While the tea was cooling this morning, I perused the headlines at the New York Times. There was an interesting article* on people suffering from prosopagnosia, a disorder that results in the inability to recognize facal differences. People with face blindness can typically understand facially expressed emotions — they know whether a face is happy or sad, angry or puzzled. They can detect subtle facial cues, determine gender and even agree with everyone else about which faces are attractive and which are not. In other words, they see the face clearly, they just do not know whose face they are looking at, and cannot remember it once they stop looking. Researchers say the phenomenon is much more common than previously believed: they found that 2.47% of 689 randomly selected students in Münster, Germany, had the disorder. People with face blindness develop alternate strategies for identifying people — they remember their clothes, mannerisms, gait, hairstyle or voice.
There are times I wonder if I might have this. I’m horrible at remembering faces. I’ll need to see a person a few times before the connection is made. On the other hand, my spatial memory is spot on. I can remember how rooms were laid out in my childhood, hotel rooms we visited, navagate in cities (except in that small area near South Coast Plaza, where are the roads are twistly little passages that look alike).
I have this theory that everyone has one form of memory that they excel at. In my case, it is spatial and geographic memory. What’s yours?
* BTW, if you read the New York and want to link to an article, you should know about the New York Times Link Generator. This permits generation of a reference link to a New York Times article that doesn’t require registration.
