Faces...

All my life, I've had difficulty recognizing faces.  It isn't that I can't recognize faces – people I know well I can recognize with no difficulty.  The challenge I have is with people I don't know well.  So I'm pretty sure I don't have any flavor of prosopagnosia.

Recently at work there was a good example of my face-recognition challenges.  There's another fellow there named Tom whom I mistakenly thought was Frank Slootman, our CEO.  When someone corrected me (and only then!), I asked around to a few other people – and none of them thought Tom and Frank looked anything alike!  Yet I still (even after carefully examining both of them) find it challenging to be sure which is which when I see them.  This sort of thing has happened to me many times.

Another common pattern: I'll meet someone for the first time (say, on a visit to a customer), and for the term of the visit I'll be able to recognize them.  Then perhaps 6 months or a year later, I'll visit again – and while the rest of the ServiceNow people attending will recognize the person without difficulty, I will not recognize him or her, and I may not even realize that I've met the person before.

I suspect this difficult is related to my inability to visualize “in my mind's eye”, something I've blogged about before.  Most people tell me that they can easily “bring up” the face of someone they know; I simply cannot do this, not even for people I know very well.  I've got no proof these things are related; it's just an intuition...