Another thing that's "wrong" with me: Face Blindness

Hannibal, as seen by someone with face blindness (I think)

So, if you’ve watched the most recent season of Arrested Development, you know there’s a character who has face blindness (I won’t say anything that’s spoilerish about that).  It was the first time I’d seen face blindness come up on TV.  And… I was kind of annoyed by it.  There are different levels of face blindness, and for some people it gets really extreme, but folks with face blindness (like me) learn to recognize people with other cues.  Like their hair color and style, their voice, the clothes they wear.  If I concentrate real hard, I can take note of whether people are wearing glasses or not, if they have facial hair, and sometimes things like eye color and moles.  We use these little reminders to help us recognize people.  As far as I know, there is no such thing as a person with face blindness so extreme, that they can never recognize the person they’re talking to ever.

And then I realized I am going to talk about Hannibal spoilers (sort of, it's not super important to the plot of the episode itself).



So in last night’s Hannibal, I was surprised when it seemed the killer has face blindness.  I wondered how they would handle it.  And they seemed to do it right!  I mean, the killer has other issues mixed in with it, and they never said it was face blindness specifically.  But the way they showed Hannibal’s face (in the picture above), all blurred out, but with his hair and clothes perfectly clear.  That is totally what it’s like when I try to remember a face.

When I look directly at a face, I can describe it quite well.  I can see the eyes and nose and lips, the cheekbones and the shape, the ears and neck.  But when I look away, and I try to call the face up in my mind, it looks pretty much just like Hannibal’s blurred out face.  There’s dark spots for eyes, a line for the mouth, the hair, the clothes.

The better I know someone, the more I can tell you about their face.  But it’s like reciting poetry that I’ve memorized.  I can tell you my brother has long eye lashes and hazel eyes.  He has a long nose, too, I think.  And this curly blondish/reddish beard.  His eyebrows are like… well eyebrows.  They’re not unusual.  And his skin is pale and sometimes there’s splotchy red bits, like faces get.  His cheeks are kind of… sunken?  Is that the word? Not in a bad way, like he’s sick, he just has a skinny face instead of a round one. And his chin is narrow and pointed.  And he has an adams apple!  I can even see each of these things in my mind very clearly.

But if I try to put all those pieces together in my head, it looks like the picture to the right.

 Actually, thinking about this led me to create some images based on how I remember people's faces. 

Like I said, when I am looking at a face, I see it.  I can see and draw all the details. If you've seen some of the pictures I've drawn, you'll see I can draw faces with all the correct proportions and everything.  Like in the page of sketches below (which were warm up sketches of my sister and brother-in-law, along with some tigers and a terrible t-rex):

But if I want to draw a person I know from memory, my brain only recalls certain elements.  And some of those elements are more exaggerated than others when I try to call up an image of my friends and family.  The next sketches are close approximations of what I see when I close my eyes and imagine Gitai and John's faces.  Gitai's hair, eyebrows, and acne scars stand out for me (I don't know how to draw acne scars).  John's eye's are large and intense, as well as his hair.  Since John's eyes figure more prominently when I try to visualize his face, I drew them larger.  Gitai's eyes appear as dark smudges, or sometimes happy cat eyes when I think of him (Happy cat: =^_^=).

The next images, which are animated gifs, are more what I actually see when I try to picture them (as opposed to a sketch from memory).  Features shift in my mind, most details are blurred, some parts come into sharper focus as I think harder about it.  Different parts of the face don't really match up.  To make it easier to see what's going on, you see the faces from one angle only.  But when I try to imagine someone's face, I see it from many different angles, so while I might see Gitai's happy cat eyes as dark smudges, looking straight on at me with his face creased in a smile, I am also seeing the shape of his jaw from profile, and his ears are floating all around in there like drunk butterflies.

Gitai says I should do watercolor portraits of people's faces from memory.  I do like watercolors, but I don't know if I have the energy to break them out right now (I haven't been able to paint in earnest in well over a year).

And now you know another thing that's "wrong" with me.