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Imagine it's the start of the school year and you're a teacher staring out on a classroom of new students. Remembering everyone's names might take some time and careful study of the seating chart to nail it down.

But what if you couldn't remember your students' faces?

For Ashley Peterson, a special-education teacher at Lincoln Northwest High School, recognizing faces — a skill that doesn't usually even cross our mind — is a daily challenge.

Peterson, 38, was diagnosed about 10 years ago with prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, which hinders her ability to recognize people — from friends to celebrities — by the specific arrangement of nose, eyes, mouth, eyebrows, etc., that make up each person's unique face. She can take in those individual parts, but her mind doesn't store the whole picture.

Facial blindness, a relatively unknown disorder, is actually quite common. It's estimated 1 in 50 people have some form of the condition, which is acquired at birth but can also be the result of brain injury. In severe cases, people can struggle to recognize their own loved ones or even themselves.

Peterson first started to realize there was something different about her perception of others when she attended a small Bible college in Colorado. While her class size was a relatively small 40 students, she only knew three or four people.

"I run into people who talk to me that I just have no clue who they are," she said. "You start to kind of think that maybe you are like this arrogant person that doesn't pay attention to people around them."

Then one day she saw a segment on the CBS news program "60 Minutes" on facial blindness that confirmed she wasn't being merely inattentive or lazy.

"I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, that's me! That's me!'" said Peterson, an Iowa native who grew up in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska. "I never even realized the way I see the world is different from other people."

So she reached out to specialists at Carnegie-Mellon University, who had her do some online tests. She met the criteria and flew out to Pittsburgh and took part in research on the condition.

Peterson, who has since taken part in multiple studies over the years, was featured last month in a National Geographic issue on the brain and how it works.

As the article lays out, prosopagnosia is not a defect of vision, but rather of perception. It was first described in veterans of World War II who sustained brain injuries, and eventually researchers linked it to the parts of the brain that deal with facial recognition.

In the National Geographic story, Peterson likens facial blindness to studying a leaf, tossing it into a pile, then trying to retrieve the one you studied.

Over the years, Peterson has developed a number of coping skills. She relies on vocal clues — how a person sounds, what they're talking about — and other features, such as hair, gait and clothing. It's similar to how one might recognize a familiar friend from behind.

Through repetition, she can begin to recognize faces of the people closest to her, like her three brothers and her nieces and nephews, but even that is not guaranteed.

While on a recent bike ride with some family, Peterson stopped to repair a wheel on her nephew's bike. Her nieces rode ahead, but one circled back. Peterson thought she was a stranger coming to help.

"That hit hard," she said.

At Lincoln Public Schools, Peterson works with students with intellectual disabilities and significant behavioral challenges. Before accepting a position at the soon-to-open Northwest, she taught at Lincoln East. And before that, she worked with home-based children under the age of 5 with disabilities.

It helps that she works with smaller groups of students, Peterson said. Her prosopagnosia also gives her insight into her students' challenges.

LPS offers accommodations for Peterson, including providing face printouts of the school staff. Co-workers will often introduce themselves to Peterson before talking to her, too, and wearing specific accessories, such as jewelry, can also help her identify people.

Northwest Principal Cedric Cooper found out about Peterson's condition through one-on-one staff meetings. He had never heard of facial blindness, but was intrigued by her story and wanted to help.

The two also had a conversation about implementing some professional development opportunities for staff to learn about the relatively common disorder. 

For Cooper, Peterson encapsulates his vision for the new school, in which everyone is looked after.

"She can really be an advocate for special education in our building," he said.

Stephanie Smith, a friend and former co-worker, once ran into Peterson and her dog at a summer concert at Stransky Park.

Peterson knew it was someone she'd met because Smith mentioned her dog's name, so she sat down with Smith. But she couldn't place her since she only knew her co-worker by what she wore to work and how she did her hair.

"I was in bike shorts and tank top and a pony tail," Smith recalled. "After we were talking for a few minutes, she was like 'Oh, you're Steph!'"

Stories like that are common, Peterson said, and encounters can run the gamut from innocuous to unsettling.

In one incident she described in the National Geographic story, Peterson was at the funeral of someone she knew from her church when she saw the person they were there to bury walking around.

It turned out Peterson had mistaken two people — who shared the same name, were roughly the same age and wore similar clothes — as one person.

"The brain does weird things like that," she said.

Peterson said facial blindness can cause anxiety when she's in large crowds or out in public. But she's come to accept what she calls her "proso," and is working to raise awareness. In addition to the Nat Geo piece, she presented at the Nebraska State Autism Conference in 2020, as autism has been linked to facial blindness.

"She's just so warm and accepting of other people ... and she is willing to share about it," Smith said. "I just think as individuals and a community we always need to be aware of the diversity and uniqueness of each and everyone one of us."