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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem I seem to have in these situations is that I can't remember people visually.

If I'm introduced to you, and we talk for half an hour, I will not recognize you an hour later. If you remind me who you are, then of course I'll remember the conversation and your name and everything, but I just have zero visual memory of people.

This is even to the extent that my wife once sat down next to me on the train (we didn't usually make the same train), and I spent the entire trip thinking "I think I know this woman from somewhere, maybe?" before she finally couldn't hold it in any more and told me who she was.

(Yes, I score in the bottom 5% of prosopagnosia tests.)

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Wow. I have some trouble with faces, but that sounds awful. I'm terrible with names and not very good with faces, so those two issues compound sometimes and make me feel like an ass. Once someone adds in some details of a conversation we previous had it usually comes flooding back, but by then they probably feel a bit slighted as I've let on I don't remember their name from their face, and even with their name I'm obviously still drawing a blank.

I had the same problem with Chinese people but I'm much better now (I live in China). Here's a funny story. I had been dating this girl for a few days and I once walked past her on the street without recognizing her. She said something like "Hey Oli" and I immediately realized it was the girl I was dating. I had to pretend I was looking at the floor and didn't see her face but that was a lie.

I (a man) once met a woman briefly in class at school, and then later that week we hung out for the afternoon.

While we werr hanging out I slowly realized that there were actually two completely different people (with vaguely similar appearance and life experience)-- When I struck uo a chat with the second woman and got invited back to her dormitory, I was actually talking to a stranger with a level of confidence I had when talking to actual strangers.

If I could somehow replicate this tactic intentionally, I would have been much more successful getting dates at school and in the world. But alas, it was UST beginner's luck (and the charged atmosphere of first week of college, when many people are scrambling to make new friends and romantic partners to replace high school social circle)

Pretty much, yeah. Now imagine the same thing, but it's your wife of 5 years.

Wow, you have it pretty bad! Did you ever see yourself in a picture or in a mirror without recognizing it was you?

In a mirror I know it's me. Pictures, it's hit or miss.

I also have this problem, combined with my general awkwardness it means I really struggle to network. I even managed to go to a hn meetup and not manage to talk to anyone.

I find it particularly awkward when it is obvious someone recognises or remembers me as there is little to no chance I'll recognise them.

I ran my local poker club for a year or two and there were people who came every week and I had to ask their names every time.

Prosapagnosia really sucks, I sometimes wonder how much my social awkwardness is actually from that trait rather than aspeger's.

I'd welcome a good guide on how to network without being "creepy" but sadly TFA was not good advice, it washed over how to initiate conversation with "just do it", useless advice.

There was a reddit casualama a while ago from someone with this same condition and some of her responses were super interesting/frightening. One of her answers that really stuck out was how she sees faces. Basically she says she sees essentially a blank mask. She can't tell if someone is pretty or ugly, she can't even tell someone's race. Would you say the same about yourself?

Definitely not. I can certainly tell attractiveness, race, etc etc. I just can't tie the face to an identity.

There's probably a way to say, with reassuring confidence, that you aren't good with faces, so if they bump into you again to just remind them what you talked about. I think some things, like not remembering faces (or sometimes in my case, names) are awkward barriers until they're explicitly mentioned and explained.

I have the name problem to an extreme. I have excellent face recall, but I can't remember names--and of course it worsens in social situations. I've pretty much given up on trying to introduce people to one another after repeatedly introducing my best friend as "my best friend"...awkwardly leaving it at that because I'd temporarily forgotten his name. Furthermore, I have a hard time discussing books with friends because I can't recall characters' names--despite having seen them hundreds of times throughout the course of a story. In such conversations, I have to denote characters by their identifying traits or actions. Since I don't seem to suffer from other non-visual recall issues (for example, my working vocabulary seems normal and I can remember past conversations in detail), I find the problem particularly strange.

I avoid slighting people by letting them know up front that I'm terrible with names. But I think it helps that mildly-poor name recall is common enough that people can empathize and excuse it. Also, I can quickly recognize and greet people I know--even if I can't acknowledge them by name. I'd imagine that most would find the effects of prosopagnosia more jarring and harder to dismiss without much more explanation than my bad name memory requires.

I've tried that, but this skill is so central to most people that they find it really difficult to understand not having it - just as I find it really difficult to understand having it.

It's sort of like ... imagine everyone but you can see color, and they ask you to hand them the green crayon, and you have to go through ALL THE CRAYONS looking at the text on the wrapper.

I can't say I know what it's like, but I can empathize by extrapolation from my own experiences having to do things by brute force search that come naturally to others. The crayon analogy was helpful.

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