busyI can sympathize; I'm not very good at remembering names and faces. I guess you could call me face ... myopic. I have no trouble with close friends and family members. Casual acquaintances, however, may or may not register. Introduce two or more people to me at once, and chances are I won't remember any of them. I can spend 9 months seeing the same 25 people in a room every day, and never learn to recognize all of them. Changes in a person's hair, glasses, or other features can cause me not to recognize them. It isn't personal; this simply isn't data that my brain is good at storing.
People frequently get pissy if you don't recognize them. Fortunately, I'm social teflon; I don't really care. I also tend not to care if someone doesn't come up and talk to me if we casually pass in public, or if someone doesn't invite me to an event. It just doesn't register on my radar as a significant occurrence. (Occasionally in junior high, someone would come up to me, all tearful about what a heartless bitch I was ... because I wasn't upset about not being invited to a party she'd counted on me being broken-hearted at not being invited to. I was startled the first time, and replied "What party?" Subsequent occasions I just laughed.) On the other hoof, I get along well with other folks who often forget names and faces: I'm distinctive enough in appearance that most people can spot me, and I'm not easily offended by mistakes.
Anyhow, this is fun material for alien interactions. I had one race that just could not tell humans apart. The first contact crew solved that by having every human wear a different scarf -- one crewmember happened to collect them and had a drawerful of exotic scarves. But you always had to have that scarf, or they wouldn't know who you were.
The obverse is also interesting, when aliens can identify something easily that humans can't. Another race breeds only during peak monsoons that occur every few years. They're amphibious and colorful. Individuals born in the same generation have a characteristic appearance; they can tell at a glance which generation someone belongs to. This is difficult for humans to do, which is awkward, because age is a very big deal in that culture. The way the language is designed, you can't talk to someone unless you know whether s/he is younger than you, older than you, or the same age.
March 8 2008, 14:05:26 UTC 13 years ago
I've always felt that pure genius often exists in a narrow context - you need more brain focused on the area at hand and less on maintaining a job, cleaning a house and childery. Maybe that is why women historically have been less represented in the genius stakes - the phallocracy and their own contemporaries refused to coddle women of genius and let them off the hook of their more minor duties?
I don't get irritated if people don't recognise me, but my irritation level always increments by one each time I have to spell my name for someone over the phone and they ask me again and I spell it again - for some reason that drives me furious to distraction.
March 8 2008, 17:41:56 UTC 13 years ago
It really is a lot like certain roleplaying games that use point-based character generation. Those are polygenetic, meaning that multiple people came up with that idea, although later generations of games are often inspired by earlier ones. And part of the inspiration was the observation of how incarnation works. Some people do get a bigger "pool" of points to start with, and some people just get lucky; but the pattern of balanced generation is valid. People who are brilliant at one or two things tend to be mediocre or wretched at a lot of other things.
Furthermore in each life, you have a finite amount of time and energy, which you can allocate to such categories as self-maintenance, family, career, spirituality, and so forth. The more of that you concentrate in one area, the less developed the others will be. Even if you have coprocessors that give your great "gas mileage" on your energy use, there's only so much time in the day. And if you've got access to time-stretching abilities, then you clearly put something into the Magic category!