I mean, “couldn’t see her face” is not exactly right. I could tell there was a face there. In theory. It wasn’t just a blank slate. I could zoom in on eyebrows and laugh lines and lips. It was just that the pieces didn’t fit together right. They didn’t make a face. It was a bit like looking at a Picasso painting. I could see it, I guess. I just couldn’t understand it.
So, there are two kinds of prosopagnosia: developmental and acquired. Sadie, in this book, has acquired--which results from some kind of damage to the brain (TBI, stroke) and impacts perception. Like, your fusiform face gyrus can see the elements of the face, but can't quite put them together. Developmental prosopagnosia is different. This is a condition folks have had all their lives, and it's more connected to remembering faces than perceiving them. Like, they can see the face just fine when they're looking at it, but then they don't remember the face well enough to recognize it the next time they see it. This is the kind of face blindness Jane Goodall has. Folks who have developmental face blindness often don't know they have it. That's how it's always been, and they figure everybody is like that. They often know they struggle with recognizing people, but they don't know why. With acquired, the change is abrupt and very noticeable. There's a before and an after, and they're different. I went in thinking I'd be writing about developmental, because that was the first kind I knew about but wound up writing about acquired—and I did a ton of reading and research to try to figure out what you're seeing when your perceptions have changed like that. This was the best way I could come up with to describe it!!
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