Term for not recognizing faces
I remember a term for someone who has difficulty remembering faces. I was reading several years ago, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and my friend told me that Humpty Dumpty had that disorder(he told me he had read it off somewhere, so I believed there is such a term):
“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
“That’s just what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the same as everybody has—the two eyes, so ” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be some help.
Is there really a term for it?
Solution 1:
Prosopagnosia, if you really want to get technical about it.
Solution 2:
As @Anita points out, prosopagnosia is the technical name of the condition. Face-blindness is a widely-used colloquial name for it — for instance, the Harvard and UCL Prosopagnosia Research Center website is at www.faceblind.org. I have a couple of friends who are somewhat face-blind, and that’s the term they use.