Is anyone else here completely unable to imagine any faces?
I don't have aphantasia - I can generally imagine things pretty vividly. I also don't have face blindness - I am perfectly able to recognize faces when I see them.
I just can't remember any faces. And I don't just mean someone I barely know or someone I haven't seen in a while. I can literally be looking at a person who I know really well, but as soon as I turn away, I immediately have zero clue about what they look like. I don't know what my parents look like, or my friends, or even myself. Everything else - the body, the hair - that I can picture just fine.
What's also interesting though is that I can imagine photos of people. So, for example, I have no idea what my face looks like and I can't imagine it, but if there is a photo of myself that I remember, then I can imagine that specific photo in great detail, including my face. But as soon as I change the photo in any way in my imagination, I stop seeing my face again. This also works with other people, not just me.
Does anyone else here experience that?
You say authoritatively that you do not have aphantasia, but your symptoms sound very, very much like an aspect of it.
I doubt any of us are qualified to tell you what you do or don't have; but if aphantasia has varying degrees of "impairment", it's still possible you have a version of it. Have you talked with a doctor?
What's a doctor going to do? Tell ya "welp, ya got the aphantasia, see ya around."?
Having a label for something one experiences can help to deal with it.
OP might not have adverse effects from it, but it's clearly on their mind; they're asking strangers on the Internet about it.
Maybe I do. I haven't talked with a doctor since it isn't really something that affects me that much in day to day life. This would be a weird kind of aphantasia though, because as I said, all other things I can imagine in great detail. I know that aphantasia can be of different intensity, but I haven't found anything about aphantasia only hindering the ability to remember one specific type of thing. This also doesn't really explain why I can imagine photos of faces but not real faces.
You say you can imagine them in great detail...can you actually see them in detail? I can imagine things in incredible detail, but I can't actually visualize things in detail beyond occasional flashes so quick that I'm not sure I really visualized anything. My normal state of imagination is almost like when a word is on the tip of my tongue. It's just not quite there.
I've heard a lot of people say this is true for them. Sounds very normal.
Yeah, I do. It's obviously not a super crisp and brightly colored image, but it is still a detailed image
Wait, do you mean that you've heard a lot of people say that they can't imagine faces at all? Because I haven't personally met anyone who had the same experience. Or do you just mean that it's generally easier for people to remember photos than to remember faces?
I've seen a lot of people say they can't remember faces but they can remember photos of faces.
It's worth noting that photos of faces are still not the same as actual, live faces. Brains are weird. I won't presume to speak on how they work.
Neuropsychologist here. I also cannot imagine faces. I don't have prosopagnosia (I process faces just fine in day to day life), and I don't have aphantasia (I'm a very visual thinker). But ever since I can remember, I have been able to picture nearly anything and anyone...except the faces are just kind of not there. Sort of a blur or swirl or cloud or something, but never a face.
It doesn't cause any issues. It's probably something to do with connections between the visual cortex and fusiform gyrus, if I had to guess. It's an interesting phenomenon, and one I've only heard from two or three other people in my work and personal life. Glad to know we are growing in power!
Interestingly enough, I do think it has to do with processing faces differently than others do. My wife is a super-recognizer, and when we discuss who someone looks like, we always disagree until really "looking for" the other person's suggestion. Then it eventually clicks.
I do come from a very neurodiverse family. Maybe you do too?
That sounds handy to live with a super recognizer. Given your background and the existence of super recognizer, do you think Dunbar's Number (max stable social relationships being around 150) is a real thing?
@Noox and I both have prosopagnosia and it has all kinds of minor-ish social inconveniences. I'm also going to be hopeless if I ever became a victim of crime, and that's something I think about from time to time. I wonder if super recognizers get more information about people than usual. Like, if 5 years ago one casually observes someone being rude or mean in a passing context, then they're formally introduced and so one has more info. I had trouble recognizing which kid at school was a bully and it sucked.
That really does suck. Thanks for sharing.
She and I are both major introverts, and I fit the profile of "highly sensitive person" so I most definitely have fewer than 150 stable relationships. At a quick count, I'd say 40 max for me, including work relationships. Maybe more if you count extended family who are always happy to see each other every few years but otherwise don't keep in touch. Then it's maybe 60. And even what I have feels like a stretch. I'm usually the passive one in keeping up the relationship, too, except in about 20 of them. In those I'm all in and I'm told I'm very highly valued.
