In Dr. Oliver Sack’s book, The Mind’s Eye, the famous neurologist explores clinical cases of individuals afflicted with fascinating perceptual aberrations, including the inability to recognize faces. Sacks, who himself suffered from this disorder all of his life, recounts a case of apologizing to a bearded man he had bumped into when in fact it was a reflection of himself in a mirror. Prosopagnosia or face blindness, is a perplexing condition that can be hard to explain for those of us whom it afflicts. While my own case is nowhere near as severe as the example of Dr. P in Sack’s earlier book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, it nevertheless impacts my ability to maintain connection with people and discern their individual identities.
All faces are basically the same. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Distinguishing the subtle differences requires a lot of computational effort for which we’re evolutionarily fine-tuned. In cases of face blindness, either through injury, degeneration or genetic abnormality, neurons in the fusiform area of the brain, specific to identifying faces, don’t activate or store facial recognition data.
How I see you is an assemblage of abstractions rather than as a distinct identity. Your separate self does not immediately appear to me. I see you and everyone who is not you. I craft elaborate compensatory strategies, assembling clues that define your relationship to me. I’ll mostly remember your voice to connect to your identity, but tattoos are helpful, as are moles and piercings. Describing someone is not the same as being able to recognize someone. I can recall in my mind’s eye some characteristics of an individual face I know well, but can’t assemble those parts coherently. Shapes are easier, so I focus on those. Through a quick process of deductions, I narrow my guesses and improve the odds.
When Thais I have met approach me in public and they say, “Hi, Chris! Do you remember me?” My answer is always the same: “I’m sure that I do.” Because they know me, I must know them, I just have no idea how I know them. This sometimes leads to hurt feelings and disappointment until I explain, and even then it’s awkward. Once they reveal their name, I ask where we last met. This helps me, as I tend to remember specifics of constructed spaces, then the details of a previous conversation come flooding in. If you want to see how tragically humorous this can be, there is a scene from Seinfeld that absolutely nails it.
As I have begun to view my condition through the lens of recent transcendent experiences, I consider Dr. Sack’s observation that, “There is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.” This “disorder” may be an alternative way of perceiving reality that challenges conventional frameworks of separate selfhood.
“Neurology’s favourite word is ‘deficit’, denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).”
The clinical view of prosopagnosia focuses on what’s missing – the ability to distinguish individual faces. But what if this “missing” ability is actually removing a filter that maintains the illusion of separation? Buddhist tradition regards the dissolution of the separate self as a form of wisdom rather than a loss. The conventional view might see face blindness as losing something (the ability to distinguish individuals), but I have begun to see its alignment with a more fundamental reality. Instead of struggling against the inability to distinguish faces, I’ve found it harmonious with a deeper truth; that apparent separateness is itself an illusion.
There’s a delicious irony in my face blindness becoming a vehicle for spiritual insight. While others work to dissolve the boundaries between self and other through meditation, psychedelics, and spiritual practice, my neurological “condition” has been quietly dismantling these boundaries all along. The face that can’t be distinguished becomes every face. The individual identity that can’t be grasped becomes universal identity.
The challenge of having to explain my condition to people who feel forgotten, highlights how our conventional social world is built around assumptions of distinct, separate identities. How do I explain to you that my inability to recognize you isn’t a rejection but a deep recognition of your true nature? That in failing to distinguish your particular face, I’m seeing you as you really are; an expression of the same Divine consciousness that animates all beings. I’m learning to embrace my cognitive dissonance, dwelling comfortably in recognizing individual traits while simultaneously experiencing the underlying unity.
This isn’t to romanticize the practical challenges of face blindness. Rather, it’s to recognize that what we label as limitations often contain hidden doorways to deeper understanding. Just as the quantum physicist finds that the closer they look at matter, the more it dissolves into probability waves, the more I’ve examined this supposed deficit, the more it has revealed itself as a gift of clear seeing.
We are all wearing masks of individuality, playing our parts in the cosmic game of hide and seek. My particular neurological configuration just makes it a bit harder to maintain the pretense. My differently-tuned receiver picks up a broad bandwidth of human presence, one where individual faces blur into a universal countenance. In failing to distinguish your face from all others, I’m recognizing what you really are: a wave in the same vast ocean. The face that can’t be recognized becomes the face of the Divine, smiling back at me, hiding in plain sight.