Do people who are super recognisers remember context as well? I feel like it would be awesome if the ability came with that. But if you’re walking around recognising everyone but unsure where from or the degree to which you know them, that would be very annoying. I once saw a woman I thought was our antenatal facilitator in Countdown and was on my way to walk over and say hello when I got to about a meter away I realised it wasn’t her and was actually Paula freaking Bennet! Who I definitely do NOT want to chat with. I had to quickly abort 🤣
Oh yeah I've done this too. Saw my old PE teacher as I was getting on a bus in town. I waved to him, and he kinda gave me this scowl nod, like "ugh yup another one". I was really confused for a few seconds as I watched him ride off on his bike, then realised it wasn't my PE teacher but Matthew Ridge 😅
I am not sure recognising every face I’ve seen is super, other than super-annoying. Then I spend hours puzzling out the context. And often can’t recall the name. Who needs it?
It helps being an introverted kiwi. You recognise these people, know where from most of the time, but don't even acknowledge them to avoid conversation :)
My husband has face blindness and since the pandemic it has been so much worse because of face masks. His struggles and your articles have really made me rethink how I approach people, especially if I a am wearing a mask. I have started just saying ‘Kia ora! It’s me, Nell!’ So that if they have any trouble recognising me I have made it easier for them. I used to think it was rude if people didn’t recognise me, now I realise how naïve I was! This fits in with my changing wider view of how we could interest with each other in a way which accommodates neurodivergency. My daughter has ADHD so finds some environments very stimulating and my niece and nephew have autism and so can engage in non-typical ways. It is really important to me that I meet people where they are at and not where society thinks they should be. We need more awareness in general of these types of things, that’s one of the reasons your articles have been so great!
Thanks Neil - and yeah, I guess I have Brad Pitt to thank for me talking about it at all. Thanks, Brad.
And yes - the mask thing certainly makes it harder. The one advantage I have found is that it makes me a bit more anonymous-feeling when out and about, so I feel a bit more incognito and less worried someone will talk to me and leave me in confusion as to who they are!
As someone who has, several times!, gone up to people on the street who I thought were my friend but turned out to be someone I had seen in a play or on tv, I wish I were a better context recognizer.
I used to live a block away from a person who was a regular on a tv show I watched. Walking to the bus when she was walking her dog was the most dangerous game.
Yup, one night at work I saw a guest had walked up to a locked door. I opened it, my face lit up at seeing her and I just managed to stop myself going in for a hug and saying 'oh my god, how are you!!' to someone who used to star in Shortland St who I'd never met.
But she knew what I'd been about to do and she shrank back. Mortifying.
My dog Oakley does this! I've literally had to shove towels under anything he can push his ball under. He's sneaky too. He'll act like he's playing with it then all of a sudden it's under some piece of furniture. I know people think I'm weird when they come to my house and there's towels shoved under all my furniture. 😬
I am extremely good at recognising people’s voices. I used to be able to correctly guess what country or area of England people come from when they talked, but I am no longer very accurate at this aspect.
I find it difficult to tell Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio apart, which made watching The Departed (2006) very very confusing when they both trying to infiltrate the other side's organisation.
I usually have no problem with faces at all but for one movie, the best western ever made. In "Once Upon A Time In The West" (1968) I get two characters a bit confused sometimes. I think it's the ones played by Henry Fonda and Jason Robards. Well worth watching on a big TV if you haven't seen seen it before, for the absolutely gorgeous cinematic scenery and haunting soundtrack. It was Sergio Leone's masterpiece (imo) and almost equaled by his mob movie "Once Upon A Time In America" 16 years later.
Yea, Ennio Morricone wrote the scores for both of fellow Italian Sergio Leone's "Once Upon A Time..." films, and several others, amongst the hundreds he wrote music for. Plus the title piece for Sergio's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". Have you heard / seen this live rendition from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra & guests? https://youtu.be/enuOArEfqGo
I noticed how I can't recall the details of someone's face, like my mom or dad, at a young age. If I need to think of their details, I'll piece something together from recalling pictures I've seen of them or remembering they have brown hair and blue eyes. I have mentioned it to my family but no one really said it was an odd thing. The article confirms my hunch, for better or worse, especially because I knew I could still recognize someone's face in public.
