Does anyone else have this?
I call it “crowd blindness” because I honestly don’t know what else to call it. I’ve had it (or have noticed that I had it) since high school, although it became very pronounced in college. Simply put, let’s say that you are in a large cafeteria with a group of friends.
One says, “I’ll get a table” and the rest scatter out to the various food lines to put what they want on their tray. After I’m done, I’ll look out into the crowd and I won’t see anyone I know. I’ve tried row by row scanning patterns,
top to bottom, table by table, and I usually still won’t find them. Suddenly as I’m walking, usually 10 feet in front of me, I’ll see waving hands and hear my name being called.
“Hey…! Didn’t you see us…!?” :smack:
I’ve grown a great defense mechanism of just laughing & shrugging it off as something silly, but they were right. I couldn’t see them; I couldn’t pick them out from the crowd. I could hear them and when they waved their arms I could differentiate to look more closely at that area,
but without that, me stumbling on to them would have been sheer luck. In theatres, I look down at my feet and either count the rows or count my steps down the aisle, especially in the dark. I actually carry a small flashlight in case it ever gets too dark to see the numbers/letters.
It never affects my seeing or hearing a show or a movie, but even this weekend it showed itself. I had taken my son to a concert and he had left to use the restroom. It was general admission, so I held the seats. After 15 minutes, I stood up and started to look around for him.
I thought I saw him 300-400 feet away and I started to wave to him to come to me. That’s when he showed up at my side and asked, “So, who were you waving at Dad?” :smack:
Q: Is there such a thing? What’s its real name? Are there any exercises or prescribed treatments to mitigate this? Once again, this only happens in crowds (not one of my favorite places to be to begin with).
Total WAG on my part, but I wonder if this isn’t somehow related to the phenomenom of zebra stripes: supposedly, having all those stripes milling back and forth makes it difficult for a predator to pick out and isolate a particular individual, because there’s too much visual stimulation.
Maybe? No?
It sounds like some form of face blindness (prosopagnosia). You can presumably recognize faces on an individual basis, but not when they are part of a large group of faces. How is your vision generally? Maybe whatever specific clues you use to identify individual faces are not visible to you beyond a certain distance.
Ha! I just always said I have slow eyes. I used to make my husband always precede me into a crowded place as it just take me longer to adjust to crowds. I just see a mass of, well, not even people, just a mass.
I am like this, as well. It extends to parking lots, too, for me- if someone drops me off at the store and goes and parks, I can not ever find the car when I come out. It is literally like I just can’t see it, and I will panic and wander aimlessly for hours until the store closes and all the other cars are gone and finally there my companion will be still, waiting… or that’s what I always think will happen, anyway. It’s kind of scary, actually.
I usually try to remember what people are wearing. Clothes vary more than faces, and they can be picked out from much further away and from all directions.
Another thing I do when looking for faces is decide on a distance to look at first. So I’ll look among people, say, 1 row away from me first. Then I’ll look among 2-3 rows away.
This happens to me, too. I can’t see friends or family members in a crowd. It annoyed the crap out of my dad.
I get it a bit too. It’s almost easier to pick out clothing then the faces. You could also consider the possibility that your vision may be worse than 20-20.
Best thing to do though is just don’t lose track of them, watch where they sit if possible.
I do it too, and I have a very hard time recognizing faces.
It can be embarrassing sometimes, I can walk right by people I know and not even see them.
One time I was meeting an now ex-bf at a cookout and I almost walked up to a total stranger thinking he was my bf.
I don’t know if it is genetic, but my son is even worse.
However, if people are walking I will recognize the way they walk long before I see their face.
I have little to add to the responses since I generally have no problem like that. Except, lately I’ve been having problems with my eyes and the first thing that goes is the ability to recognize faces. I assume that, not only is there a specific area of the brain dedicated to faces, but also it requires higher resolution that other visual tasks (except reading, that actually goes first). If you could communicate with Oliver Sacks you might find something.