From Discover Magazine, June 2002, Vital Signs
She also had a bigger problem: She couldn't recognize
faces. Pictures of high school friends were the faces of strangers. Patients with
this condition, called prosopagnosia, can identify a face as a face, its parts,
and even certain emotions, but they are unable to identify a particular face as
belonging to a specific person. Prosopagnosics often do not recognize their
own faces in the mirror, although they will recognize that they are looking at a
face.

I spent a few weeks, in my thirties, without my glasses, during which time I discovered that I could recognize friends from afar by their walks. I wonder if those afflicted with prosopagnosia could recognize friends in the same way.

In one of the articles about prosopagnosis, it told of the guy talking with somebody for 15 minutes,
then a half hour later mistaking a total stranger for the person he had talked to. Gait isn't the only
body language item we get information from. I'm reminded that when my macular degeneration first
began I could not tell my wife across a lecture hall unless I could remember what dress she wore.
I did not, however, attempt to use the handicap to enter into new arrangements.
Handicaps can of course be utilized. The guy with Klumpke's Disease(,an obstetrical injury which I
believe afflicted Kaiser Wilhelm) could use his right arm to reach everything on the table he wanted,
and the short, almost useless arm to miss the dinner check by two inches.