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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Is it called the same thing if you can't visualize faces? I cannot visualize any face, not my own, not my wife's. I can sort of get a blurry idea of my child's face, and an even less blurry idea of my pets faces. But every other face I can't remember.
The moment I step away from a mirror, I forget what I even look like. If you handed me a pencil and paper and told me to draw myself, I could only do it with a mirror or a photo on hand.
Look up face blindness. I have that and some level of aphantasia too.
I lost my mom recently and it makes me sad that i can't see her in my head. I 'meet' the same people repeatedly. I'm worried that i won't recognize my family one day.
I think I have this.
It's hard for me to communicate online to my coworkers who do not have a profile picture. And then when I do meet them in person, I don't recognise them straight away the next time I pass by them (or worse, in a social function).
The ways I remember people by are their mannerisms and everything else about them, except for their physical appearance. But because people change styles and environments change, it's hard to instantly recognise them on the third or more times I see them.
Wait. So when you look in a mirror it's a surprise every time? Im also unable to draw myself, but that's more of a drawingskill issue than anything else I guess..
Man, they let that bum in here... Again...
Yes, in fact if I look in the mirror and close my eyes, I forget what I look like in about a second, or two... maybe much quicker. Timing the brain is hard to do on yourself.
Yeah, it's not a skill issue. I am not super great at drawing, but I can get a rough sketch of someone in front of me or a picture. But I could never realistically draw myself without a picture or image, nor could I draw anyone else without that or them being right in front of me.
That's really interesting. I don't have this condition but I wear glasses all of the time I can't see without them, but if I were to think about what I looked like I don't actually include the glasses.
But in my case it's more that they're just not part of my mental image of myself than the fact that they don't know what I look like.
I think it's really cool you can see yourself in your mind. I was blown away when I found out thats normal. If I want to try to picture myself I kind of have to build the image, and it comes out like a shoddy police sketch of myself than anything close to a mental image.
So I can have glasses or not, because I am not viewing, I am creating. It's kind of like learning how to sketch for basics. First you make a generic face, then I add the facial features I know I have, and then come up with a generalization. But it's different every time I do it, and looks far more like a generic man, then it looks like myself.
This happens to me too, but isn't it normal?
Drawing or mirror? Drawing might be, but not knowing what you or others look like without viewing them is not "normal"