Quote:
Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2
The neurological condition Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces. People with this condition cannot tell people apart by their faces. they can't even recognize their own face in a photo. This is real.
So an inability to process abstract symbols is not unlikely. |
Well, Non-Iconographic was invented for game purposes in the old
GURPS Cyberpunk. It made you unable to use graphical user interfaces, forcing you to rely on command line interfaces. I'm pretty sure it wasn't invented as a game implementation of a real condition, like Hemophilia or Bad Sight. It's survived since then as legacy, with a certain amount of increased generality, in case it was useful for aliens.
Prosopagnosia is a real condition, all right, but it exists because there's a region of the brain that is specialised for recognising faces. If that's faulty or underdeveloped, people have to fall back on much more general recognition abilities, and find it harder than average to recognise people.
I have a mild case of this, probably due to being almost blind until age three. I can compare faces readily enough, unlike diagnosed Prosopagnosia, but they aren't my main way of recognising people. That's voice, shape, hairstyle, gait and so on. I frequently fail to recognise people I know well if they've changed hairstyle, or gained or lost a lot of weight. I also falsely recognise strangers quite often.