Understanding Prosopagnosia: The Face Blindness Phenomenon

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“Only the other day, I was at a residential conference where I’d eaten breakfast with a group of fellow participants. I went back to my bedroom before heading to the auditorium. Plonking myself down next to a stranger, I smiled, stuck out my hand and said, ‘Hi. I’m Mary Ann Sieghart.’ ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘We’ve just spent the past half hour talking to each other.’” Many people have had an experience like this where they have failed to recognize someone they have met before, sometimes on several occasions, or an experience where they know they’ve heard a name before, but can not place a face to match it. For some, like Mary Ann Sieghart, this is not simply because they are bad with faces, but because they have a condition called prosopagnosia.

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