[brains] face recognition, separation, continued thoughts

[wispfox]

It appears that beards seriously screw with my ability to differentiate people from others with beards, and with my ability to recognize those that I have developed some ability to recognize _in_ context, when they are no longer in that context. It also seems to make it far more difficult for me to read a person.

Excepting people who grew beards after I was close to them, I can't think of anyone I'm very close to who has a beard. And even in the 'grew it later' category, I don't think I'm _still_ amazingly close to anyone who did that - but then, I can only think of a single case, and there are other possible reasons for that.

Annoys me that this is true, since it annoys me that there's a category of people who I apparently will not get close to based on something as trivial as a type of facial hair. But... I don't think this has ever not been true, and may be a large part of my dislike of such things.

This was sparked by a reminder of the fact that I was _completely_ unable to figure out _why_ someone knew me (and who I was pretty sure that I knew, as well) a few weekends ago, when I saw them out of context. Felt really bad about it, too! On the plus side, for once him saying his name _did_ help... (since I'm also bad with proper nouns)

Comments

[secondhandwhore.livejournal.com]

Incase you don't know about the friends of friends list, instead of /users/blah/friends you go /user/blah/friendsfriends and it shows you all of the recent posts by everyone on your friend's lists. ^.^

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

I do know about it, yes. Makes sense, that does. :)

[secondhandwhore.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I *think* it's a paid account feature but I'm not sure. Anyway, it's great for sleepless days/nights when you're not home *cough*

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Not sure, either - I don't remember if I ever felt the desire to use it when I didn't have a paid account...

(not as if I really need to go looking for more people to read, since my friends list is insane...)

[secondhandwhore.livejournal.com]

heh.. Yeah. I skip over most of my friend's page.. there's a lot of people I want to add but I feel like I'd be short changing them.