When my husband dropped me off at the trailhead, I felt like a kindergartner on the first day of school. “Have fun!” he said, before driving away. A group of outdoorsy-looking ladies stared at me, and I knew why: I’m a 42-year-old woman who depends on her husband for rides.
Pushing aside my embarrassment, I greeted the hiking group with false confidence. I’m new in town; I’m here to make friends. As the women introduced themselves, I tried various tactics to make their names stick in my mind. Jean was wearing jeans. (But she probably owns other pants!) Sandy has sandy-blond hair. (But so do at least five other women standing around her!) A woman named Dale introduced herself, and all I could think was how unfortunate it was that she didn’t have chipmunk cheeks.
I was tempted to keep faking it—to plaster my face with a dumb smile, keep conversations vague, and avoid using names completely—but I’d promised myself that I’m not doing that anymore. I needed to come clean to this group of strangers about my disability.
“Just so you know, I’m face blind,” I told Sandy (I think?) as we hoofed it up a steep hill.
“Oh, me too!” she replied. “I’m just terrible with names.”
Inwardly, I rolled my eyes and sighed. My problems go much, much deeper than forgetting names. I forget faces—including my own. I can’t always identify myself in photographs. I have a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, which means my brain lacks the specialized face-recognition software that 98 percent of the population has. The condition is colloquially known as face blindness, and it affects about six million Americans, the vast majority of whom have never been diagnosed.
For 40 years, I, too, failed to notice that I was struggling with things that other people find trivially easy. You’d think that I would have realized I was making mistakes no one else makes: getting into strangers’ cars, making plans to meet up with someone and then being surprised by who showed up, not being able to follow a movie if the main character gets a makeover. (Me watching Pretty Woman: “Who’s that? What happened to the prostitute?”)
When I do manage to recognize someone’s, I get so excited I tell everyone. But my introductions often backfire, because I tend to forget people’s relationships to one another, as well. (“Sadie, I know Josh. He’s my brother.”)
Uncertainty, improvisation, and wacky mishaps make up the fabric of my life, and I never thought to question it until I tried to write some of these experiences down. I wanted to publish a David Sedaris-style collection of funny autobiographical stories, but when I sent drafts to my friends, they had a lot of questions. How could I have mistaken a stranger for my husband? And how on earth had it taken me years to realize that the framed picture I had on my bookshelf was not, as I’d thought, of my cousins, but a stock image?
At this point, most people probably would have contacted a neurologist, but I’m a science writer. So I started downloading studies, and found a researcher at Harvard who was trying out a computer-based program to teach people to get better at face recognition. By this point I knew I was below average at it, and I wanted to improve. I signed up for the study. But before I could embark on my eight weeks of face-recognition training, I had to take three days’ worth of tests.
I was at work when I got the news: I am not just below average at face recognition, I’m in the bottom 2 percent—for humans, at least, though that does put me “on par with a mediocre or below-average macaque,” as one Harvard scientist put it.
In short, I’m legit face blind. Scientifically face blind.
The chunk of your brain that is responsible for remembering faces is called the fusiform face area (FFA in neurology-speak). It allows humans to register a set of features—left eye, right eye, nose, mouth, cheeks, freckles, dimples—then create a three-dimensional mental image of a person’s face. That means you can recognize it the next time you see it, even if it’s at a different angle, or in different lighting conditions.
Like everyone, I have two FFAs, but mine suck at their job. Brain scans suggest they might be a bit thicker than average, which is probably a sign that when I was a kid they did not get enough “neural pruning”—which is the process where the brain gets rid of excess neurons, to become more efficient.
Learning all this about myself, on the cusp of my 40th birthday, was a shock. How had I been blind to this invisible force that had been quietly shaping my entire life? What else don’t I know about myself?
A lot, it turned out. During the course of my nerdy midlife crisis, I discovered that I am quite neurodivergent. It’s not just that I can’t visualize faces; I can’t visualize anything at all—a condition known as aphantasia. Actually, I was quite surprised to find out that the average American can basically hallucinate on demand. Counting sheep, conjuring up peaceful beach scenes, undressing someone with your eyes—I thought these things were purely figures of speech!
My brain is unusual in several other ways, but I am quite typical in this one respect: I’ve always assumed that my conscious experience is roughly the same as everyone else’s.
I was wrong.
Scientists are now finding that the variety of ways people experience being awake and alive is, frankly, mind-boggling. Your best friend, your spouse, your boss: Their perceptions and inner lives might be completely different from yours. And—chances are—you have no idea.
If you don't believe me, start asking them questions like: When you’re reading a novel, do you “see” the characters in your mind’s eye? (If so, lucky them! I see nothing but words on a page.)
Or: Are your memories in color or black-and-white? Do you experience them in the first person or third? (All I remember of my past are the stories I tell about myself—all words, no pictures, and muted emotions.)
And then there’s the issue of credibility. When I try to describe my conscious experiences, why should you believe me? Why should I believe myself? After all, I’m clearly a master of self-deception, having thought for decades I was basically neurotypical.
This difficulty is why, in the 1950s, the field of psychology stepped away from studying inner experiences. Psychologists wanted to be taken seriously as scientists, and scientists study things that can be observed and quantified. Questions like “Is the red I see the same red you see?” seemed best left to philosophers and potheads, while less interesting, more concrete issues like “How can I make this pigeon work harder?” were taken up with great rigor.
Fortunately, scientists got interested in studying internal experiences again in the ’90s, with the advent of the fMRI—a scan that can capture images of brain activity. But that’s just one way psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to corroborate or contradict what we claim is going on inside our skulls. For instance, you can ask vivid visualizers to imagine a brightly lit shape and see whether their pupils contract. (They do!) Or you can have someone read a violent passage in a book and see if they break a sweat. (Vivid visualizers will; me, not so much.)
You might never think about it, but your capacity to visualize things affects your whole experience of life. Because I can’t hold images in my mind, I live in a very literal, concrete, here-and-now world. My friend Miriam has hyperphantasia—a condition where your mental images are so vivid they almost feel real—which means that every day she is immersed in a kaleidoscope of imagined sights, sounds, smells, and sensations.
When I found this out, I finally understood why she has trouble focusing and is forever running late.
And when I found out I was face blind, I was newly appreciative of how impressive the average brain is. As part of that Harvard study, I completed 30 hours of tedious training, where I learned to rapidly estimate the relative distances between facial features. (I got better at the tests, but it didn’t really translate to my real life.) This is something your brain, if you’re like most people, can do without even trying. You’re computing hundreds of measurements for every face you see, faster than the fastest computer.
So, even if you forget names from time to time, give your hardworking cortex some credit.
We all walk through life with brains that filter, enhance, and sometimes distort reality, creating individual experiences that can seem alien to others. When you’re angry, do you actually see red—almost as if you put on tinted sunglasses? Do certain textures make you feel an overwhelming sense of discomfort? When you hear music, do you see shapes or colors swirling in your mind’s eye? Some people do!
These differences are not flaws; they are a testament to the incredible complexity of human consciousness. And no matter how unusual your experience may be, chances are, you’re not alone.
Sadie Dingfelder is a former reporter at The Washington Post. Follow her on TikTok @SadieDingfelder.
This essay was adapted from her new book, “Do I Know You? A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination.”
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