Sometimes I seriously consider whether I suffer from Face Blindness. This was suggested to me after an odd encounter with who I thought was an ex-girlfriend. Walking around my Universities campus, I saw a light haired woman, roughly 5'6" and in a bad mood. I thought to myself, "Hey, isn't that Samantha?" Names have been changed to protect me. There is a reason we aren't dating anymore. Long story short: I let her insanity get between us. Hyperbole, but not really. Anyway, I thought I saw her in the main square but I wasn't sure. Out of sheer bewildered confusion, I ended up staring at her for what must have been 30 seconds. Eventually, her Feminine Extrasensory Creep Detection Signal (also known as FECDS, not found on medicinenet.com) went off and she turned to see me staring at her. She, clearly fazed (less by my smokey blue eyes and more by my stupefied look) resumed her jaunt, quickening her pace, all the while staring back at me with the same confused face I had presented her with a healthy dose of revulsion included. It wasn't her. Shocker. Ordinarily, I would need a good 8 days of hiding in my apartment and walking through scenarios where I could have saved face. But I was so dumfounded by my inability to recognize a face, I forgot all about my routine of wallowing in self pity. What had happened? Well I did a little research. Or rather, I typed words and phrases into the google search bar and the search engine found research by other people.
For those of you who, like myself, don't have an imagination to grasp this situation, please allow me to copy and paste what medicinenet.com told me Prosopagnosia, otherwise known as Face Blindness, is the neurological condition where an individual has difficulty recognizing or differentiating faces. Usually caused by damage or abnormalities in the Fusiform Gyrus portion of the brain (as highlighted in the image below), this condition can render the individual unable to recognize even the most familiar of faces.
Initially, I was a little nervous. What if I can't recognize people? What if it gets worse? Then I realized, this is the excuse of a lifetime! I can ignore anyone I want, all I have to do is start explaining "my condition" to people and learn how to correctly pronounce prosopasno- posrop- prosopagnoti- I'll just go with Face Blindness. That large open world out there is no longer full of people I need to worry about. I'll update you all on how my Adventures in the land of Proso- Face Blindness go.
