Prosopagnosia is a rare disease that currently affects 2. 5% of the population and affects well-known personalities such as actor Brad Pitt, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and recently deceased neurologist Oliver Sacks. to recognize the faces of others and even your own. Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you had this one?Facial blindness ??
Imagine that when you walk with your dog you walk past your best friend, but don’t say ‘hello’ because you don’t know who he is, think about when you’re going to fire your kids, but you can’t recognize their faces; or when he arrives at the office and his colleagues are “complete strangers. “
- Therefore.
- It is difficult and difficult to have the day-to-day life of those with prosopagnosia and.
- In many cases.
- They do not even know that they suffer from it.
This disorder not only prevents the recognition of the closest relatives, friends and acquaintances by the face, but it can even alter the identification of emotional expressions and the distinction of the person’s gender, all faces look the same, without distinction.
Therefore, those around you may come to judge or feel hurt for not being able to recognize them, in fact, confessed the actor Brad Pitt, who when suffering from this disease was considered arrogant by very close people.
In the most serious cases, the person cannot be recognized in a mirror or in the photographs where he appears in a group, which can have very negative consequences, not only in the maintenance of interpersonal relationships, but also in his professional performance and self-control. esteem, even causing depression.
The term comes from the Greek prosopon (face) and agnosia (disrecognition). People with this disease have good visual ability and can remember and recognize most objects quite well, so, like any healthy person, they know who their parents are, their children’s favorite color, their spouse’s tastes, what they ate yesterday, or how much their roommate sings.
Thus, while the areas of the brain that treat faces are in constant interaction with the neural networks of memory, this is not a memory problem per se, but a disease that specifically refers to faces.
Before learning to talk or even starting to babble, babies tend to look instinctively at faces. During the fourth month of life they are treated in a clearly defined way. This is because faces are extremely informative: they reflect a person’s emotions, feelings, identity, gender, or ethnicity.
The person with prosopagnosia can identify the different parts and organs of the face (nose, eyes, mouth?), but is unable to remember its exact location within it or compose the total structure of the face, cannot convert facial elements into a unique pattern of characteristics, and cannot associate the face with a person’s identity.
Indeed, faces are treated in a “holistic” way, that is, we do not identify a person by his eyes or by his mouth, precisely because we are able to obtain all this information, we can integrate it simultaneously to create the widespread model. one-sided.
However, while the inability to recognize faces is the most striking feature of prosopagnosia, in some cases they may perceive those of their loved ones: they can do so as long as their face stands out from the rest by a certain characteristic. use different keys and contextual strategies to avoid possible embarrassing situations and deduce through this characteristic detail that is the person in front of you, for example, look at the color of your hair, your glasses, your walk, your complexion, an eye-catching scar, a stain or the warmth of your voice.
The more noticeable the person’s characteristic, the sooner and better you’ll know who he is: a very populated eyebrow, very wide ears, fluorescent green lenses, or a piercing smell can help identify the people around him.
This disease can have a congenital origin, be hereditary and transmit from generation to generation, although not common, in most cases it is an acquired disorder whose main cause is a brain injury in both hemispheres caused by stroke, a brain tumor or, to a lesser extent, cranioencephalic trauma or infections affecting the central nervous system , such as encephalitis.
Facial perception involves a number of cognitive processes related to different areas and brain structures, however, there is a region of our brain that is specifically responsible for recognizing the fixed aspects of the faces: the fusiform facial area (FFA), which is located in the temporal lobe, in fusiform convolution.
Currently, prosopagnosia does not have an effective treatment. However, patients can be trained in using these contextual keys and it is recommended that people around them make their daily lives as easy as possible, for example by telling them the names of those present, avoiding large crowds and social gatherings, or watching films in which many characters appear.
What do you think of this disease that, although little known, affects a large number of people and the “blind face”?