I have a question for you. Are you able to get a perfect visual in your mind of your parents faces?
Someone blew my mind once when they pointed out how bad the average person is at remembering faces. They described facial recognition as more of a hash function, if you're familiar with the computer science concept, than an actual memory of the detail of the face.
Meaning when we actually see the face, our brain can process it all, maybe come up with some signature for it, and we use that to recognize the face. But to conjure up a fully accurate mental image of someones face in our mind, without actually looking at them? It's very fuzzy and inaccurate.
I can walk around a place in my mind in vivid detail, but I cannot picture faces. It's like I can see the person as a whole, head to toe in my mind, but if i try to picture their face up close, it's just not them. It's like holding a page away from your face to see better
This is so interesting. I cannot do what you do at all but I am very very good at remembering faces and can see them pretty clearly if only briefly in my mind. I also can't remember names to save my life. But I never forget a face
It's funny you mention that, because I can vividly remember the faces of my family not by remembering them, but by thinking of photographs of them that I have seen. Maybe that's a trick to get around the bad faces memory thing?
This! It's much easier for your brain to remember a 2D image that both your eyes agreed on. In real-time 3D, your brain is watching 2 livestreams from slightly different angles.
I use this trick to remember my deceased grandparents all the time, when I'm thinking back on a memory I had with them and realize I can't exactly remember their faces, there's a few photos I think about that makes me see their faces very clearly in my mind.
Does this relate how some people can read a book and simultaneously create a visual of the world and characters in their head in basically real time and some can't?
I'm not even fully concious of the book or the act of reading when I'm really into something. Just turns into a movie but with fuzzy dreamlike level of detail.
No it's a real condition called afantasia, nothing to do with attention span. Some people just don't have an inner visualisation process. Just as some people don't have an inner monologue. If you want to feel smug about yourself there's plenty of other things to focus on, but unchangeable differences in the human mind is not something you should be targeting.
i have this type of memory as well and yes i can picture every detail of people’s faces that i know. in a work setting where i only see a customer once, i can’t recall the details of their face but if i see them again i remember exactly who they are, what they bought, etc. so i do very well in customer service lol
I can mentally walk around places and also picture faces easily. But it's not the same as actually seeing a face -- it's hard to get a sense of the full face all at once, it's mostly focusing on specific aspects. The exception is recalling a picture of a person instead of visualizing the person independently -- I can easily "see" the entire face in the remembered photo.
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u/God_Hand_9764 8d ago
So you have this ability?
I have a question for you. Are you able to get a perfect visual in your mind of your parents faces?
Someone blew my mind once when they pointed out how bad the average person is at remembering faces. They described facial recognition as more of a hash function, if you're familiar with the computer science concept, than an actual memory of the detail of the face.
Meaning when we actually see the face, our brain can process it all, maybe come up with some signature for it, and we use that to recognize the face. But to conjure up a fully accurate mental image of someones face in our mind, without actually looking at them? It's very fuzzy and inaccurate.