The Name Mnemonic Research Institute (NMRI) supports people who struggle to remember faces and names — including those with prosopagnosia (face blindness) — with information grounded in lived experience and research.
You meet someone again and again, but the face never connects to the name.
You pass someone in the hallway and have no idea who they are.
A new haircut is enough to make them look like a stranger.
That’s not carelessness, and it’s not rudeness.
It’s a cognitive trait called prosopagnosia.
If you’ve thought "maybe this is me too," you may have spent your life apologizing for something you couldn’t explain.
Not asking for someone’s name again. Being afraid people would notice you’d forgotten.
That stress has always had a name.
of people struggle to recognize faces
about 1 in 33 (DeGutis et al. 2023)
of whom face significant difficulty
about 1 in 108
of whom face mild difficulty
about 1 in 47
That roughly 3% is about the same scale as persistent adult ADHD (about 2.58%) — a condition most people have heard of. It’s just as common, even if the name isn’t as familiar.
Source: DeGutis, J., et al. (2023). Prevalence of developmental prosopagnosia. Cortex. Adult ADHD prevalence from Faraone, S. V., et al. (2021) and Song, P., et al. (2021).
There is no medicine you can take today that cures prosopagnosia. Research and treatment are still evolving. That is exactly why we believe people who live with it — people like us — need to create our own ways of making daily life easier.
We are not building these products to make a profit. The name tags are sold at close to cost, and the app carries no ads. The only features we charge for are the ones where we ourselves pay an external fee for AI processing.
If these tools can make daily life even a little lighter for someone facing the same struggles — that is why we make them, one at a time.
Someone who loves people enough to invite 20 of them over every weekend, yet still can’t place a name to a face no matter how many times they’ve met — living with that contradiction led to this site, built to say "you’re not alone."
Read the storyQuestions we often hear from people with prosopagnosia and their families. This isn’t a substitute for a diagnosis, but it may help if you’ve been wondering, “Is it just me?”
Almost everyone feels a little unsure about remembering faces sometimes. With prosopagnosia, though, it’s not an occasional lapse — it’s an ongoing pattern: struggling to identify someone by face alone even after meeting many times, suddenly not recognizing someone in a different setting, and constant tension about seeming rude. It’s not a lack of effort — it’s that facial information doesn’t get processed the way it typically does.
Prosopagnosia is not a general decline in memory. People with it often remember conversations, plans, places, and events perfectly well — it’s specifically that the face is hard to use as a cue for identifying someone. Because of this, many rely on a combination of other cues instead — voice, hairstyle, clothing, gait, or the context where they meet someone.
There is currently no medication or standard treatment that directly "cures" prosopagnosia. That said, getting a diagnosis or talking with a specialist can make it easier to understand why you struggle the way you do. It can also make it easier to explain your situation to others and to adopt supports like name tags, notes, verbal introductions, seating charts, and photo references.
Developmental prosopagnosia can run in families, and genetic factors are suspected to play a role. If a child struggles to recognize friends’ faces or tell teachers apart, environmental adjustments — rather than scolding — can help: having people say their names, using seats or belongings as cues, or reviewing photos with names in advance. Consult a specialist or a developmental support service if needed.
Rather than expecting the individual to simply try harder, small changes to the surrounding environment can make a real difference — introducing yourself by name even if you’ve met before, using name tags or seating charts, keeping fixed seating in meetings or classes, and preparing a reference list that pairs photos with names. What matters most is sharing the understanding that it’s not "not remembering" — it’s that a face alone is hard to identify by.
Self-check
A self-check based on the PI20. Takes 5–10 minutes. Everything is processed right in your browser.
Start the self-check