Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. Prosopagnosia is also known as face blindness or facial agnosia. The term prosopagnosia comes from the Greek words for “face” and “lack of knowledge.” Depending upon the degree of impairment, some people with prosopagnosia may only have difficulty recognizing a familiar face; others will be unable to discriminate between unknown faces, while still others may not even be able to distinguish a face as being different from an object. Some people with the disorder are unable to recognize their own face. Prosopagnosia is not related to memory dysfunction, memory loss, impaired vision, or learning disabilities. Prosopagnosia is thought to be the result of abnormalities, damage, or impairment in the right fusiform gyrus, a fold in the brain that appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory. Prosopagnosia can result from stroke, traumatic brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases. In some cases it is a congenital disorder, present at birth in the absence of any brain damage. Congenital prosopagnosia appears to run in families, which makes it likely to be the result of a genetic mutation or deletion. Some degree of prosopagnosia is often present in children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, and may be the cause of their impaired social development.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm
I will tell you that if you change your hairstyle, I will not immediately recognize you, especially if you are "out of context." I once carried on an entire conversation with a guy I met at a party. When I saw him at another party weeks later, I proceeded to carry on the exact same conversation with him, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the same guy. He later remarked to our mutual friend that he thought I was kidding. I wasn't; I thought he was some new guy who would be just perfectly fascinated with my disquisition on whatever matter. People are lucky in that they get several first impressions with me. If you screw the first one up, you'll get another --until I finally commit you to memory.
One of the advantages to threatening to make pastries for the president is that I get all sorts of complimentary psychiatric poking and prodding to find out precisely what abnormality causes me to lazily point out the obvious.
When one of my witch doctors and I started exploring this Assburgers hypothesis, I said, "Well, I certainly wish I had known this twenty years ago. It's like I've just now found out that you're issued 3-D glasses in this world. Everyone's got them and I didn't even know they existed. It's no wonder I've no idea what's going on."
