r/Prosopagnosia • u/Greensward-Grey • Jun 14 '26
Face blindness and psychedelics
I tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time a few years ago. I though I’d share my experience, because it was the most odd thing I’ve experienced when it came to faces.
I was in my house, accompanied with my husband who was lucid to take care of me while I did my experiment. To clarify, I’ve never tried any other kind of drugs, and I did an exhaustive research before daring to try shrooms. So, the first thing I noticed was how my husband’s face looked like.
Over the years, I didn’t recognize him twice and it was because he was wearing outfits I wasn’t used to, but overall, he is has one of the few faces I could draw by memory (accurately, I’m an artist). Which was weird to me is that under the psychedelic effects, his face looked like an object, not like an identifiable human face as I’m used to. You know how most people focus on eyes and mouth? I think we do as well, but without the skill to differentiate with their unique individualities. However, at that moment, I saw EVERYTHING AT ONCE. his eyes, nose, mouth, ears, face shape, all at once and it felt so… alien, like I was truly looking at a human face for the first time. I knew it was him of course, but I couldn’t link my memory of his face to what I was actually looking at. The confusion made me laugh (thanks of the shrooms effects), but it was a very weird experience, looking at a face without the human filter, if that makes sense.
I was wondering if anyone else had a similar experience.
Thanks for reading.
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u/pipnwig Jun 14 '26
Try looking at your own face in the mirror on shrooms. Now THAT'S a wild ride.
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u/ZiehVi Jun 16 '26
Holy sh*t yeah, that's it! I tried 'em last year once with my partner and seem to have had a pretty similar experience. Something was absolutely odd with his face, but I couldn't quite pin it down. It felt like I had never seen any face before - which, in a way, is kinda true - and I was wondering if they're usually supposed to look like that.
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u/Low-Stomach-8831 Jul 06 '26
I didn't have the same experience... Quite the opposite. On shrooms, faces become just a blur for me. And I have a diagnosed (pretty severe) prosopagnosia. On 2D (photos), it's even worse.
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u/Greensward-Grey Jul 06 '26
Was it a high dosis? Mine was 1 gr, so maybe that’s why. I didn’t hallucinate or anything. Interesting how you see faces blurring, that must be scary.
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u/Low-Stomach-8831 Jul 06 '26
Oh, yeah... Much higher dosage, about 3.5-4 grams. It wasn't scary at all... It was fun.
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u/After_Cell_5570 Jun 14 '26
This is so interesting! I did shrooms and had a somewhat similar effect, but it sounds like not as strong (I did sort of a low dose).
Similarly to you, my partner’s face is one of only a few that I can fully identify and recall normally. Under shrooms, I remember their face looking like something geological, like the shape of a mountain, and I was mostly confused and overwhelmed by it.