By: Katie Rice
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Jovan Baslious rolls out of bed about 5 a.m., walks to the bathroom, looks in the mirror and sees a stranger staring back at him.
He doesn’t recognize the figure’s tousled hair and sleepy eyes. Baslious has no idea what he looks like.
He knows he has a beard and brown eyes. He thinks his eyebrows are thick — and confirms that by reaching up to touch them. He is aware he has long eyelashes, because it bothers him when they brush against his glasses.
He’s memorized all that.
Other than being farsighted, there’s nothing wrong with his vision. It’s his brain that makes him different.
Baslious has face blindness. Simply defined, he can’t recognize peoples’ faces. He doesn’t know what he looks like, he can’t identify his parents and brother, and he can’t describe his best friend’s face. The medical term for the condition is prosopagnosia.
Imagine a life like his. The simplest of social interactions become complex puzzles. You’re introduced to someone, turn away to talk with someone else and turn back to the first person only to find he or she is now completely unrecognizable.
As visual creatures, we tend to forget how much significance we give to appearances, even though they are prominent in every interaction we have. We embrace those who look like us; we reject those who appear different. We instantly judge whether someone is trustworthy, attractive or friendly with just a glance. We construct mental images of others, and with those portraits comes a rush of associations: feelings, thoughts, memories.
Imagine not having that portrait.
“It’s terrifying,” he said. “You live in a world where you’re not sure if somebody who’s talking to you, you’ve met them before or not, or maybe they’re nodding towards you or waving towards you and you’re like, ‘Do I know this person?’ And that’s every single time you ever go out, ever. That’s awful.”
Baslious isn’t literally blind to a face. When he looks at people’s faces, he sees what the rest of the world sees. But ask him to focus on something else and that image disappears, along with the concept of distinguishing facial features.
“Closing my eyes and looking away, the details are lost,” he said.
Those who have prosopagnosia lack the tools required to place and differentiate between faces, said Kristen Dalrymple, a leading expert in prosopagnosia research at the University of Minnesota.
Dalrymple said there are two types of prosopagnosia, acquired and developmental. Acquired prosopagnosia results from brain damage, and developmental prosopagnosia happens during brain development. Baslious’ face blindness is developmental, she said, based on a description of it.
Developmental prosopagnosia affects approximately 2 to 2.9 percent of the population, according to a 2006 study. It has a higher prevalence rate than recognizable developmental disorders like autism. The lack of public attention paid to prosopagnosia might explain why people like Baslious often don’t recognize they have a disorder and why they don’t receive timely diagnoses and assistance.
Baslious didn’t know he was different until he was a teenager. Sure, he couldn’t recognize himself in family pictures or remember what his mother looked like when he lost her in the grocery store, but he thought everyone had moments like that. He thought he was just bad with faces.
Until Baslious was 14, he couldn’t put a name to the condition that explained why he couldn’t tell his younger brother, Jeremy, apart from a boy named Steven at his family’s church, Saint Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Charlotte.
In 2010, he was running alongside a teammate during cross-country practice at Weddington High School in Weddington, North Carolina. The teammate mentioned an article he’d read about face blindness. He knew about Baslious’ trouble with faces, but had noticed his friend’s skill at identifying runners by their form. The teammate suggested Baslious get tested.
Baslious brought the issue up to his pediatrician at his next physical examination.
He remembers that the nurse presented him with pictures of people in different groups and with changed appearances. He assumed some of the people were the same, but he couldn’t tell the difference. The nurse asked him how many times he recognized certain people in the pictures and how often they appeared.
The nurse’s diagnosis of prosopagnosia didn’t affect him much. If anything, he was critical of the test, because it didn’t seem to be an official method of diagnosis.
There is debate about the methods used to diagnose face blindness, Dalrymple said.
“Researchers have been coming up with their own criteria on an individual level, and in general the consensus seems to be that you have to have some objective test for face recognition,” she said. “So like a face memory test, where you show someone faces and see if they can remember them later.”
Baslious now had a name for his condition, but there wasn’t much else to it. The nurse didn’t offer any therapy or treatment programs, and Baslious’ life continued as it was.
Baslious’ mother, Jackie, said she noticed her son was a solitary child, but she never attributed his introversion to anything in particular. Nothing could have suggested he was face-blind, she said.
From infancy, Jackie and her husband, Gamil, treasured their first-born. He was their American link, the first of the Baslious family to be born in the United States. He wouldn’t have to immigrate from Egypt, as they did, or naturalize to become American. He was a symbol of new beginnings, and they didn’t want to put him in harm’s way.
“As a baby, we didn’t let him put himself in danger, as in to open up and play abroad or talk with kids we didn’t know — we were very protective of him,” she said.
“Maybe that’s what triggered it.”
Jackie Baslious is face-blind herself, and she prefers to think of it as a learned behavior rather than a medical condition. While her face blindness still causes her anxiety, she keeps working at it. She makes pointed efforts to be sociable. She doesn’t want to label herself or her son as requiring special attention, so instead she says she and her son just aren’t people-oriented. She thinks their social interaction styles are just part of who they are.
“I think it’s something that he trained himself to be, as I did,” she said, “to focus on what we have at hand, not on people.”
The top two contributing factors to prosopagnosia are genetics and experience.
“You need to have good visual access to faces in order to develop the skills for face recognition,” Dalrymple said.
