Face Blind: The Day I Didn’t Recognize My Own Baby

Part 1:  Aphantasia, Face Blindness, and How I Know People 

I was sitting at the nurse’s station during a shift when I opened a desk drawer.Inside was a photograph of a baby.

I picked it up and studied it. My baby had pajamas just like that.

I looked again, trying to place it. Whose baby was this? And why was their photo in a drawer at the nurse’s station?

Then it hit me.

It was my baby.

How his photograph ended up there, I have no idea. But what stunned me wasn’t where the picture was. It was the realization that I hadn’t recognized my own child.

I have Prosopagnosia, I am face blind.

I don’t remember faces the way other people do. I remember conversations. I remember the details people share. I remember who they are by their stories.

I can spend an hour talking with a patient, walk back to the nurse’s station, and later have that same person approach me in street clothes—with no idea who they are—unless I remember something they said or did.  I can talk with a student in class and pass them in the parking lot minutes later without recognizing them.

Faces change. Stories don’t.

When you don’t recognize faces, people sometimes assume you’re inattentive. Or rude. Or that you don’t care.

But really, the brain is just wired differently.

And sometimes that difference shows itself quietly—in a photograph of your own baby, sitting in a drawer, waiting for you to know he’s yours.