Face-Blindness and 3D

[shawmkreitzman]

Hi, Everyone,

Firstly, an apology: this post is not strictly related to 3D movies or Blu Rays as such, but I'm hoping to pick the brains of everyone here.

I happen to suffer from Face-blindness (Prosopagnosia to its friends) which is an inability to recognise faces. This is hardly a disability, but it does mean that I'm very, very bad at recognising people I know if I meet them out of context, or if they drastically change their hairstyle, grow a beard etc. When I worked in a shop in West London (about 150 years ago) I was useless at recognising regular customers until they spoke to me (I'm much better with voices, which is probably a compensating technique). I also have difficulty recognising actors in films, or even keeping track of characters if their appearance changes significantly over the course of the story. (And I have no hope if there is more than one character of roughly the same build, age and hair-colour.)

I'm posting this now because I recently learned that the late Oliver Sacks (who also suffered from prosopagnosia) was an obsessive lover of stereo photography. Apparently he collected 3D photos throughout his life (particularly View-Master) and had a great love for all things 3D.

This has piqued my interest, because I also have a very strong (almost visceral) love for 3D photography, going back to the first View-Master I was ever given (at the age of 5). To this day, I get a little thrill when I put a viewer to my eyes (or put on the polarised glasses) and see an image fuse into a solid, three-dimensional scene. Stereoscopic images speak to me in a way that flat images simply do not, and I am now wondering if this response is somehow connected to the prosopagnosia.

Clearly, my love of 3D is not universally shared by the general population (witness the backlash over 3D movies over the last few years). Many people I speak to simply do not understand why I love 3D so much; they tell me it's a gimmick, it hurts their eyes, it gives them a headache... I'm sure everyone here has heard the same lines. But that has never changed the fact that a 3D photograph will always be more meaningful to me than any 2D image. I never get tired of it.

I have taken many facial recognition tests over the years (and always score very low) but every test I have seen uses flat, still images. As far as I am aware, no one has ever looked into the relationship between face-blindness and stereo perception. In the real world of course, most of us see in stereo, and I wonder if my enjoyment of 3D is connected to my inability to perceive information that is second-nature to most people.

All of this brings me (finally!) to the reason for this post: does anyone else here have experience with face-blindness? Are you (or is anyone you know) also face-blind? Everyone in this group is presumably interested in 3D on some level, so I would be very curious to know if my experiences sound at all familiar to you.

Thanks for reading!

Shawm