[LifeStyle] ‘Sometimes I don’t recognise my own family’: life with face blindness

[BirSaNN]

The other day a man waved at Stanley Chow, and went over to him. “I said: ‘Have we met before?’ Which is kind of the last thing you want to say.” It happens a lot – he finds it hard to remember new people’s faces. “Anyone I’ve spoken to once or twice I do forget quite instantly,” he says. “If I meet someone new, I’ll make a point of following them on Instagram or Facebook so their face becomes ingrained in my memory somehow.”

Around six months ago, a friend phoned Chow to complain he had “blanked” a mutual friend, but the 48-year-old illustrator just hadn’t recognised him. “That unsettled me for a few weeks.” Now, he says, “I always make an excuse, like: ‘Since Covid I can’t remember faces as well as I could.’” He’s not plucking that idea out of thin air. He says he has always had a small degree of face blindness – where people have difficulty recognising or remembering faces – but he believes the Covid infection he got in early 2021 made it worse.

Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, has been raised as a possible symptom of long Covid. Last month, researchers at Dartmouth College in the US published a case study on Annie (a pseudonym), who had developed prosopagnosia since having Covid, to the extent she couldn’t recognise members of her own family. The study is extremely limited – Annie is just one person, and she wasn’t given an MRI scan to rule out other causes of prosopagnosia, such as stroke (Covid itself raises the risk of stroke).

The researchers are still at an early stage. However, there is another person who has claimed they have post-Covid prosopagnosia they want to work with, says Marie-Luise Kieseler, a doctoral student and lead author of the study, and two others who have been in touch. “We heard from another man who is not experiencing face blindness, but face distortions,” she says.

Based on responses to a survey she did, “we do think there are lots of people who have some sort of visual problems after contracting Covid-19. Some people have reported colour vision changes. We’ve heard from people who have trouble with navigation, recognising streets that are supposed to be familiar to them and losing their way when travelling.” One woman told Kieseler she has had a lot of visual distortions, including seeing shadows as trenches. More people with long Covid reported problems keeping track of characters in TV shows than people who had recovered from the virus, she says.

We do think there are lots of people who have some sort of visual problems after contracting Covid-19
Prosopagnosia is a rare condition, and most of the cases are acquired through some sort of brain injury or diseases such as encephalitis or Alzheimer’s, but some people are born with it. Haaris Qureshi, an IT and data technician, has had it – alongside dyspraxia, which affects motor skills and coordination – for as long as he can remember. “I’ve always struggled in social situations to be sure if I know someone.” It’s annoying, rather than debilitating, he says, but he does sometimes go out of his way to avoid people, rather than risk blanking them.

If he has known or worked with someone for a while, he will remember them. “But even then, with someone I know very well, if I see them in the context I’m not expecting them, I won’t recognise them.” When we speak, Qureshi, 28, is on a work training course and is meeting new people; he remembered one of his workshop partners by the colour of the tracksuit they were wearing, but they were wearing a different-coloured one the next day and he couldn’t pick them out. “These are the things I’m having to navigate,” he says.

If it’s someone Qureshi expects to deal with for a short period of time, such as at a conference, he looks for things such as jewellery or hairstyle – things that probably won’t change. “I have to expend mental effort memorising aspects,” he says. “Over longer periods of time, it’s more difficult.” Now he knows what face blindness is, he will tell people he has it, and if they have arranged to meet, he will ask them to approach him.

For some people with prosopagnosia, it may be a perception issue. “Because they’re seeing faces a little bit differently to everybody else, it doesn’t allow them to pick up on the visual cues that the rest of us use to distinguish between different people,” says John Towler, lecturer in psychology at Swansea University. They can have problems processing the whole face at a single glance, and will focus on a particular detail to remember people by – the eyebrows, or a mole or piercing for instance.

link: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/08/sometimes-i-dont-recognise-my-own-family-life-with-face-blindness