Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

> For example, I think I may also have mild face-blindness, the difficulty in recognizing faces and linking them with names. Usually, it doesn't cause major issues, and with some effort and repetition, I can learn to recognize people. But the face-blindness really rears its head when I meet someone not-so-familiar in an unexpected place, like random encounters on a train. Since I don't have the usual contextual cues to help me, in these cases I find it very hard to pin down who they are. They go "hey Marco, what's up?" and all I get is the vague sense that I know this person from somewhere. Only when they mention names or other contextual information do I have a chance of allocating them in their rightful place in my mental social network.

Oh man, I don't have aphantasia (though I do have unusually poor autobiographical memory), and things like this happen to me all the time. Even more embarrassing is when I introduce myself to someone and they say "we've met several times before."

I also have problems with faces, if they've changed slightly or I see them in unfamiliar places. I don't have aphantasia, or problems recalling my past - quite the opposite, I have strong visual memories from before I was three.

On the other hand I'm extremely good at recognizing people from their gait. I can see someone in the far distance and know who they are, even if we haven't met in years. For some reason I also recognize people from how they place their shoes.. as when I walked in somewhere and saw a pair of shoes and immediately knew that it was one of my cousins I hadn't seen in ten years.

I have a similar thing about the gait and I think it might have to do with me needing glasses, but it being mild enough (-1.0, -2.0) that I didn't wear them as a teenager and in my early twenties - so my NN just trained on the data it had ready access too: Gait, preferred colors, movement patterns etc.

The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.

Exactly, I have severe myopia, that was quickly developing during my teenage years so my glasses were often too weak. Beacuse of that my brain learned to identify people by gait too.

I didn't consider it might be myopia; I was diagnosed around 10, but already -3.5

I didn't consider that - my eyesight wasn't checked before I was nearly five years old, then my father started suspecting something (I still remember him asking if I could see a crow a couple of hundred meters away, between two slanted poles. I couldn't separate the slanted poles). So, I got glasses, for astigmatism and hyperopia, and I could see. Finally. If that's related to how I so easily recognize gaits (better than faces) I will never know. (It's not that I don't recognize faces, it's just that I may have problems if they're in places I don't expect or if they change a bit - getting older, or a haircut etc).

My partner has this pretty significantly. One interesting byproduct is that for most of her life, she didn’t really understand that other people could just recognize and recall faces. So when a bartender would recall her by name when she had been to a place 3 or 4 times in the last month, she thought they were a creepy stalker and not just someone that automatically recalled her. Because for her it is a deliberate and active process of picking out distinctive traits (glasses, beard, bald, gaunt face, small nose, haircut) to “learn” someone’s face. Or thinking she was just completely anonymous if she went to the same club, on the same nights each week, stood in the same place, and people watched. She was horrified when I told her that everyone that worked there definitely remembered her and probably a bunch of the other regulars too.

Last year I switched to a local mom&pop pharmacy from CVS. It was a really strange experience when the owner greeted me by name after seeing me twice over a month apart. Almost startling and somewhat offputting.

I just kind of forgot that some people are just that good at recognizing others. It's something I can't relate to at all, so it's a concept that just slips away from my mental models. But I suppose that's always how it is when you try to conceptualize how another being experiences the world.

I have a strong memory. I can cluster memories of a particular vibe (e.g. rainy atmosphere) on demand. But it hurts my brain if I do it too much.

This happened to me yesterday. Sorry Wolfgang.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com