faceblind?

As part of my ongoing obsession with neurology, I've been watching lots of documentaries, and have seen now multiple references to the condition of faceblindness.

I've always felt really bad with faces - I have what I consider to be a difficult time identifying people outside of context, if they change the color of their hair, in substantially different wardrobe, that sort of thing. I'm pretty confident there's more than one person that considers me to be an arrogant jerkwad because I've ignored them in public. Even when I was a kid watching movies, I'd sometimes get confused if there was more than one character that was same height, build, and hair color. The truth is, the face just doesn't click with me like it does for some.

I've never considered myself to truly suffer from prosopagnosia*, to be fair - I usually get there in the end. And there are people who have much worse ability than I do. And, until today, I didn't even have verifiable evidence that anything was wrong, really. Just a gut hunch - but how do you compare your facial recognition with other people's?

Answer: the Cambridge Facial Recognition Test. Googling brought me to that site, which I've had open for a while but given that it requires 20 minutes of uninterruptedness, have avoided using until today.

A score of 80% is expected. Below a 65% indicates you might have problems.

I got a 51%.

While there's lots of caveats about low scores not guaranteeing faceblindness and high scores not guaranteeing you don't have a problem, it certainly coincides with my self-diagnosis.

I would, however, be curious to know how other friends rate, as one random Internet test is hardly a complete proof of anything.


*No, I didn't know that word until today, and my ability to even remember how to spell it is about as good as my memory of faces.