https://www.insider.com/brad-pitt-believes-he-has-undiagnosed-prosopagnosia-or-face-blindness-2022-6
I've been interested in the neuroscience of the condition, but couldn't imagine the difficulty of living with it. I know a few people with it. The condition manifests along a spectrum and people can be born with it or acquire it later in life from neurological injuries.
While face blindness evokes thoughts of the Lovecraftian facial horrors from DALL-E Mini, it isn't really that the person doesn't see a face or sees a distorted face. Just that faces don't appear unique and rather than seeing a face holistically like someone without the condition, they are more likely to focus on individual facial features. It'd be like asking someone to identify different chairs that look the same.
Usually sufferers compensate by identifying other attributes of individuals like their clothing style, gait, voice, hair, etc like some people with ASD do to compensate. Curiously a lot of people with ASD also score low on facial recognition. People with face blindness can struggle even with identifying their own face in reflections.
You can sort of test this by turning faces upside down. Our facial recognition is used to upright faces. Or by segmenting faces into individual features and building mismatched composite faces. We identify faces holistically.
I've read interviews with people that have the condition. They'll remember the clothing rotation of co-workers and be thrown off if that person buys new clothes for example. Or if they get a haircut/shave off their beard.
