Who Are You?

I'm face blind.  There is a much longer term term for this condition—prosopagnosia—but this is just a fancy way of saying that I rarely recognize anyone, even my friends.

You know that little voice in the back of your head that tells you who a person is when you meet then on the street?  Well, I don't—that little voice stays mainly silent.  I can usually figure out who someone is.  If I knock on Chuck's door and a large mustachioed man answers it, I know that it is Chuck.  And if I go to Beth's office, that is almost certainly Beth.  But when Beth saw me in the mall and ran in circles around me waving her arms, I just assumed some random nut needed to be shoved out of the way.  (She spoke just before I clobbered her—I'm very good at recognizing voices.)

If people are out of context, I usually don't recognize them.  My own two sons, What's-His-Name and The-Other-One, have snuck into my classroom at Enema U just to hear me lecture, and I didn't catch on until the students kept laughing and looking at them.  This is also one of the reasons I never take attendance in class—as far as I can tell, everyone is always there.

People with face blindness learn to cope.  I use things like gait, hair color,  makeup, and clothes to try and reason out people's identity,    Personally, I think people who aren't face blind stop looking at people as soon as they recognize them.  On a regular basis, I am told that I am the only one to notice a haircut, new makeup or glasses, or that someone is ill or has lost weight.

 

While scientists are still doing a lot of research, it does appear that face blind people have a little trouble linking certain facts to people.  Little facts like names or the names of spouses.  (You would not believe how often my wife, The Doc, and I have stood on the sidewalk outside of a friend's home while she reminded me of the names of people we have known 20 years.)

Face blindness is not that rare, about 2.5% of people have it.  Some prominent sufferers, besides me, include Brad Pitt, Dr. Oliver Sacks, and Jane Goodall.  In Dr. Goodall's case, her practice at analyzing faces she didn't recognize probably helped her in research on chimpanzee facial expressions.  And what all of us with prosopagnosia need, is someone to follow us around and whisper into our ears the names of the people we meet.  What we need is a nomenclator.

During the Roman Empire, a rich and powerful nobleman met far too many people to remember, so he did what a rich Roman nobleman did whenever he had a problem:  he bought a specialized slave.  A nomenclator was a slave with a remarkable memory; his job was to remind the nobleman of who he was meeting.  (Maybe a few of those noblemen were part of the 2.5% crowd.)

There is a more modern system—one that does not require slaves.  The modern version is the Farley File.

James Aloysius Farley was a consummate New York politician and political kingmaker, and his specialty was being a political advisor and campaign manager.   After successfully helping Alfred E. Smith win the governorship of New York in 1922, he managed the campaigns of a relatively unknown politician—Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

With Farley as his campaign manager, Roosevelt won the governorship of New York in 1926 and 1928, and then challenged President Hoover for the presidency in 1932.  Jim Farley was the campaign manager for FDR's first two presidential elections.  Now I can't prove that Roosevelt had a problem recognizing people and remembering certain facts about them... And I can't prove he had a bad memory in general, but he was the president who said:  "Nothing is so responsible for the good old days as a bad memory."

A bad memory is not a great asset in politics, so Jim Farley devised a clever remedy: he kept an index card of every person that Roosevelt met, and recorded the names of spouses, children, hobbies, education, place of employment—any personal information that you could reasonably expect a "good friend" to remember.  If Roosevelt returned to the same area, Farley would hand him the index cards of everyone he might meet.

The records soon became known as a Farley File, and as the years went by, Roosevelt's files became massive, and with them, FDR could remain personally close with all of his supporters.   Farley, as a reward for his efforts, was appointed Postmaster General and Chairman of the Democratic Party.

The index cards are no longer needed, today, a Farley File is an app for your iPhone.  Ironically, while every modern politician has such a Farley File, very few remember James Farley

 

And 2.5% of people wouldn't recognize him if they saw him again.