It's a great word and it means the inability to recognise faces.
Prosopagnosia is something that we probably all have to some degree at some time but mine - very mild though it is - seems to be getting worse.
Don't get me wrong, I can recognise people that I know well - like my wife (except for that one time when I grabbed that other lady's bum by mistake - but the charges have been dropped in exchange for an undisclosed settlement) - but if it's someone I've only seen, say a dozen times, I'm just as likely to have no idea who I'm talking to.
I met a guy the other day, chatted amiably to him - drawing on the little library of banal nothings that I keep handy for this kind of occasion - for about ten minutes. Fifteen minutes after that, I saw him again - this time without his sunnies on - and I had no idea who he was; he had to introduce himself again.
It happened a few years ago too. I had always chatted to my father-in-law's neighbour over the fence. I saw her face and so forth, but when she turned up at the front door I had absolutely no idea who she was. It was like Tim the Tool Man's hatted neighbour.
The same thing happens in movies. If the heroine changes her hair colour or puts on a hat, I'm buggered and I have to confirm with my wife if I'm looking at the same person.
Someone tried to teach me a trick whereby you associate a person's face and name with some kind of cute little mnemonic to help your brain recall it when needed. Apparently you can train yourself to do this really quite quickly and true professionals can recall a whole room full of people on one meeting. I tried doing that but it turned out that the mnemonic rather than the name came back to my mind and I only just bit my tongue in time to avoid saying things like
"Ah yes, She-Of-The-Magnificent-Breasts - nice to see you again"
or
"It's been a while Man-With-Mindless-Opinions, how have you been?"
I'm not sure if there's anything else I can do about it. I'm worried that, as I get older, my facial recognition will continue to get worse and I won't be able to tell my own kids apart. In fact, I can't tell them apart now and I fully expect the boys to answer to any male name I yell out - followed almost always by "stop doing that with the filleting knife!"
Is there a pill I can take for this problem? Some kind of electro shock therapy? Is there an app?
Maybe that's my niche. Use the proximity feature of smart phone to find out who is around me and what their names are. Like a facial Geiger counter - as you move it around the room it has a little display that shows the names of everyone nearby and, when I get within a certain distance of a particular individual, it beeps or whispers their name in my ear or some such thing.
I'm sure there's a market.
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