In lighter vein!!!

I have a mild attack of prosopagnosia whenever I attend social gatherings. The situation could get worse if I don’t take preventive measures. Of course, adequate amount of aid is kept at hand. I take precaution like not looking into the eyes of the person I encounter. If I run into a vaguely familiar face, then I stick close to a more familiar person, who would help me out unconditionally. You won’t believe what happened to me once. I frequent a well stocked fashionable store. The friendly proprietor is easy to talk to whenever I visit. I happened to meet him at a sale in the neighborhood one day. Enthusiastic to appear polite, I greeted him and asked, “Oh, you have come to buy here…this is a good sale.” I hurried away when he said, “madam, this is my sale.”

An interesting article I read recently by Patrick Titley, in The New Scientist put everything in perspective for me. It seemed like, he was writing about me. He writes that he normally recognizes people fairly easily when they are standing in front of him; his problem is he can’t visualize them when they are not there. So, if he meets someone he has met just a few times before, he doesn’t remember what they look like, he’s always worried he will meet their eyes, and he’d look away and they’ll consider him rude. He knows one another person, with the same problem, and they both have devised strategies to deal with it. (He gets out his note book and pretends to be absorbed by it, so that the onus is on the person he is meeting to say, “Hello” first; which is a good clue! While his friend looks away vaguely as if lost in thought, till someone comes up and talks to him!) I have a different strategy; I try to fade into the background until I can jolt my memory; to remember the familiar faces before they materialize directly in front of me. I would have been forewarned to be forearmed.

If I don’t meet a person for some time, then God help me, I can’t dredge up that person’s name from the depth of my foggy mind…fast enough. The other day, as I literally, stood behind the lectern, figuratively standing in, for the president, at the toast masters, I couldn’t recall my friend’s name. The sport that he is, he joked that he was regularly irregular. Trying to remember faces by imagery hasn’t helped me a bit. While I do these mental calculations, I appear stunned and petrified. I am reminded of an incident my brother in U.S narrated to me. It seems his friend’s wife was trying to find him in an African market. She was having a hard time finding him because she had forgotten the color of his shirt, and then she remembered that he was tall and a European and found him right away!!

My brother had nicknamed me, “absent minded professor” when I was in high school. When ever we argued, I got the upper hand, as my nose, always being buried in books, had enough and more ideas to win. I never forget the difficult passages I read or the events in history but my memory fails me, at the strangest social moments. Once I was introducing myself to a person I met at my community function. As I proceeded to rattle out my married surname, my mind suddenly went blank.I could remember only my maiden name! I quickly diverted the topic with an exclamation; as if I suddenly remembered something I had found familiar in that person and one more crisis was tidied over for the time being.

Prosopagnosia (pro.so.pagno.sia: prosopon: Greek for ‘face’ and agnosia: scientific word for ‘recognition impairment) is a disorder of face perception, where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact.I may not be as bad as Norbert Weiner, the American mathematician, who was notoriously absent minded. When his family moved from Cambridge to Newton, Massachusetts, his wife wisely packed him off to MIT with an address slip to keep him out of trouble while she directed things. Later in the day, Norbert, after scribbling out some calculations, had thrown the paper away…At the end of the day, he arrived home, found no one home, and had no idea where he then lived. Fortunately, he spotted a young girl on the street, who seemed to recognize him, “Excuse me, perhaps you know me,” he began. “I’m Norbert Weiner, and we’ve just moved. Do you happen to know, where we’ve moved to?” “Yes daddy,” the girl is said to have replied. “Mommy thought, you would forget…” My little secret that I want to share with you all is, when I don’t recognize someone, I keep a smile on my face, hoping that person would walk up to me and talk!!!