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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

I have prosopagnosia. Glasses that could tell me the name of the person talking to me would be amazing. But not if I have to give big tech data about everyone around me

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I have it as well. This is how i explain it to regular folks: most people have an whole neural network dedicated to processing the human face, memorizing its feutures and matching them to the people in front of them. But when they look at trees they cant really distinguish a pine tree from another pine tree, unless the differences are extreme: one is brunt down, or has a weird shaped trunk, etc. If they try to recall a specific pine tree all they can recall is a messy green spiky blob. Why? Because their brain has no neural network dedicated to identifying trees. For us, the human face is as distinguishable as a tree

Good way to describe it. Hard to relay to people what it is like walking into a crowded room and not be able to find the people you are meeting without one of them waving.

I try to explain it is a lot like the subway scenes from Pink Floyd's "The Wall". Everyone has the same distorted indistinguishable face.

Very likely I have lost a lot of "new friends" and business contacts from walking past not recognizing them.

When someone comes up with smart glasses with a fully local setup, I'll be the first to buy.

But I'm not wearing something where the content might get viewed by a random person in Nigeria for "cataloging content".

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