Kate Fox journal charlotte tumilty
Kate Fox: I recognise your name, but your face escapes me
The Journal
I didn’t recognise Renee Zellwegger in her most recent photos, but then that’s not unusual for me.
I’m so bad at recognising faces that there have been occasions where someone I’ve just met has left the room and I haven’t realised they ware the same person when they come back in a few minutes later. Between our first date and second date my now-husband shaved his beard off but when he mentioned it I said “What beard?”.
I can generally manage to recognise the school children I work with by their hairstyles. Uniforms can add a level of challenge though and at the moment the difficulty level has been stepped up in a all girl Muslim school where I run a writing group. The girls wear both uniforms and headscarves. I keep saying that I’m bad with faces and have resorted to getting them to always sit in the same places every week. I am now very used to the hurt expression that comes over somebody’s face when you’ve met them before but fail to recognise them.
My rudeness has an actual neurological root though, honest. There’s a condition called “Prosopagnosia” which comes from the Greek word “Proso” meaning face and “Agnosia” meaning to forget, though in my experience, going on about an obscure quirk in which your brain’s facial recognition software is badly wired, doesn’t make them the people you forget feel any better! Faces are such a key marker of our identity that, of course, changing our face changes the way that people relate to us. When the change happens practically overnight, as Zellwegger’s plumped up cheeks, widened eyes and smooth forehead appear to have done, then of course people are going to comment on it.
It is disconcerting. It probably triggers some primeval instinct stemming from the need to know who people are in case they’re enemies and we need to flee, or allies and we need to cement social bonds. However, the comments have tended to either mock her for so obviously having had
The Journal
I didn’t recognise Renee Zellwegger in her most recent photos, but then that’s not unusual for me.
I’m so bad at recognising faces that there have been occasions where someone I’ve just met has left the room and I haven’t realised they ware the same person when they come back in a few minutes later. Between our first date and second date my now-husband shaved his beard off but when he mentioned it I said “What beard?”.
I can generally manage to recognise the school children I work with by their hairstyles. Uniforms can add a level of challenge though and at the moment the difficulty level has been stepped up in a all girl Muslim school where I run a writing group. The girls wear both uniforms and headscarves. I keep saying that I’m bad with faces and have resorted to getting them to always sit in the same places every week. I am now very used to the hurt expression that comes over somebody’s face when you’ve met them before but fail to recognise them.
My rudeness has an actual neurological root though, honest. There’s a condition called “Prosopagnosia” which comes from the Greek word “Proso” meaning face and “Agnosia” meaning to forget, though in my experience, going on about an obscure quirk in which your brain’s facial recognition software is badly wired, doesn’t make them the people you forget feel any better! Faces are such a key marker of our identity that, of course, changing our face changes the way that people relate to us. When the change happens practically overnight, as Zellwegger’s plumped up cheeks, widened eyes and smooth forehead appear to have done, then of course people are going to comment on it.
It is disconcerting. It probably triggers some primeval instinct stemming from the need to know who people are in case they’re enemies and we need to flee, or allies and we need to cement social bonds. However, the comments have tended to either mock her for so obviously having had