This may be Oliver Sacks' face. I'm not sure. Neither is he. (Image by Erik Charlton.)

I was born with an odd neurological glitch called Face Blindness. It makes it difficult for me to recognize faces, even of people I know well. I don’t have it 100%, so I’m very good at recognizing people in context, but if I’m not expecting to see someone, it’s 50-50 that I can recognize them before I hear their voice. I can see their faces just fine; but the recognition mechanism malfunctions. People who wear hats and sunglasses pose additional problems. And for me, blond people are tougher to recognize than dark-haired people, perhaps because most of the people who I grew up around were ethnic and I have more practice with them. I don’t know.

I’ve had otherwise intelligent people acknowledge to me that they carried on feuds with me (that I knew nothing about) because I had “snubbed them.” When I’ve told others of this condition, they tend to brush it away because people often have rather large and fragile egos and expect you to acknowledge them no matter what. I can only imagine what it’s like for those who have Face Blindness completely–they can’t even recognize themselves in a mirror!

Two people who also have Face Blindness are neuroscientist Oliver Sacks and artist Chuck Close. A big thanks to Marginal Revolution for pointing me in the direction of this NPR show in which the two men discuss coping with Face Blindness. Listen to it here.