This is going to sound a little crazy, but I have horrible facial recognition. And no, it's not like I'll briefly meet someone and then forget who they are a week later. It's much worse than that. For instance, today I was in class and there was this guy sitting right beside me who I thought I had never seen before. As I got up to leave, I heard a familiar voice inquire "Hey Amanda! How are you?". I turned and was shocked to see that it was that guy! For a split second, I panicked. I wondered how on earth he could possibly know my name. As I choked out an awkward reply, suddenly I realized who it was. This was a guy who I had talked to on numerous occasions - in fact I had spent an entire evening with him this summer at his bar trying to coerce him into giving out free drinks to my friends and I.
And it wasn't his face that helped me come to this conclusion - it was his voice. Whereas my facial recognition skills are lacking, my voice recognition skills definitely make up for it. Basically, unless a person has some bizarre defining physical feature, I strongly rely on the sound of a person's voice to recognize them.
Don't get me wrong, it is not like this for people I know really well, like my parents, my boyfriend, or my close friends. I always know who they are. And if I repeatedly see the same people in the same context (i.e. a classroom) I know who they are. But if I were to see one of my classmates somewhere else, say at a shopping mall, I might not be 100% sure if it was them or not.
For the longest time I thought that this was how everyone was. In high school, I noticed that my friends were much better than I was at recognizing people, but I thought that they were just freakishly good at remembering faces. It wasn't until I took a psychology class where we learned about the brain and its different functions that I realized that I had a problem. Damage to the facial recognition part of your brain can apparently cause symptoms similar to mine (or much worse - like where you don't even recognize your own mother).
Whenever I tell people about this, they usually don't believe me. I have had so many people tell me that they thought I hated them because I would never say hi to them on campus.
To set the record straight - I don't hate anyone. And it truly was a pleasure meeting you, even if I don't remember it tomorrow.
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