My friend Valerio taught me this word only a few months ago: prosopagnosia, which my computer dictionary says is: “an inability to recognise the faces of familiar people, typically as a result of damage to the brain”.
I used to have an almost photographic memory when it came to telephone numbers and directions to/from places, even places in foreign countries where I’d be able to direct the local taxi driver after only a day there (cf. Caracas in 1986 — see blog entry A day in at the Caracas Airport, posted July 2011). If I saw a telephone number over a shop selling some commodity I wanted and I had no pen and paper with which to note it down, I’d close my eyes and burn the image of the number onto my brain screen. Later, I’d retrieve it by closing my eyes again to see the number light up on my brain screen. For directions, I’d note landmarks without even being conscious of doing it, and be able to retrace the way in the opposite direction.
Yet, I have difficulty telling Oriental faces apart. Year after year, if I had more than one overseas Chinese student (of the same sex) in my class, I’d get them wrong. One year, I had four! One day, two of them turned up, so I took a surreptitious look in the register to see which two of the names had been signed against for attendance. One was sitting on the window side of the classroom; the other on the door side. Pleased with myself for coming up with this solution, I went for Name X when asking a question, looking at the student on the window side as I was sure it was her name I’d called out. The answer came from the student on the door side, which made me jump!
Fast forward 20 years and I’m no better. My Cambodian friend brought back from Hong Kong a 50-episode Korean DVD of a story set in the 1400s and 1500s, with a lot of intrigues and corruption among some of the officials at the imperial court.
It is confusing enough when they refer to people sometimes by their name in full, sometimes by their surname followed by their court title, sometimes by their full court title only, so that one is never sure, at the first (or even second or third) sitting, that they’re actually the same person. Some of the court titles are three characters, which makes them look like names — like Chinese names, the format of Korean names is: one character for the surname, followed by two characters for the personal name.
It gets trickier, however, when one’s prosopagnosia makes one unable to tell apart the goodie and the baddie — two high-ranking officials (same rank, therefore same costume). (It doesn’t help either that later even the goodie turned against the hero, thus making him a baddie as well…)
Another pair, both buffoon in looks (the stereotypical representation of buffoon features: eyebrows sloping downwards on the outside, a permanent drop-jaw open-mouth expression on the face, drooping outer corners of the mouth, a jutting lower jaw with only the lower row of teeth showing) and in behaviour, are, first to appear, the military man in charge of the exiles on the island to which the heroine was dispatched — he rather fancied the heroine; and later, one of the medical practitioners at the imperial court — who also worshipped the heroine. My immediate conclusion, therefore, was that the military man had re-trained in order to be close to the heroine. It took me four more viewings of the whole series before I realised they were actually not the same man. They both treat their immediate underling appallingly, shouting and beating them with the nearest object to hand. Admittedly, the different underling in each case was a different man, but it was a minor observation to my prosopagnosiac mind.
My prosopagnosia got so bad that I even found the assassin looking exactly like the hero, and thought perhaps there was a sub-plot, i.e., intrigue within intrigue, with the hero maybe moonlighting as an assassin in order to penetrate the corrupt network of the baddies, etc., etc.. I had to go back over the (separate) scenes that featured them, freeze-frame or play frame by frame, to study the physical features to see what the difference might be: the assassin had two vertical frown lines between his eyebrows, the hero had horizontal ones in the scenes I looked at — that could’ve been deliberate disguise, though — but in other scenes he had four vertical frown lines; the assassin’s face was more elongated; the hero had crow’s-feet; and so on.
I have now watched the DVDs at least five times but still cannot confidently distinguish the baddie official from the goodie official. Luckily for them, I’m only watching them on disc, because if it was a live performance on stage, I would be pelting the wrong chap with rotten eggs and tomatoes! Performance after performance after performance.
(London 2012/2013)
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