I think that I fit the criteria for aphantasia. Visualization is an internal narration, without images. I still find it hard to believe that people can see inside their mind, or even overlay imagined images into their visual field.
The day I found out that people can actually see when they visualize blew my mind.
But my dreams are super vivid and realistic (but truly bizarre). I’m trying to learn how to activate my dream brain to visualize when I’m awake
Just as an aside, David. Why do you always wear a hat? Inside? I actually find people wearing hats makes them more difficult to recognise, because you can't see their face clearly. I also find when someone's face is heavily shaded with a bill cap, that it's more difficult to see their expression, when we're talking.
Maybe that's why it was always considered to be bad manners to wear a hat indoors?
I can't really explain it beyond I feel really comfortable in a hat at the moment. Probably due to not having a haircut in forever and it just feels more polite not to subject people to my terrible hair!
I missed your newsletter on this last time, but so relieved to read of others sharing this experience (sorry misery does love company it seems). I used to work as a trainer, and it made my job so challenging being unable to recognise faces. I used the technique of remembering names by clothing, but if I walked out of the room and Rosie took off her red jersey, I was stuffed. I had no clue who my cousin was when I encountered her in the street, but faked it through until she gave me enough detail. When I was younger I used to explain to people I wouldn't recognise them next time I saw them, but it just felt kind of fruit loopy, so I went back to bluff and presenting a rather genial smile to all comers. I'm sure this has contributed to my discomfort in gatherings, where I'm around a lot of people I'm expected to know. I recall a super recogniser I worked with, the gap between us so wide it was fascinating. She fakes not remembering quite where she met someone, because there is a social rule that makes you a little creepy if you have all the detail. And she sure had that, to the point she worried her hard drive was going to get too full. She not only remembered each face, but name, where she met them, the day of the week that fell on, what they were wearing, and their conversation. Even if it was ten or twenty years ago. Thanks for socialising this, be helpful if it was understood a bit more.
I am really, really glad this helped. It was the intent of the first piece. Because it makes you feel shit, right? Because you are worried you are going to make others feel shit. And that it's somehow your fault. When it's entirely out of your control. I am fully with you in every way on this.
Yeah I'm the person that remembers everyone...I have worked in a lot of jobs that involved public speaking and events, and do have the annoying habit of recognising people from years...decades...ago that I may have only met once or twice. Often I pretend I don't though, as saying, oh yes, I met you in 1995 does tend to freak people out. Sorry not sorry lol.
I am somewhere in-between being able to recognize people and not. That’s normal, I guess? I work with a small group of individuals and we deal with many clients face-to-face each day (albeit virtually). A lot of the time, the clients will be so pleased to see me that they’ll greet me by my first name and ask how I’m doing and everything (sometimes they’ll even be like, “did you get a haircut? new glasses?” And I’m just sitting there like have you talked to me before?), and I have to meet their enthusiasm without knowing who the hell they are until I start helping them out and see their name, etc. It’s a weird thing to have people know me and be glad they got me to speak with me that day while I’m over here dealing with folks back to back and not recognizing most of them right away. That’s not to say that I don’t have clients I do know right away - their voices certainly help a lot with that - but it’s still an odd thing to consider.
I suspect this is why the National party keeps selecting extremely dubious characters to represent them in Parliament they just don’t recognise them at all
I sound very similar to you, David. I can usually click on who someone is if I run into them and they interact with me, but usually not if they're just around. And I cannot for the life of me visualize faces, even of close family members. There's nothing there.
My better half, however, is a super recognizer. At least once a week she'll clock someone across a busy cafe, with a mask on, as the older brother of a stranger two years away from her in school.
I especially can't fathom how well she recognizes faces as they age, which is so beyond my abilities. She'll recognize someone from preschool at 4 who she hasn't seen since, but can recognize their face at 30. (And vivid memories of what they did on a given day, et cetera). I have a hard time with faces sporting a different hairstyle, let alone 26 years of changes.
We make a great pair though, as I have great recall for places/directions, facts, numbers. We probably talk about it once a week since it's so fascinating to bounce off each other the way we remember a certain event.
Something that made me feel the most seen with regard to my memory was reading through the Wikipedia pages for "Semantic memory" and "Episodic memory". My memory is almost entirely semantic — if you asked me to picture in my mind "Walking on the beach" I can certainly imagine walking in sand and how it would feel and what it might look like, but I'm not imagining some specific time I was on a beach, it's more of an amalgamation of my knowledge of beaches. My partner however, from the same prompt, will just straight into a specific beach, at an age, with certain people and that time of day, actually re-living the memory. I never re-live memories, my memories aren't in the first person, I'm not seeing through my own eyes.
