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, 21:06:10 UTC 13 years ago
Here is an idea for you. Maybe a language that is written in different colors to denote different meanings. I just thought of that right now.
March 8 2008, 22:46:18 UTC 13 years ago
That's a documented phenomenon called synesthesia--a blending of the senses--which is something else I've got! Most commonly it causes people to experience a sensation of color and even texture with graphemes (written letters, numbers, and in other languages pictographs), but that's not all--I see time spatially, and sound has color and texture for me. Other people have rarer versions where they may "taste" shapes or "smell" colors, or all sorts of other odd sensations. (There's another, less-documented phenomenon I've come across with myself and others I've talked to who have it--a tendency to assign not only color and texture, but gender and personality to things like graphemes or days of the week.)
If you want to follow up, a good place to start is Pat Duffy's book Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens. It's not very well-written, but it has a wealth of information on the phenomenon and some interesting stories from synesthetes that you might like--such as her recollection that when learning to write the letter "R" by writing the letter "P" and adding a line, she discovered that it was possible to change the color of a letter with one line!
March 8 2008, 22:51:55 UTC 13 years ago
March 8 2008, 22:57:49 UTC 13 years ago