When it comes to remembering faces, you can think of the brain as a "smart" device, but with limited storage.
Sanam Hafeez, neuropsychologist, says the longer you live, the more people you will know and the harder it will be for your brain to store all the facial images, especially if you do not see them regularly. Face recognition ability tends to peak at age 30, according to Science.
Some people naturally have "facial blindness," otherwise known as prosopagnosia or facial agnosia, a condition in which people cannot recognize other people's facial features.
"Face recognition depends on a number of factors," says Dr. Gefen. "One may not know a face because it was of no particular interest."
She explains that memory has three stages: coding, or retrieving information; recalling, or retrieving information; and maintaining this information.
The first stage depends a lot on how much attention you are paying. This is why you may not remember someone you once met at a party if you were not interested or attracted and saw them a little.
Being good at remembering faces has nothing to do with memory either. A study published in Cognition & Emotion in 2019 found that if you have always been great at reading other people, for example by discovering the emotions on their faces, you are more likely to even remember them.
However, if you have noticed a higher level of difficulty remembering faces during this time, there is an explanation for this.
Pandemic can make recognizing faces a little more complicated than usual. Recent research shows that wearing masks changes the way your brain processes faces. 13% of people in the study said they had trouble distinguishing people when wearing masks.
However, there is nothing to worry about, but if you think face recognition is becoming problematic for you, you can get the evaluation of a professional.
One trick to remember is to try to think of someone’s name instead of your face. A small study in 2019 in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology found that people were better able to remember names than faces. A name can spark something more in your memory.
Source: Bustle
