Reviews for You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

The average rating for You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-15 00:00:00 Alfred Dodson Update Dec. 2020 in this plague year of masks I am seeing that some people find it hard to recognise others when they have a mask on, but others have no difficulty at all. More and more people are on the sliding scale of face recognition. I knew it wasn't just me, but I hadn't realised there were so many of us. One firm with a lot of employees has masks printed with a photo of the lower half of the person's face which is either an interesting solution or a fun gimmick! I wonder if anyone here has experienced the problem of not recognising people so easily with a mask? ____________________ The first two thirds of this book were the author using the reader as a therapist and just letting out one long blast of hatred towards her family for being so appalling. Or at least that's the way she tells it. There was absolutely nothing to do with prosopagnosia even vaguely hinted at. The last third of the book was about prosopagnosia. Sellers sets herself up as an expert and authority on this neurological disorder that she and I share. Having read Prosopagnosia, Face Blindness Explained. Prosopagnosia Types, Tests, Symptoms, Causes, Treatment, Research and Face Recognition all covered, I don't share her confidence. The author says she can't recognise people often, but then reading carefully it seems she can recognise people very often but not reliably, which is what I have. I've had lunch with someone I see at least three times a week and thought I recognised them later in the supermarket but wasn't sure. However I recognised their handbag (I gave it to her) so that was ok. Facial recognition is by a part of the brain that is discrete, that is all other kinds of recognition are not handled by that area. For the few people I have met who know they are face blind to some degree, there are various other problems, some of which are to do with interpreting facial expressions which look as though the person has Aspergers, but in fact they don't. Not all of the things we share are negative, all of us are somewhat intellectual and most of us are artistic as well. This leads me to believe that mild prosopagnosia may just be yet another neurotype, a different kind of wiring, personality really, that is less common that the average one, but not rare, one that people are generally unaware of and just say, "I'm never any good at remembering faces". One thing that changed for me was that I decided to be open, to 'come out' as it were and tell everyone, so that people would stop thinking I was sometimeish or cutting style on them by not speaking to them. However, half the people laugh and say they don't believe it and the other half look at me like I'm mad and they don't believe it either. The only people who do believe it are people who know me well and are forever prodding me when they see someone I know and if I don't recognise them will tell me their name first. So all I'm doing by telling people I'm face blind is making myself look even more eccentric. What to do? The book wasn't a hard read and it was well-written but really reading about other people's dysfunctional families can be extremely boring. Tolstoy's opening lines of Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," might well be true, but it doesn't make them interesting. The book started off as a 2, degenerated rapidly to a 1 and redeemed itself ending up on a good, golden, solid five!

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-25 00:00:00 Thomas J Hawkins Prosopagnosia is supposed to be a rare neurological condition. But it isn't. And I'm not even sure it is a 'condition' and not just part of a personality type. Recognising faces is on a continuum from extreme non-recognition to the super-recognisers employed by, for instance, the police on Oxford St. in London to catch shoplifters. I am well below the average, you could say I have prosopagnosia. I've read in a friend's review that she can't believe someone could go through all their life and not know that they can't recognise people. But you can, just not always and not the same people. You think you have a bad memory for faces and you tell people that and then they tell you almost always how they can't remember names (can anyone?) When I tell my customers I might not recognise them again (as I have the last few years since I found out about prosopagnosia since I hope people will then not be quite rude to me as they think that is what I am being to them) and talk about it, about once a month or so one will tell me of their exact same problem. I have noticed that it goes along with an introvert/extrovert (no balance) personality, not being able to read people well, being artistic, intelligent and too blunt. We don't all share all of these characteristics, but it does seem the people I know do share most of these. Perhaps we don't have neurological deficits as much as we share a personality type that is 'diagnosed' instead of accepted as another variety of normal? It's not as if we live any differently. We find it harder to make friends for sure, but we aren't friendless, we have careers, we marry, we have children. We just don't always know who you are even if we did a few hours earlier. All of the people I have met who have prosopagnosia say, as I do, that it comes and goes. That is part of the problem. You don't know who you aren't going to recognise next. I've left my ex-husband at the airport, but never any other time did I not recognise him. My friend I lunch with a few times a week I've failed to recognise later in the day. This makes people think you are cutting style on them, that you are sometimeish and snobbish and only speak if you feel like it. But you don't know to say hello because you don't know you knew them. I lost one very good customer, a very wealthy man (best friend is the Aga Khan, seriously). He would turn up every six months or so and buy hundreds of dollars worth of books. I didn't say hello to him the last time he was in and he didn't believe a word I said and was very nasty to me and told me he would never ever buy another book from me. He hasn't either. So I'm interested to read this book from the prosopagnosia point of view. From the disfunctional family angle? Not so much, I had my own and like dreams, hearing about other people's abusive family can be a little tedious.