Yes, it seems like you have the same thing! It's great to have a neuropsychologist here, I was pretty interested about what brain regions could potentially affect this.
I don't know, definitely not anything diagnosed though. I do have a suspicious that me and my father may have ADHD, but I haven't gotten around to visiting a doctor so it remains a suspicion for now, and I'm obviously not going to self-diagnose a mental condition.
Wise. I'm not seeing anything in the literature about a connection between the two. Just a thought.
Maybe you're just overthinking it? I think many or most people remember faces as an abstract amalgamation of thoughts rather than well-defined physical details. That's why most people suck at drawing. Sure, there is a skill component to moving a pencil across a piece of paper, but the main reason people can't draw a recognizable face is because they don't actually look at and remember the details in a way that translates into an image that people would recognize.
A lot of art training focuses on teaching people to ignore the brain's abstractions and see things more objectively. One good example is how people tend to be surprised when they learn the rule of thumb that the eyes are roughly halfway between the bottom of the chin and the top of the head. I had to take a ruler to several front facing portrait photos to prove this to myself at first. Most untrained people will draw the eyes way too high because the lower half of the face has more features and dominates our perception when we're looking at someone. So if people don't even know where the eyes are, when they say that they can mentally visualize a face, take that statement with a grain of salt.
I asked many people IRL about this, and it seems like while their mental images of faces are indeed pretty vague, they still have them. Eg. they can imagine what their friends look like (and some people can even imagine details, like what their eyes looks like, their nose, etc.)
Kinda sorta? While I don't have aphantasia, my imagination is somewhat broken. My mind's eye needs glasses; I'm bad at remembering fine details of physical objects, except for when they are in physical relationship to eachother. I can see their face in my mind but I couldn't meaningfully describe them.
That's interesting. Another similar thing that I noticed about myself is that my memories are not "timecoded" in any way. I have no inherent feeling of when something happened, not even a vague one, the only way I can figure it out is by logical reasoning (eg. "okay, so I was with this person, who I've only met like 3 years ago, so this memory isn't older than 3 years")
I thought it was like that for everyone but then some people told me that apparently they just remember approximately when things happened as a part of their memory
What if they're less accurate than they think they are?
I do have a sense of time of when things happen, but it's incredible unreliable. Something can feel like it happened 3 months ago, but it actually happened 2 days ago. And the opposite too.
Even with covid at its peak, many people kept saying it felt like an incredibly long time and are usually surprised to discover they haven't been home for all that long.
My experience with figuring out "weird" issues my vision has, has been kind of revealing.
As a kid, I was obsessed. I wondered if I was slowly going blind. Because every night, if I look at the wall, the clock on my wall would disappear if it's in the corner of my vision.
I kept asking so many people if they have the same thing. If it's normal. And everyone says they don't experience it. Things don't disappear. So I worried even more.
Then I got older and the internet got more robust and then there was this viral thing that people were sharing. Basically it was about the weird things you don't notice about your eye. And one of it was that everyone has a blind spot at the corner of their vision, but the brain will compensate for it and fill in the gaps.
And suddenly everyone I asked before was like "Wow! Interesting! I never knew!"
And as a teenager, I went wtf! I asked and everyone said no! I was paranoid for a long time since nobody knew what I was talking about!
Then I realised I just am more aware and notice more things with vision than other people. Even with imagination, I'm pretty aware of what my limitations are. I assume it's because I tend to get obsessive and paranoid about things.
Since I draw, and learning how to draw really shows how unreliable the image in your head is. You can think it's vivid. You can think it has details. But try put those details down on paper and you'll realise how far off the details in your brain actually are.
There's a whole exercise for learning to train your brain to really see and observe things properly when it comes to drawing. Because it's rare to naturally be able to do it.
Maybe many other people have the same issue you have. They just don't notice it and go on with their lives. So when you ask, people say no. They don't have that issue.
Googling around, because I was curious, and it looks like you're definitely not alone. E.g. From reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/6vsp7r/i_have_aphantasia_just_with_faces_anyone_else/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/fg7asp/i_cant_picture_faces/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/n298n2/aphantasia_with_only_faces/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/xw46ua/aphantasia_but_only_for_faces/
https://www.reddit.com/r/hyperphantasia/comments/tjuajs/i_think_i_have_both_facialaphantasia_and/
Etc.
