Yep – I have face blindness too.
I’ve also got a terrible sense of direction – I often come out of a shop and turn the wrong way down the street, for example. It’s even worse if it’s a department store and I’ve left by a different door – then I have no clue at all where I am.
If I’m in a new office (which is fairly often, as I’m a contractor) I get lost going to the loo or the kitchen, or even back to my desk in a big place. My trick is to keep on turning round and looking behind me as I’m being shown round a new location – so that I see what it’s going to look like on the way back.
I’ve also done the thing with thinking for ages that two different people were the same person. So embarrassing when you finally realise because you’re talking to person A about stuff related to person B and they’re like... “wuh?”!
I definitely don’t recognise someone out of context – but even in context it also depends on how many times I’ve met them before. It takes me much longer than most people to even start to learn what someone looks like, so if I‘ve only met them a few times, I’ve got no chance. I go by voice, hair, clothes, the way they walk - much more than face, although sometimes if they have a very strong facial feature it can help. Someone I know with a hat on, or sunglasses, or a new hairdo – again, I’ve got no chance of recognising them. And yet if someone calls me on the phone and they don’t announce who they are, I’ll know who it is because I recognise their voice immediately.
I’ve also done the thing where I talk with someone or work with them for hours one day, see them the following day and have no idea who they are. Or I’ll spend time with someone who then goes off and changes their clothes – again, I’ve got no idea I’ve just been talking to them for ages.
A couple of times I’ve had male friends who’ve shaved off their beard, and it’s pretty much blown my mind each time. Here’s this person I’m supposed to know, and they’re talking to me, and it’s that person’s voice, and I recognise it, but it’s coming out of this face that is COMPLETELY alien to me, and I just can’t compute at all.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve bumped into someone in the street and we have a chat and I’m spending the entire time trying to pick up clues about who they are and how I know them. Total embarrassing nightmare if you’re there with someone else and feel you should be introducing them, but can’t because you don’t know who the person is, or what their name is, or how you know them.
I’m in a band that has over 100 members, with a bunch of new people joining every year, and that’s really hard to keep track of. In one section of the band there are about 5 blokes, all with no hair/shaved heads – and honestly, I can still barely tell them apart, even though they’ve all been in the band a couple of years at least now.
These days, because I know what prosopagnosia is, and I know I have it – I just tell people. It’s so much easier, and much less embarrassing. So the 5 identical blokes all know I can’t tell one from the other, and they just let me know which one they are, and we’re all happy.