the Freudian explanation of why we can't remember a name sometimes no matter how hard we try: it gets temporarily linked in a given circumstance with something we don't want to remember. I might bury the name "Tom Hanks" for example, if the first memory of it that starts to come up is one of him being interviewed by that TV show guy I hate, and whom I don't want to think about. That sort of thing.

Jimmy Snyder

I was familiar with 30/30, but only got 24/30 right for 80%

zoobyshoe

I found Sacks has a couple of YouTubes about this:

Physics_UG

I recognized all of them except tony blair and margaret thatcher (I didn't know what they look like). I knew the names of all of them but a couple I couldn't recall the names at the time.

DiracPool

It's amazing to see how easily you guys are entertained...

OmCheeto

Thank you DP,

That comment made me chortle.

Very similar to, but not quite as intense as, my chortle from this morning.