Living with Prosopagnosia: How could you not know?
Interestingly, research into Prosopagnosia has discovered people with a polar opposite condition;
Individuals with Prosopagnosia have to figure out their own ways to recognize people.
For example, people with Prosopagnosia may have reduced connectivity between brain
regions in the face processing network.
In the end, there is no known cure for Prosopagnosia and treatment options have proven fairly infective to date.
In the end, there is no known cure for Prosopagnosia and treatment options have proven fairly ineffective to date.
In fact, if you have Prosopagnosia, there is a 50% chance that a child you have will also inherit it.
Later, other cases of Prosopagnosia were also described by practicing psychiatrists and neurologists,
which they attributed, as a rule, to brain damage or stroke.
Because of this, kids with Prosopagnosia will often strongly prefer cartoons,
where characters almost always wear the same clothes and often sound very distinct when they talk.
For people with Prosopagnosia, they see the individual parts,
but are not capable of perceiving the face holistically, making it incredibly difficult to recognize someone by their face.
So many people hate me because they think I'm disrespecting them,” Brad Pitt told Esquire magazine during his June 2013 cover interview,
admitting that he believes he has Prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia(Prosopagnosia, or face-blindness) is a perceptual disorder in which a person
is not able to recognize the faces of other people, even the closest ones, such as friends, family members, work colleagues.
One of the tell-tale signs of Prosopagnosia is if someone generally has difficulty following
the plot of a TV show or movie because they can't keep track of which character is which.
People on the Autistic spectrum(including Asperger's, which incidentally is a name distinction that's soon to be going away in favor of just calling everyone on the spectrum“Autistic”)
usually demonstrate some level of Prosopagnosia.
Given that many of the people who were born with Prosopagnosia seem to have close relatives with the condition(often
quite a few of them), it's thought that face blindness is directly caused by a defect in some dominant gene, which results in the brain's mechanism for being able to holistically see a face not developing correctly, making it harder to distinguish one from another.