Why Some People Just Can't Remember Faces

This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.

You spot someone across a room; they’re staring at you and want to say hi. You know you must know them from somewhere, but you don’t recognise their face. They start talking to you and you’re desperately hoping for some contextual information, anything that can help you remember who this person is. You feel awful, as if this failure to remember is some terrible reflection of your own shitty personality.

I’m here to tell you it’s OK, and you’re not alone. Some people just find it harder than others to recognise and remember faces, whether they’re celebrities or people they actually know. According to Roberta Daini, a neuropsychology professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, people often underestimate how difficult it is for our brains to perceive an object, animal or person because the mechanism is so seamless. “You might think that, because we open our eyes and immediately recognise things, perception is a simple process, but it’s actually very complex,” she says.

That’s especially true for distinguishing faces, which share so many characteristics and are therefore harder for our brains to distinguish than objects. In fact, studies have shown that we recognise faces through what Daini defines as a “holistic, global and configural” process. In other words, faces are so similar that we can only distinguish them by analysing differences like eye colour or lip shape – like recognising objects by looking at their smaller constituent parts (see: the leg of a table or the pattern of a sweater).

As complicated as it may be, we’ve largely got used to carrying out this process spontaneously and almost automatically since birth. But results can vary a lot from one person to the next. “Any [cognitive] ability is at different levels in different people,” Daini says. “Some people are better at doing something, and others less so, and most people are more or less average.”

In neuropsychology, people who almost never forget a face are called super recognisers. At the other end of the spectrum, however, there is a condition called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. Although there are no comprehensive estimates of how prevalent face blindness is, some studies suggest that between 2% and 2.5% of the population is born with congenital prosopagnosia. There are also people who have acquired face blindness after something like a brain injury.

Let’s be clear, not being able to easily memorise faces doesn’t automatically mean that you have prosopagnosia. It’s reasonable to think of it as a spectrum, with some people having minor difficulties and others larger issues. One of the most common problems reported by face blind people is having a hard time identifying someone they don’t see often, or who is in a different environment from where they usually see them. But when the problem is particularly prominent, people have a hard time recognising loved ones or even themselves in a mirror. They might be unable to watch a movie without losing track of who the characters are.

Unfortunately, practice has nothing to do with it, either. We all see a lot of real-life faces and representations of them over and over again, but this isn’t a skill you can get better at, unfortunately. According to Daini, that’s because scientists currently believe the ability – or inability – to recognise faces is basically encoded in our genes.

Still, some people have found alternative strategies to try to distinguish who they know, like memorising their hairstyle, voice or posture. “I know someone who definitely has congenital prosopagnosia but she’s really good at making up for it,” Daini says. “So, for her, it’s never been a big problem.”

One of her patients, a teacher, would remember who her students were based on where they sat in the classroom. She ended up being assigned to a school where, to improve socialisation, the students were encouraged to move desks every week. “This teacher had a really hard time with this, and the school management didn’t understand,” Daini says. “She had to quit after a short time.”

If you’ve realised you have a similar, recurring problem, Daini says it’s probably not just because you’re shy or distracted. You can take a test to measure how bad you are at recognising faces to receive a diagnosis of face blindness. “In some cases, having these difficulties recognised from the outside and finding [support] tools can be helpful,” Daini says. If you suspect you may have an issue with recognising people, but don’t feel like this is too much of a problem, you don’t actually need to be tested and diagnosed.

Developing and deploying self-directed strategies for recognition is not the sole way to manage the condition. According to some recent experimental studies, the drug oxytocin could improve face recognition in people affected by this condition, but this research is still in its early stages.

Daini concludes that the most important thing to do about face blindness is to actually raise awareness, as young children affected by this issue are often misdiagnosed with autism. “Perhaps the child is simply not looking people in the eye because they don’t find it informative,” she says. “Perhaps they’re looking at other aspects around the face, not because they have a social problem, but because they find it hard to use that information to understand who the other person is. They may get a wrong diagnosis and carry it with them throughout their life.”