I've often wondered how it is that a person can reach adulthood having lived all their life with some sort of serious shortcoming in the way they are wired without ever being fully aware of it. Color blindness is an example. How a can a person with even a partial inability to distinguish colors grow up with realizing this? One would expect that for a person who could not tell the difference between red and green, it would not be much of a leap for them to to see that they had a problem. Certainly there would be no shortage of amusing incidents in their lives to drive home this point.
I may not be color blind, but it was only a few years ago that I realized I have another sort of neurological problem that is probably just as debilitating. I was reading the introduction to Jane Goodall's Reason for Hope in which she mentions that she suffers from a neurological problema called prosopagnosia. (The text is available here.)Basically this is a shortcoming in the brain's ability to recognize and differentiate human faces.
The funny thing is that until I read that, I had never realized there was something wrong with me. But once I learned that such a problem existed, I immediately recalled dozens of incidents in my life that should have clued me in to the fact that something was not normal. There are lots of horribly embarassing stories I could tell at this point, but for the sake of my self-esteem, I'll just mention one. When I was in high school, I called a girl up, asked her out, picked her up, and took her out to dinner and a movie. The next Monday at school I passed her on the stairs. She was looking directly at me, so I looked back. Then I continued on, having no idea who she was. She never really spoke to me again after that. Clearly this was one of many points in my life when I should have realized there was something not quite right about me.
A more typical incident which occurred a few weeks ago will better illustrate my day-to-day difficulties. One day I was coming out of a classroom, as were a horde of other students. Just then I heard a female voice say "hi" followed by what sounded like my name. I turned my head in the general direction of the voice and saw a crowd of people, none of which I recognized. Of course by then the speaker had finished speaking, so it was too late to spot the mouth as it uttered the words directed at me. There was one friendly female face looking directly at me. I did not recognize her, and it didn't help that she was wearing a hat. But was she the one who had said hello, or was she just looking back at me, because she saw me looking at her? Had anyone actually spoken to me? (After all, there was a lot of background noise.) I stared at her, and she stared at me. Then I kind of squinted so I could scrutinize her features in great detail. When I did this, she visibly recoiled. But was she recoiling because some guy she didn't know had looked at her in a friendly manner as she walked down a corridor looking as if he was going to say something to her but instead, started staring at her face very intently? Or did she recoil because she knew me, had said hi, saw me look back at her, and instead of a greeting in return, all she got was a prolonged intense stare? I wish I knew. I also wish I knew who the heck that was. That is a fairly typical event in my daily life.
As I stated previously, prosopagnosia occurs at various levels of severity. I am lucky enough to still have some facial recognition ability. Apparently there are people who have none at all. There is a great page that explains facial recognition ability in terms of recognizing stones in various contexts. It gives a very accurate portrayal of the types of situations in which I often find myself when I can't instantly pick out a face.
During my research for this post, I made an exciting discovery, which is that people with prosopagnosia are also often afflicted with topographic agnosia, which means they have no innate sense of direction. That's me alright. It was a relief to discover that the two conditions are probably manifestations of the same cause. In other words, there is really only one thing seriously wrong with my brain, not two. I may even have a very minor case of Central Auditory Processing Disorder. Apparently it's all one great package deal.