this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Autism
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I feel you on that!
I'm not face blind, I can recognise particular faces fine. What seems to be screwed for me is face memory. Without a face to anchor to, names are then an absolute bitch.
I've yet to find even an actual name for the phenomenon, let alone a fix.
Idk what it's called either but it appears to be related to a constant mode of threat assessment similar to what animals in the wild experience to stay alive.
Environement features and the person's actions and movements are identified but identifying social features are not.
Therefor it follows that antianxiety medications or similar behavioral drugs could potentially offset it, but honestly I think I rather keep my wits about me these days.
I personally suspect it's autism related. Social effort gets downgraded whether I want it to be or not. It doesn't seem to track with my own fight or flight reflexes. We might have different variants.
I know our brains deal with faces separately. That's why we see them everywhere e.g. face in the moon. It then makes sense that face memory is done separately.
It's weird. It's almost like someone took a video of an event, but replaced the face and body with a generic placeholder, and a pointer to more information. That extra info promptly gets dropped, leaving the pointer hanging.
I once found myself completely unable to describe someone, less than 5 minutes after talking to them, knowing I might need to describe them. The fact they had a nose piercing, and neon blue hair just got dumped from memory.