I have always known I am not good with faces. I’m not great with names either, to be honest. So I am frequently embarrassed by a failure to recognise someone quickly, or to remember their name… and quite often both of these at once.

When I first heard of face blindness a few years ago, it was the extreme version where people fail to recognise loved ones, even close family members or people they live with. How odd, I thought, and filed it away as a strange neurological condition that must be quite rare. Something for an Oliver Sacks book perhaps.

But recently I was listening to an episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Armchaired and Dangerous (a spin-off of Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert, and the only celebrity podcast I endorse), when David Farrier started talking about his own experience as someone with facial blindness, and I realised that everything he was describing was ME.

I recommend listening to the episode. It’s a good one anyway, about Multi-Level Marketing scams, but the discussion on facial blindness starts at 7.09 minutes and goes on all the way to 17.20.

Listen: Armchaired and Dangerous: Multi-Level Marketing

Here are some of the things that I experience, and have done so all my life:

• It takes me a long time to learn someone’s face. This applies even for work colleagues I see every day
• I usually recognise people by their hair, clothes or gait. Hair is the biggest factor for me; if someone changes their hair – even someone I know quite well – I will usually not immediately recognise them
• I don’t recognise people out of their context. I have often walked right past people I know out on the street, or stared at them for a few seconds if they talk to me, because they’re not in the place I usually see them. I’ve had colleagues, friends and others tell me that I “blanked” them on the street, or that I was “lost in my own world” when they made eye contact with me … because I had not recognised them
• I often fail, or take too long, to recognise people I have known for years but only see rarely, such as friends of a family member that I might only see at parties
• I sometimes fail to recognise people I know quite well, such as my daughters’ friends, or work colleagues I don’t interact with every day. I’ve had more than a few occasions where I’ve asked someone ‘who’s that?’ and they’ve given me a funny look and said, ‘that’s [name]!’ in a tone of disbelief
• When I think of someone I know, I sometimes have trouble conjuring up their full face in my head, and I would have trouble accurately describing someone’s face, other than perhaps a prominent feature. I would be useless as a crime witness

If I’m out and someone I know calls my name, and I then turn and see them, this is what tends to happen. (1) My eyes go straight to their hair and their eyebrows, and I concentrate on their voice, while I quickly try and place them; (2) then I place them and then struggle to bring their name to my lips, even if I know them well; (3) while this is going on, I will start to say “Heyyyyy, how are you?” to grab a tiny bit of time before I have to introduce them to whoever I’m with; (4) then the recognition kicks in fully and I can (usually) do the introduction (but I’ve had plenty of fails where I couldn’t, as well).

If the person happens to be wearing an item of clothing that I’m familiar with because they wear it in their usual context (e.g. at work), I will recognise them much faster.

There have been some very embarrassing occasions where recognition has failed to kick in, and I have not recognised the person until well into the conversation, when some other clue will finally help me out. This happened a lot more when I was younger; as I’ve got older I’ve got better at using clues to speed recognition (and at disguising my slowness to recognise).

When I do fail to recognise or appropriately respond in time, and where I can see that the person has noticed, I will wave it away as “Sorry, my brain just stopped working for a minute!”. But most often, I have resorted to a simple “Hi!” or “Bye!” without using the person’s name. I’m embarrassed by it every time, because it’s very obvious to me that most people don’t have this issue.

People with prosopagnosia often use non-facial cues to recognise others, such as their hairstyle, clothes, voice, or distinctive features

BBC News, ‘Test to diagnose ‘face blindness’, 4 Nov 2015

I often find myself staring at people’s hair, glasses or clothes while I’m talking with them. I know this is probably noticeable so I make a big effort not to do it. But I wonder now if the reason I do it is because those things are what help me to remember people.

It’s not that I cannot recognise people at all. It’s more that I concentrate on specific features or other clues to remember them, and I do have to make quite an effort to file these features against names and faces, so that I can recognise their faces within a respectable amount of time and greet them normally.

I have always drawn pictures of heads and faces on notepads and pieces of paper, but just as often my doodles are of heads with hair and no faces. I seem to be obsessed with hair for some reason, and I do look at people’s hair all the time (maybe I should spend more time looking at their faces!) As a little kid I remember noticing and being drawn to hairstyles more than faces, and my mother thought it was funny that I said things like “I like him; he has nice hair.”

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So you may be wondering, do I have trouble recognising people I know really well, like family members and close friends? The answer is no. I have zero difficulty recognising and responding to family and friends. I can even (kind of) picture their faces in my mind! But I have had some weird moments where I have failed to recognise them for an instant. It’s hard to explain but it’s as if for a second or so they are someone else.

This is horrible to admit, but there have been a few occasions where I have failed to recognise my own kids. If they are not where I expect to see them, or if they are surrounded by other people their age… it can take me a minute. I acutely remember three occasions where I stared right at my own child and did not recognise her (and yes, I’ve done it with both of them).

I also want to stress that if I fail to recognise you out in the world, it is no judgement on how well I know you, or how much I like or respect you. It is, however, supremely embarrassing to me.

And if it’s any consolation, I also fail to recognise myself on occasion, when looking at photos or catching a glance in a mirror. I have also confused my sister and myself in photos, or one of my daughters for the other…. Not often, but it has happened.

All my life, I have thought this was a bad character flaw of mine; that maybe I was lazy, or self-absorbed, or just an idiot. Hearing David Farrier talk about his experience, which is so similar to mine, was amazing. It was like a veil being lifted, or a light coming on. I had no idea this was a thing, and that I was not, in fact (or at least not totally), a self-absorbed idiot.

And apparently it is not uncommon, at least in its milder form. It has even recently been estimated that 33% of people may have some level of facial blindness.

You can also do online tests. Here are a couple:

• P120 prosopagnosia index
• Exposure Based Face Memory Test

The test results naturally vary. The first one is a simple self-reporting questionnaire, at which I scored high for probable prosopagnosia. The second test is based on recognising photos of faces, and in that one I got 58% right – which is higher than I expected to get but lower than the average score. So it does seem that there are probably many people out there who struggle with facial recognition more than I do. And if that’s the case, I really feel for them!