This is so totally me:
Some people claim to never forget a face. And the ability can prove to be socially awkward.
A new study finds some people can remember faces of people they met years ago and only in passing. Others of us, of course, aren’t blessed with that ability. In fact about 2 percent of the population have prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by great difficulty in recognizing faces.
The “super-recognizers,” as they’re being called, excel at recalling faces and suggest that there is – as with many things – a broad spectrum of ability in this realm. The research involved administering standardized face recognition tests. The super-recognizers scored far above average on these tests – higher than any of the normal control subjects.
“There has been a default assumption that there is either normal face recognition, or there is disordered face recognition,” said Richard Russell, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. “This suggests that’s not the case, that there is actually a very wide range of ability.”
Super-recognizers recognize other people far more often than they are recognized. So they often compensate by pretending not to recognize someone they met in passing, so as to avoid appearing to attribute undue importance to a fleeting encounter, Russell said.
“Super-recognizers have these extreme stories of recognizing people,” says Russell. “They recognize a person who was shopping in the same store with them two months ago, for example, even if they didn’t speak to the person. It doesn’t have to be a significant interaction; they really stand out in terms of their ability to remember the people who were actually less significant.”
Wow… Me to a t. If you don’t believe me, just ask my wife.