Recent prosopagnosia research suggests face-blind individuals like Baslious and his mother will never outgrow their prosopagnosia, she said. Field-tested treatment strategies have been ineffective in treating face blindness, but face-blind individuals have designed their own tools for survival in a world where looks are everything.
Over time, Baslious has developed cues that help him recognize others. People tend to wear the same colors and keep their style consistent, he said. Voices are a big help, as long as he knows the person well enough. Posture and gait add to the mental database he compiles for family and close friends.
The biggest visual cue for him is hair, from its color to its cut and usual style. Baslious can recognize celebrities by their hairstyles, but not much else. When shown a picture of Angelina Jolie with her hair down, he does not recognize her. He guesses she is Princess Kate, Demi Lovato, or Celine Dion before being told who she is. In the Angelina Jolie movies he’s seen, she always has her hair up.
Baslious describes himself as looking “like an Arab man.” This is what he knows: he looks his age, 21. He is 5 feet 10 inches tall, stocky and barrel-chested. He wears glasses, and they are constantly smudged.
What he doesn’t know is that he has a crooked smile that curves toward the right side of his face. His mustache is growing a little long at the corners of his mouth and is in desperate need of a trim. His curly hair is a little tousled, but not unruly. His build is husky, neither muscular nor chubby. His rumpled appearance, combined with his rimless glasses, makes him look like an absentminded, yet loveable professor from a feel-good movie.
And, of course, his glasses really are smudged, so much so that it’s a wonder he can see out of them at all.
Baslious imagines he resembles his parents, but he doesn’t know what they look like either. When he tries to picture his mom, he sees her hairstyle and skin color but nothing more. Over the summer, his dad was hospitalized after a car accident, and Baslious made an effort to memorize his face but still can’t recall specific details. He thinks his brother resembles the rapper Drake from what he can tell — he’s compared their pictures side-by-side — but a discount version, a “Walgreens Drake” (He’s more of a cross between Drake and DJ Khaled).
Prosopagnosia makes it hard to meet new people.
“I don’t make casual friends very easily,” Baslious said, “because I won’t remember them anyway.”
Social interactions get better with time, but he still does not like to be around large groups or crowds. He often leaves outings with his regular group of friends early, retreating to his room for some quiet.
If he hesitates when interacting with unfamiliar people, it’s almost imperceptible to someone on the outside. He doesn’t show physical signs of discomfort, but someone familiar with his mannerisms can tell he’s more reserved, slightly quieter, more serious. To avoid uncomfortable interactions, Baslious tends to walk around with earbuds jammed into his ears blasting one gaming podcast or another.
For the most part, he has gotten accustomed to what many would assume to be a social handicap. It’s embarrassing only when something happens because he’s forgotten someone or can’t recognize the person. It’s hard for him to figure out if a person acknowledging him in public is an acquaintance or just being polite, because he can’t recognize people out of context.
There was that time in his first-year introductory history course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when he had started talking to a classmate often, so he saved her a seat next to him. A young woman walked up and tried to sit in the reserved seat, but he brushed her off.
Class began. His friend never showed up. He noticed the other woman looking at him throughout class, and he finally asked her if he knew her. She was the classmate he saved the seat for, but he hadn’t recognized her because her hair was in a ponytail. She switched seats for the next class, and the class after that. She stopped talking to him.
This summer, Baslious went on a camping trip with his best friend, Katrina Bootes. At some point he said something that made her laugh. He wasn’t looking at her at the time, and he realized he couldn’t picture her smile.
“It’s just like, ‘You are my best friend, you are the human I cherish more than any other human on this planet, and I have no clue what it looks like when you smile,’” he told her. “It’s just the worst.”
Frustration creeps into moments like these. Baslious knows he likes Bootes’ smile, but try as he might he can’t picture that important aspect of their moments together.
Bootes said Baslious is socially awkward, but thinks that trait is part of his personality more than his prosopagnosia. She affectionately refers to him as “a huge nerd.”
In his romantic relationships, Baslious faces similar problems of face recognition. He can recognize attractiveness when he sees it, and his favorite feature on a girl is her smile. But he can’t remember what his girlfriends have looked like when he isn’t directly looking at their faces or pictures.
“I’ve definitely made out with a girl, and then opened my eyes and been like, ‘Holy crap, you’re beautiful; I didn’t know what you looked like when we were doing that,’” he said.
For him, seeing a person with new eyes is as simple as a second glance. Falling in love all over again is only a look away.
Baslious isn’t a recluse. He has a group of about 15 friends who meet regularly, and he co-hosts an anime review podcast with friends from his alma mater, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. He teaches SAT preparation classes with the Princeton Review when he’s not studying ancient history and military intelligence at UNC-Chapel Hill, and he dreams of becoming a professor of ancient military history someday.
His parents still hope he can study to become a doctor or lawyer. The Egyptian-American community places great emphasis on academic achievement, he said, and an Egyptian child isn’t considered successful unless he studies hard and earns a high-paying, prestigious career. Baslious credits these goals to his parents trying to ensure a stable future for him — and an easier life than they were dealt.
“That’s just your parents wanting you to do good for yourself,” he said. “America is hard to get by in.”
Though Baslious knows his prosopagnosia will never be cured, he is unconcerned about how his condition might affect his future. He’s more concerned about who’s going to win the World Championship in League of Legends, an e-sport he follows rabidly, and the essays due in the coming weeks.
“It’s not something that’s constantly on my mind,” he said. “It’s just something that I live with until something happens, and then it’s out of sight, out of mind again.”
Just like the faces of those he comes in contact with.