I'm curious if you go and skim those Wikipedia pages, if either click for you. They might be out of date psychologically but they really fit with my experiences directly, and I think help explain why I'm so inept with faces.
I can definitely recall specific locations if I need to - places are no problem. It's very much a face problem for me.
And as for this - "she'll recognize someone from preschool at 4 who she hasn't seen since, but can recognize their face at 30" - that blows my mind. Rosie in the story (who just commented below!) said a similar thing and I just could not believe it.
I think she has, if you're referring to the Greenwich University tests. I think she got a follow-up that she has yet to do after getting in the top couple percent. I'll nag her to do that
Fascinating stuff! I am sure I suffer from a bit of Prosopagnosia, constantly not recognising people, and forgetting people's names. Amazing to think there are people out there who are "super-recognisers", I can't imagine what that feels like.
My power is watching a show and saying "that person! She was in something!"
The most annoying movie watching partner ever.
😬
me too, mediocre superheroes assemble!
🤣
I do that too!
How about people voicing a cartoon character?
Yep, that's me.
And documentary narrators
Maybe if I watched more anime
I always do that too.😂
Do people who are super recognisers remember context as well? I feel like it would be awesome if the ability came with that. But if you’re walking around recognising everyone but unsure where from or the degree to which you know them, that would be very annoying. I once saw a woman I thought was our antenatal facilitator in Countdown and was on my way to walk over and say hello when I got to about a meter away I realised it wasn’t her and was actually Paula freaking Bennet! Who I definitely do NOT want to chat with. I had to quickly abort 🤣
We do. Sometimes it might take a little longer to figure out where from, but we get there in the end 😉
Rosie! The best person to answer these questions!
Already lurking 🕵🏼♀️
Oh yeah I've done this too. Saw my old PE teacher as I was getting on a bus in town. I waved to him, and he kinda gave me this scowl nod, like "ugh yup another one". I was really confused for a few seconds as I watched him ride off on his bike, then realised it wasn't my PE teacher but Matthew Ridge 😅
How funny, I have also mistaken Matthew Ridge as being someone else and waved...and was also scowled at!
😆 excellent! I wonder how many people wave at him for being him now!
I am not sure recognising every face I’ve seen is super, other than super-annoying. Then I spend hours puzzling out the context. And often can’t recall the name. Who needs it?
It helps being an introverted kiwi. You recognise these people, know where from most of the time, but don't even acknowledge them to avoid conversation :)
Context is everything! I see a face I know.....where from? Aarrgghhh!
It can keep me awake at night......
Haha noooo!
Can I make it so people I went to school with never recognise me
Don't worry, time will take care of that. Added bonus - the longer you last, the less of them there will be for you to encounter.
Gosh wouldn’t that be awesome! I’d like that too 🤣
😂
My husband has face blindness and since the pandemic it has been so much worse because of face masks. His struggles and your articles have really made me rethink how I approach people, especially if I a am wearing a mask. I have started just saying ‘Kia ora! It’s me, Nell!’ So that if they have any trouble recognising me I have made it easier for them. I used to think it was rude if people didn’t recognise me, now I realise how naïve I was! This fits in with my changing wider view of how we could interest with each other in a way which accommodates neurodivergency. My daughter has ADHD so finds some environments very stimulating and my niece and nephew have autism and so can engage in non-typical ways. It is really important to me that I meet people where they are at and not where society thinks they should be. We need more awareness in general of these types of things, that’s one of the reasons your articles have been so great!
Thanks Neil - and yeah, I guess I have Brad Pitt to thank for me talking about it at all. Thanks, Brad.
And yes - the mask thing certainly makes it harder. The one advantage I have found is that it makes me a bit more anonymous-feeling when out and about, so I feel a bit more incognito and less worried someone will talk to me and leave me in confusion as to who they are!
As someone who has, several times!, gone up to people on the street who I thought were my friend but turned out to be someone I had seen in a play or on tv, I wish I were a better context recognizer.
That is the worst. I have done. Mortifying.
