Do I know you?
Recognizing friends and colleagues was always a challenge, said journalist Sadie Dingfelder in Only when she probed deeper into face blindness did she realize how much it had defined her life.
IN 2013, I was four months into my job at The Washington Post when we had a goingaway party for a woman who was moving to Philadelphia. Everyone gathered around my section’s little newsroom while our boss talked about Sara’s contribution to the paper, how sad we all were to see her leave. I, personally, was neutral on the subject. I hadn’t gotten to know Sara, just as I hadn’t really connected with anyone in my new office, but I had noticed that she was unusually versatile. A news editor–fashion writer would be hard to replace. “I think that as you get older, it gets harder to make friends with your coworkers,” I opined to my boyfriend, Steve, that evening. When I got to work the next day, I was surprised to see Sara there, standing beside a copy machine. She must be here to collect her things, I decided. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Philadelphia?” I joked, proud of myself for remembering the city she was moving to. Sara peered at me through plastic-rimmed glasses. “I’m not Sara,” she said. “I’m Holley.”
“Oh, right!” I said, hoping that Holley assumed I’d merely gotten their names mixed up when, in reality, I had thought— for months—that two of my co-workers were the same person. Everyone at work literally looked the same to me, just as everyone always does.
Last year, I was trailing behind Steve—now my husband—in a grocery store when he grabbed a jar of store-brand peanut butter from a shelf. I plucked it out of our cart and examined the label. “Since when do you buy generic?” I demanded.
Steve jumped away from me, his eyes wide with fear and surprise. It was an expression unlike anything I’d seen cross my husband’s face before—because, I belatedly realized, this man was not my husband.
I had been quicker to notice the wrong label on a jar of peanut butter than the wrong face on my husband. That doesn’t happen to normal people. And instead of smoothing my mistake into a funny story, for the first time I saw it as evidence that something might be wrong with my brain. This spring, I found out that I have a rare neurological disorder known as prosopagnosia, or face blindness. I first learned about face blindness in 2010, when I read an article by Oliver Sacks in The
New Yorker. Like me, Sacks had long assumed that his difficulties remembering people were the result of general absentmindedness. It wasn’t until halfway through his life that Sacks—a neurologist!—realized that he had a neurological disorder.
One day I was thinking about the grocery store incident and I started Googling prosopagnosia. Then I began searching medical databases and emailing scientists, asking them to send me the full text of their studies if I couldn’t find them free online. Printouts piled up on my desk until I had more than I could possibly hope to read. That’s how I wound up on the 12th floor of the Boston VA, meeting with Joseph DeGutis, a neuroscientist with a joint appointment at the Boston VA and
Harvard Medical School. DeGutis was the lead researcher on a face-blindness study I had come to Boston to participate in. I met with him after spending a day and a half looking at pictures of blank-faced young men photoshopped into what looked like nun coifs. I was so tired of looking at faces, I’d taken an Uber to the hospital to avoid looking at people on the train.
“So am I face blind?” I asked. “We think you have mild to moderate prosopagnosia,” he said. DeGutis didn’t want to elaborate because knowing too much about the experiment could taint my data. “We’ll tell you everything you could ever want to know when you’re done.”
EING FACE BLIND means living in a world full of strangers. The fact that some of these people are acquaintances and even friends is no solace. It’s actually a source of constant anxiety. There’s only one foolproof way for face-blind people to avoid social embarrassment, and that is to stay home. Wracked with social anxiety, many face-blind people avoid parties and networking events, and their friendships, love lives, and careers can suffer as a result. The most tragic cases dig themselves into a trench of loneliness that’s difficult, if not impossible, to escape.
This was the path I was going down until my dad gave me some crucial advice. I was 19, home from my first semester in college, and we’d just finished grocery shopping. “Well, that was rude,” he said when we got into his car. “What?” I asked. “Your buddy Susan Zartman,” he said. “You just walked right past her.”
“Oh, that was Susan?” I asked. A girl with short brown hair had waved to me in the store. “I said, ‘Hi.’” “You said, ‘Hey-ay,’” my dad said, mimicking my limp, singsong greeting. “You do that a lot.”
“She’s not my buddy,” I argued. “I haven’t seen her since middle school.” I later found out that Susan had continued with me to high school, and that she’d been a little hurt when I started treating her like a stranger. Something had happened— perhaps she’d gotten a haircut or glasses— that made me unable to connect highschool Susan with my middle-school friend. And when I stopped seeing her regularly, she simply faded from my mind. In fact, I had kind of forgotten Susan existed.
There’s some evidence that faces act as the
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