Take a quick look at the faces above and name who they are. They are all public figures with high recognition factors. You have two seconds per face.
Can’t do it? Me neither–except for one face.
I took those faces from an article by Debra Melani, published in 2023 on the University of Colorado Anshutz website, entitled “What Is Prosopagnosia? An Odd Condition That Can Steal Your Face.”
I am trying to educate myself to understand what my goddaughter’s son is going through. As I wrote in a previous entry, Flynn has facial blindness, among many other issues. “In calm, relatively ‘unpeopled’ settings, he can recognize others through verbal cues or familiar clothing,” I wrote.
But not faces.
Author Heather Sellers, whom I mentioned in a previous entry, was tested using upside-down faces. She wrote, in You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, “Interestingly, ‘normal’ humans are also very bad at identifying upside-down faces. They perform, with upside-down faces, as face-blind people do with all faces.”
She had trouble getting someone to diagnose her because, back in her day, prosopagnosia was considered very rare, related to strokes and head trauma.
But now, a 2023 Harvard study found that 1 in 33 people (3.08 percent) have some form of prosopagnosia.
The recently deceased primatologist Jane Goodall had to overcome facial blindness as did actors Brad Pitt and Alan Alda (M*A*S*H), and neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, portrayed by Robin Williams in Awakenings.
Goodall wrote in her autobiography, “I used to think it was due to some mental laziness, and I tried desperately to memorize the faces of people I met so that, if I saw them the next day, I would recognize them. I had no trouble with those who had obvious physical characteristics — unusual bone structure, beaky nose, extreme beauty or the opposite. But with other faces I failed, miserably. Sometimes I knew that people were upset when I did not immediately recognize them — certainly I was. And because I was embarrassed, I kept it to myself.”
In a GMA interview in 2013, Brad Pitt is quoted: “I can’t grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view,” he said.
Alan Alda described his confusion to People in 2025: “When somebody comes up to me, as if they know me, I often don’t know if they know me from seeing me on the screen or if I actually know them,” he says. “I could have dinner with somebody, spend two hours with somebody next to me, and the next day not know who they are.”
Sacks told of the time he failed to recognize a personal assistant in the lobby of an office building even though the man had worked for him for six years. He also did not recognize his long-time psychiatrist in a setting outside of the man’s office.
So, how did/do these people cope, especially when they were younger. That will be the next topic of discussion.
The upside-down faces above: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Gosling, and Beyonce.
The Q-View 