It’s worse on the receiving end, believe me, having several times been embraced by total strangers😬
I used to live a block away from a person who was a regular on a tv show I watched. Walking to the bus when she was walking her dog was the most dangerous game.
Yup, one night at work I saw a guest had walked up to a locked door. I opened it, my face lit up at seeing her and I just managed to stop myself going in for a hug and saying 'oh my god, how are you!!' to someone who used to star in Shortland St who I'd never met.
But she knew what I'd been about to do and she shrank back. Mortifying.
My dog Oakley does this! I've literally had to shove towels under anything he can push his ball under. He's sneaky too. He'll act like he's playing with it then all of a sudden it's under some piece of furniture. I know people think I'm weird when they come to my house and there's towels shoved under all my furniture. 😬
I am extremely good at recognising people’s voices. I used to be able to correctly guess what country or area of England people come from when they talked, but I am no longer very accurate at this aspect.
Ditto. I can watch videos of people talking with sound off and pick where they are from with reasonable accuracy (English only)
I find it difficult to tell Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio apart, which made watching The Departed (2006) very very confusing when they both trying to infiltrate the other side's organisation.
I usually have no problem with faces at all but for one movie, the best western ever made. In "Once Upon A Time In The West" (1968) I get two characters a bit confused sometimes. I think it's the ones played by Henry Fonda and Jason Robards. Well worth watching on a big TV if you haven't seen seen it before, for the absolutely gorgeous cinematic scenery and haunting soundtrack. It was Sergio Leone's masterpiece (imo) and almost equaled by his mob movie "Once Upon A Time In America" 16 years later.
You could say you are very vague Craig on Henry Fonda and Jason Robards.
Snap! Just watched the doco on Ennio Morricone, the composer who created that haunting soundtrack
Oh, cool, somewhat serendipitous synchronicity.
Yea, Ennio Morricone wrote the scores for both of fellow Italian Sergio Leone's "Once Upon A Time..." films, and several others, amongst the hundreds he wrote music for. Plus the title piece for Sergio's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". Have you heard / seen this live rendition from the Danish National Symphony Orchestra & guests? https://youtu.be/enuOArEfqGo
Hadn't seen that one, thanks! Love the mix of musical instruments and choir voices Ennio deploys❤️
True nightmare.
I'm really glad you touched on aphantasia.
I noticed how I can't recall the details of someone's face, like my mom or dad, at a young age. If I need to think of their details, I'll piece something together from recalling pictures I've seen of them or remembering they have brown hair and blue eyes. I have mentioned it to my family but no one really said it was an odd thing. The article confirms my hunch, for better or worse, especially because I knew I could still recognize someone's face in public.
I think that I fit the criteria for aphantasia. Visualization is an internal narration, without images. I still find it hard to believe that people can see inside their mind, or even overlay imagined images into their visual field.
The day I found out that people can actually see when they visualize blew my mind.
But my dreams are super vivid and realistic (but truly bizarre). I’m trying to learn how to activate my dream brain to visualize when I’m awake
Just as an aside, David. Why do you always wear a hat? Inside? I actually find people wearing hats makes them more difficult to recognise, because you can't see their face clearly. I also find when someone's face is heavily shaded with a bill cap, that it's more difficult to see their expression, when we're talking.
Maybe that's why it was always considered to be bad manners to wear a hat indoors?
I can't really explain it beyond I feel really comfortable in a hat at the moment. Probably due to not having a haircut in forever and it just feels more polite not to subject people to my terrible hair!
I missed your newsletter on this last time, but so relieved to read of others sharing this experience (sorry misery does love company it seems). I used to work as a trainer, and it made my job so challenging being unable to recognise faces. I used the technique of remembering names by clothing, but if I walked out of the room and Rosie took off her red jersey, I was stuffed. I had no clue who my cousin was when I encountered her in the street, but faked it through until she gave me enough detail. When I was younger I used to explain to people I wouldn't recognise them next time I saw them, but it just felt kind of fruit loopy, so I went back to bluff and presenting a rather genial smile to all comers. I'm sure this has contributed to my discomfort in gatherings, where I'm around a lot of people I'm expected to know. I recall a super recogniser I worked with, the gap between us so wide it was fascinating. She fakes not remembering quite where she met someone, because there is a social rule that makes you a little creepy if you have all the detail. And she sure had that, to the point she worried her hard drive was going to get too full. She not only remembered each face, but name, where she met them, the day of the week that fell on, what they were wearing, and their conversation. Even if it was ten or twenty years ago. Thanks for socialising this, be helpful if it was understood a bit more.