It's good to hear that other people have this as well, but it would definitely be interesting to learn what the cause may be. There is some research on regular aphantasia but unfortunately I didn't find anything about specifically this.
It sounds like it could be this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
Nope, as I said in the first paragraph, I don't have face blindness. I can recognize faces when I see them, but can't remember them after I look away.
It may still be a mild form of prosopagnosia?
You might think you're able to recognise faces when you see people, but you could be using other cues to recall whose face you're looking at.
I do have prosopagnosia and I can recall a face in a photograph, as long as I'm very familiar with that photograph (I.e. a very old Facebook profile photo of mine is of me with my still-best friend. I can recall her face from that photo, but I couldn't for the life of me describe her as she is now - 10 years later).
I cannot envision faces whatsoever, same as you, and i am positively awful at recognising people - until I've known them long enough to recognise them from other things. I rely on voice 99% of the time, which sometimes means I'll be staring at a person trying to recall them without success; but the moment they start speaking I have a very sudden and immediate awareness of who they are.
Let me ask you: If you had only seen a photo of someone, i.e. a slack profile photo, would you be able to recognise them in real life if you met them? I myself cannot.
If someone changes their glasses, or their hair is a little shorter, are you able to immediately recognise 'this is X but their glasses changed', or do you have a sudden realisation of who the person is after a few seconds (or if they start speaking, if you're me)?
I have prosopagnosia too!
Oh man the anxiety I immediately felt reading that.
Recently I ordered an Uber or Lyft and thought it was totally useless sending me a picture of my driver: they're not going to have the same hair or shirt or could be without/wearing glasses, what in earth is a photo good for?
Oh it's a lot worse than you might imagine. Because I also have a very bad success ratio recognising people I've only ever seen in zoom meetings.
You know how I found that out? When finally met my colleagues IRL after working with them every day for A YEAR AND A HALF. AND I ONLY RECOGNISED ABOUT 10% OF THEM. It was an absolutely miserable yet hilarious experience, 0/10 would recommend.
And hah, there's no Lyft here but we do have Uber, and I just check the license plate against the app as there's no way I'd recognise the photo either.
Yes, I can do all of those things. I have considered that I have prosopagnosia, so I tried to look at how I recognize people for a while, and yes, I can recognize their face if their haircut changes or if I've only seen them on a photo.
I have face blindness but not to a debilitating degree.
I also have immense trouble recalling human faces in my memory. Including my own. And I also don't usually have "time stamps" for my memory.
Anyway, a lot of my facial recognition is context based and process of elimination based. That means I do fine in most social situations but if my dad were to surprise pick me up from the airport (which is something he wouldn't do) I wouldn't be able to recognize him. My friends' kids are "the big one" or "the little one" or "the one with glasses" no matter how many years I've known them now. My friends' sisters are completely unrecognizable for me as well, even though by name I know which one likes what and which one does what, because I recieved those pieces of info in text one time.
I recognize people from school and work fine because again, context helps. Hair, body size, voice, way they dress, general "vibe" of a person, age, way they talk, previous shared detailed etc help. But I know I have face blindness because when two people from the same context share too many similarities, I can go years without being able to tell them apart physically.
I could have written that myself, and the airport thing is essentially exactly what happened when I was waiting on my husband to come out of the train station, and I didn't realise he was there until he was standing right in front of me...
Isn't it also so freaking exhausting to have 2 people that you both work with who resemble each other and you just cannot. tell. who is who? But you ofc have to fake that you do, because usually people don't appreciate it if the person they've seen every single day for years at work cannot tell them apart from this other random person who they probably don't actually resemble at all (apart from being like, blonde and female).
The worst feeling for me is accidentally coming across as a stereotypical idiot white person who can't tell people of colour apart. I've had at least 2 separate occasions of me having to frantically explain to a non-white colleague that I'm not mixing them up with another colleague 2 departments down because they're both brown - but because I physically cannot tell them apart, and neither can I tell the 2 white women in our team apart so "I swear I'm not racist! I can't tell anyone apart, regardless of skin colour!" 😅
Man, that reminds me of the time a Black lady got upset because she thought I was mixing her up with another Black lady just because of their race when it was really because I didn't know either of them and she was standing at the other lady's desk. Now, that lady was known for being that way about pretty much everything so it was more of a personal problem for her but it was incredibly uncomfortable.