Not Recognizing Someone You Know Well

Prosopagnosia: I See Yous and I Know You, Just I Don't Recognize Your Face

Prosopagnosia: I See You and I Know You, But I Don't Recognize Your Face

Prosopagnosia is a rare disease that currently affects 2.five% of the population. It has affected some very well-known people, like player Brad Pitt, the co-founder of Apple tree, Steve Wozniak, and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who recently passed abroad. People with this disorder are incapable of recognizing faces, including their own. Take y'all e'er thought about what your life would be like if you had "facial blindness"?

Imagine you're walking the canis familiaris and you lot run into your best friend, only you don't say "hi" because you lot don't know who she is. Recollect about going to say goodnight to your children, just y'all tin can't recognize their faces. Or going to the office and your coworkers seem similar complete strangers.

For someone who has prosopagnosia, the day is this complicated.And actually, people with the disorder often aren't aware that they have it.

Who are you? And who am I?

This disorder doesn't just hinder facial recognition of shut family, friends, and acquaintances. Information technology can even affect identification of emotional expressions and gender. All faces look the same, with no distinction.

That's why a person in the social circle of a person with prosopagnosia might experience hurt past him. They take shared and so many experiences, and now he doesn't even recognize her.In fact, actor Brad Pitt has said as much. He said considering of his disorder, people very close to him have written him off equally self-centered and arrogant.

In the virtually serious cases, the person isn't even capable of recognizing himself in a mirror or a group photograph.This can accept very negative consequences. Not only in interpersonal relationships but also in the workplace. It can affect self-esteem, and fifty-fifty crusade low.

Some believe that it is a retention problem

The term comes from the Greek prosopon (face up) and agnosia (absenteeism of knowledge).People who suffer from it accept perfectly good vision. They can call up and recognize most objects reasonably well.That'due south why, only similar any healthy person, they know who their parents are, their children'southward favorite colour, their partner'south likes and dislikes, what they ate yesterday, or how well their roommate sings.

Though the areas of the encephalon that procedure faces are in abiding interaction with the neuronal networks of retentivity, it's non a memory problem per se.It is more an illness that is specifically related to faces.

We perceive a general model of faces

Before learning how to talk or even babble, babies instinctively notice faces. By the time they are four months erstwhile, they procedure faces in a clearly divers manner. This is due to the fact thatfaces are extremely informative. Faces reflect emotions, feelings, identity, sex, and ethnicity.

A person with prosopagnosia can identify different parts of the face (nose, eyes, oral cavity, etc.). But they aren't capable of remembering their exact location on the face. Nor can they put together complete facial construction.They tin can't convert facial features into a unique blueprint of traits. They can't associate facial features with a person'due south identity.

This happens considering faces are processed all together, not in parts. That is to say, we can't identify someone by just their optics or their rima oris. Because nosotros tin can get so much information from a person's face, we are able to simultaneously take information technology all in and create a generalized model of a face.

The solution is to use contextual clues

An disability to recognize faces is the trait of prosopagnosia that stands out the most. Nevertheless, in some cases people with the disorder can recognize faces of people who are close to them. They can exercise it as long equally the faces stand out from the crowd because of some specific characteristic.

In this way, they use different contextual clues and strategies to ease potentially embarrassing situations.They can deduce who they have in front of them by noticing some feature detail of the person. Some examples are: noticing pilus colour or spectacles or the manner someone walks. Other clues are pare tone, unique scars, moles, or vocalization quality.

The more than noticeable the feature, the quicker and easier it will be to place them.Very thick eyebrows, ears that are really far apart, neon green spectacles, a potent perfume, etc. All of these traits can assist a person with prosopagnosia identify those effectually them.

Are you lot built-in with prosopagnosia?

This disease can nowadays at nascency. It tin be hereditary and be passed from generation to generation, though this isn't mutual.In the bulk of cases, brain damage in both hemispheres causes the disorder. This can bea event of a stroke or a brain tumor. Less ofttimes, information technology is a issue of cranioencephalic trauma or infections like encephalitis that affect the central nervous system.

Facial perception requires cerebral processes in different areas and brain structures. However, at that place is a region of the brain thatis specifically in charge of facial characteristic recognition: the Fusiform Confront Expanse (FFA).Information technology is located in the temporal lobe, in the Fusiform Gyrus.

a woman with her face covered up by blue lines

What kinds of treatments are there?

At that place is no effective treatment for prosopagnosia.Nevertheless, doctors tin train their patients to use contextual clues. Experts too recommend that the people around them make their day-to-twenty-four hour period as easy every bit possible. For instance, saying the proper name of everyone nowadays, and avoiding big crowds and parties or movies with also many characters.

Now you know a bit more about this little-known illness. It affects quite a few people and makes them bullheaded to faces. What do you lot think virtually it?

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