I am really, really glad this helped. It was the intent of the first piece. Because it makes you feel shit, right? Because you are worried you are going to make others feel shit. And that it's somehow your fault. When it's entirely out of your control. I am fully with you in every way on this.
Yeah I'm the person that remembers everyone...I have worked in a lot of jobs that involved public speaking and events, and do have the annoying habit of recognising people from years...decades...ago that I may have only met once or twice. Often I pretend I don't though, as saying, oh yes, I met you in 1995 does tend to freak people out. Sorry not sorry lol.
You should take the super recogniser test! See how you do....
I am somewhere in-between being able to recognize people and not. That’s normal, I guess? I work with a small group of individuals and we deal with many clients face-to-face each day (albeit virtually). A lot of the time, the clients will be so pleased to see me that they’ll greet me by my first name and ask how I’m doing and everything (sometimes they’ll even be like, “did you get a haircut? new glasses?” And I’m just sitting there like have you talked to me before?), and I have to meet their enthusiasm without knowing who the hell they are until I start helping them out and see their name, etc. It’s a weird thing to have people know me and be glad they got me to speak with me that day while I’m over here dealing with folks back to back and not recognizing most of them right away. That’s not to say that I don’t have clients I do know right away - their voices certainly help a lot with that - but it’s still an odd thing to consider.
You sound pretty delightfully normal to me, Ally!
I suspect this is why the National party keeps selecting extremely dubious characters to represent them in Parliament they just don’t recognise them at all
That latest guy looks like a deep fake of a bog standard white man.
That party. Ugh. Him and Luxon side by side - no thanks.
I sound very similar to you, David. I can usually click on who someone is if I run into them and they interact with me, but usually not if they're just around. And I cannot for the life of me visualize faces, even of close family members. There's nothing there.
My better half, however, is a super recognizer. At least once a week she'll clock someone across a busy cafe, with a mask on, as the older brother of a stranger two years away from her in school.
I especially can't fathom how well she recognizes faces as they age, which is so beyond my abilities. She'll recognize someone from preschool at 4 who she hasn't seen since, but can recognize their face at 30. (And vivid memories of what they did on a given day, et cetera). I have a hard time with faces sporting a different hairstyle, let alone 26 years of changes.
We make a great pair though, as I have great recall for places/directions, facts, numbers. We probably talk about it once a week since it's so fascinating to bounce off each other the way we remember a certain event.
Something that made me feel the most seen with regard to my memory was reading through the Wikipedia pages for "Semantic memory" and "Episodic memory". My memory is almost entirely semantic — if you asked me to picture in my mind "Walking on the beach" I can certainly imagine walking in sand and how it would feel and what it might look like, but I'm not imagining some specific time I was on a beach, it's more of an amalgamation of my knowledge of beaches. My partner however, from the same prompt, will just straight into a specific beach, at an age, with certain people and that time of day, actually re-living the memory. I never re-live memories, my memories aren't in the first person, I'm not seeing through my own eyes.
I'm curious if you go and skim those Wikipedia pages, if either click for you. They might be out of date psychologically but they really fit with my experiences directly, and I think help explain why I'm so inept with faces.
I can definitely recall specific locations if I need to - places are no problem. It's very much a face problem for me.
And as for this - "she'll recognize someone from preschool at 4 who she hasn't seen since, but can recognize their face at 30" - that blows my mind. Rosie in the story (who just commented below!) said a similar thing and I just could not believe it.
Like, I'm still not sure I believe it!
Ouch, David. 😔
She should definitely take our tests! 😊
I think she has, if you're referring to the Greenwich University tests. I think she got a follow-up that she has yet to do after getting in the top couple percent. I'll nag her to do that
Fascinating stuff! I am sure I suffer from a bit of Prosopagnosia, constantly not recognising people, and forgetting people's names. Amazing to think there are people out there who are "super-recognisers", I can't imagine what that feels like.
It’s pretty crazy, but at the same time, it’s all you know so it doesn’t feel any different (if you get me?) 😊
We are all so stuck in our own experiences huh, which is why it's so mind blowing to imagine it any other way!