
Heights High School
Class Of 1965
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Mark Kinsler
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Why I didn't fit in (partial explanation) Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2023 10:14 PM I'm fairly sure that at least some of CHHS's students, faculty, and administrators made a sincere attempt to figure out M Kinsler without much success. Many people there were kind, but it took effort, and not that many years ago I learned why. I am face-blind and apparently always was. It's a rare condition having to do with brain configuration: apparently something up there was too thin or too thick. And what it means is that I cannot recognize or recall anyone's face or, in general, their facial expressions. Most of us are able to rely on an exquitely-sensitive and reliably retentative registry of faces we have seen. I don't have such a registry, and this adds drama and variety to one's career and social life. You can take a face-blindness test devised by Dartmouth's psychology department, and I passed with flying colors. And that's why I seldom said hi to anyone passing in the hallways at CHHS. I did not dislike you--I simply didn't know who you were. When I was small I could not understand TV detective shows because many relied on the viewer realizing that the police chief was the same person as the robbery suspect., I couldn't tell, so I'd ask my sister, for whom this became tedious. I never wondered why Lois Lane never recognized Clark Kent as Superman because I couldn't, either. As I grew older, I began to sense that there was something about the rest of society that I could not decode. In the 1980's I'd listen to WCBS-AM in New York, and it was from one of their science features that I learned that I learned about face-blindness. I felt bad for anyone who might be so afflicted and never thought about it again. Except that maybe ten years ago--and I have no idea why--I found out what was wrong. Natalie, my beloved five-foot-tall Pittsburgh Italian spouse probably did it, having learned to serve as my missing face registry. (She can do anything.) So there's no cure. There's an on-line face-blindness journal from Britain that once reprinted one of my newspaper columns on my experiences. And that's about it: I can remember people's voices, clothing, and circumstances in detail. But never their faces. Sorry. |
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