Many of us are bad at remembering names, but can still pick out a former colleague or old flame when they pop up on social media.
However, a new Harvard University study finds that up to 5.42 percent of people struggle with the opposite problem.
‘Prosopagnosia’, or face blindness, is a condition where you can no longer recognize faces you have seen before, including those of friends and family.
It can also lead to you not being able to identify yourself in photos or in the mirror, or feeling like you know complete strangers.
Last year, Brad Pitt spoke about his experience with the condition, admitting that “no one believes him” when he talks about it.
“Prosopagnosia,” or face blindness, is a condition that causes the person to be unable to recognize faces they’ve seen before, including those of friends and family (stock image)
Childcare worker Hannah Read, who has the worst case of face blindness in the UK, said ‘every face looks the same’ and is just ‘two eyes, a nose and a mouth’.
Those with the disorder cope by using alternate ways of recognizing people, such as remembering the way they walk, or their hairstyle, voice, or clothing.
It is believed to be the result of abnormalities, damage or dysfunction in the right fusiform gyrus – a fold in the brain that appears to coordinate face perception and memory.
Prosopagnosia can result from stroke, traumatic brain injury, or some neurodegenerative diseases, but in some cases it is present at birth.
It appears to run in families, making it likely the result of a genetic mutation or deletion.
While it’s widely reported that between 2 and 2.5 percent of the world’s population has some form of face blindness, researchers set out to find its true prevalence in a new study, published in the journal Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
They recruited 3,341 individuals to complete three different online surveys, the first asking them to describe their own experiences of recognizing faces in their daily lives.
The next two were then objective tests that gauged their ability to learn new faces and recognize familiar faces, respectively.
The results showed that 31 individuals had a severe form of prosopagnosia, while 72 had a mild form – a total of three percent of the study participants.
They also found that participants could easily recognize faces and those who could not were not clearly distinguishable.
Instead, most of them fell somewhere on a spectrum of severity and presentation, in a similar way to other developmental disorders such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease.
Last year, Brad Pitt described his experience with face blindness and admitted that “no one believes him” when he talks about it
The researchers then used different diagnostic criteria to rate some of the participants with face blindness.
Depending on how strict these were, they identified prosopagnosia between 0.13 and 5.42 percent of the group.
Interestingly, it also turned out that the stricter criteria did not always identify the individuals who were the worst at recognizing faces.
As a result, they concluded that scientists investigating the disorder should relax their threshold for diagnosis and split people by “mild” or “severe” case.
Diagnostic criteria for face blindness vary, but researchers at King’s College London have created a short questionnaire for people who suspect they have it.
People are asked how strongly they agree with sentences such as ‘I often mistake people I’ve met before for strangers’ or ‘I sometimes find movies difficult to follow because of character recognition problems’.
Other questions include, “When I was in school, I had trouble recognizing my classmates” or “When people change their hair or wear hats, I have trouble recognizing them.”
Each question is scored out of five, giving a total score of up to 100. This final score can be used to determine the severity of face blindness.
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