Personal experience: what it is like to lose the ability to recognize people's faces
'12.09.2019'
Source: Tjournal
Prosopagnosia makes it impossible to know relatives and friends, often condemning a person to social isolation.
In 1947, the German neurologist Joachim Bodamer described the case of a soldier who, after being wounded in the head with a fragment of a shell by Soviet artillery, lost the ability to recognize the faces of relatives, friends and his own. The specialist called this condition prosopagnosia, a perceptual disorder in which a person ceases to recognize faces, although he is able to recognize objects, writes Tjournal.
The disease manifests itself after a head injury or is inherited, and each person suffers from different types of impairment. But all patients are united by the fact that it becomes much more difficult for them in society. Having lost the ability to remember faces, when a person appears, they are forced to think each time how to behave with a stranger: to greet, smile, speak or pass by.
In severe form, the disorder makes it impossible to recognize the faces of not only acquaintances, but also parents or children
In 2000, a London resident, Ruth Middleton, was hit by a motorcycle and taxi while she was walking across Westminster Bridge. She fell into a coma, and when she woke up, she did not recognize herself: her injured leg was amputated.
“I had problems with my spine, pelvis, and ribs,” the woman says. But recovering from these injuries was much easier for her than losing her ability to recognize faces.
19 years have passed since then, and Middleton has long been accustomed to being easily confused in the faces of the main characters of films or TV shows. When guests come to a woman, her main task is not to be surprised when a stranger greets her. Even if in fact it is a relative. To avoid this, she learned to distinguish people by voice, habits and clothes.
“People I should know have decided that I am arrogant or unfriendly to them. The truth is, I didn’t recognize them, ”she shares.
Middleton is one of the few who has acquired prosopagnosia after a serious injury, and not with birth. In the second case, the disorder is gradually gaining momentum, so many learn about the problem only in the middle of life, having already started a family and built a career. The protagonist is faced with the protagonist of the book “A Man Who Confused His Wife with a Hat”, who recognized his wife only by voice. And sometimes the disorder is called "Humpty Dumpty Syndrome" - in "Alice in the Looking Glass" he says goodbye to Alice, saying that at the next meeting he will no longer recognize her.
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In the 20 century, prosopagnosia was considered rare, but modern researchers believe that up to 2% of the US population suffers from one form or another of the disease (there are no world statistics). It’s just that most of them accept deviation as banal carelessness or distraction. For example, actors Stephen Fry and Brad Pitt thought so, who later confirmed their prosopagnosia. In a light form, it almost does not affect life, but in severe manifestations it knocks a person out of society.
A person with prosopagnosia forgets the faces of close friends and relatives, so he can easily ignore them on the street or be surprised at their appearance at home. Sometimes parents face this, forgetting how their children look.
British Boo James did not know about her condition until 40 years, attributing the inability to remember faces to her shyness. She suspected herself of an upset after accidentally hearing about him in the news.
In the 2019 year, 11 years after the diagnosis, James's condition only worsened. When she looked at family photos on a computer, she did not recognize herself in one of the frames. In the fight against the disease, the woman is helped by the husband of Devi. He tells her in what relations she is with the interlocutor, and helps his wife not to lose the thread of the plot in the films, recalling who is who among the heroes.
“Sometimes we turn off the movie because it becomes too difficult to keep track of the plot,” says James.
Describing the thrill of life with prosopagnosia is somewhat difficult. A person, as it were, sees not the whole face, but its separate parts. The brain is not able to connect and hold them in consciousness to form a complete look. Therefore, the best way to remember a person is to notice his hair, accessories, voice, figure or clothes. This method is not universal, as people often change their appearance by changing clothes or trying a new haircut.
James is one of the first who, at the beginning of 2019, agreed to participate in a new study by the British University of Swansea. This program is dedicated to the intricacies of face recognition and helping people with prosopagnosia. The project also aims to tell as many people as possible about this disorder.
One of the most common prosopagnosia tests is available on the Birkbeck University of London website. The subject is shown photographs of a person or several people, after which they are asked to find a familiar face among other frames. With careful passage for an ordinary person, this is a fairly simple test.
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All thanks to the spindle-shaped gyrus, which is located in the occipital-temporal part, which is responsible for facial recognition. It is she who, even in the womb, teaches that two eyes above the nose and mouth form the face. For the same reason, people see faces in electrical outlets or on the front of cars. The recognition mechanism develops with the socialization of a person and the study of persons around. Therefore, those who mostly communicate with people from their racial group sometimes find that many representatives of another group look the same.
For the same reason, those who were born blind and had the opportunity to see as adults often suffer from prosopagnosia. Sometimes this disorder occurs in people with another deviation - stereoblindness. This is the inability to see objects in 3D with the help of stereopsis, which makes the world look slightly “flat”. So this condition was described by the American journalist Sadie Dingfelder (Sadie Dingfelder), who discovered prosopagnosia and at home.
Although this disorder is being actively investigated, there is no cure for it. Some patients began to distinguish between their faces much better after taking the hormone oxytocin, but it became more difficult to distinguish between people of a different race. In the meantime, the most effective, albeit no less harmful, recipe for life with an illness is to abandon society.
People who choose this path rarely go outside, and if this happens, they look at their feet so as not to run into a friend they know whose appearance they do not remember. Dingfelder, without suspecting it, lived in this state until 19 years. She could not make long friendships, because she involuntarily ignored her friends, giving the impression that she was not interested in them.
“There is some evidence that faces serve as a folder of brain files for all the other information we collect about people: when, where and how you met, their favorite bands, the name of their last partner, and the reason for their breakup. Since my brain cannot create a good file folder, these details are often lost. Some people with prosopagnosia can associate biographical details with people's voices, but for me, not being able to see the face means that I partly can't see the people themselves, ”says Sadie.
Dingfelder’s behavior changed after her father’s advice: “Everyone just wants to talk about themselves. Ask a lot of questions, and people will take you for the most amazing person on Earth. ” It was this tactic that she followed in college, so she soon made many friends. It also helped that she kept photos of friends and classmates with their names on the back and periodically looked through, remembering facial features.
“If someone was looking in my direction, I smiled. If they answered the same, I approached and started a conversation, ”she recalls.
As a result, the girl was elected president of the house (as dormitories are called at Smith's College in Massachusetts).
In 2019, Dingfelder began attending a research center in Boston, including one dealing with prosopagnosia. She agreed to take a computer test, which helps people with the disorder improve their facial recognition skills. In it, the test subject is shown a selection of 10 photographs divided into two groups. In the first, the eyes and mouths of individuals are distant from each other, and in the second they have more compact features.
The program lasted more than 10 weeks, but Dingfelder felt the effect only at the end of the study.
“I didn’t notice a big difference, but if I recognize someone, now I’m much more sure that this is this person,” the woman says.
As experts later reported, she suffers from one of the most severe degrees of prosopagnosia: the development of her spindle-shaped gyrus is at the level of an 12-year-old child, and the ability to recognize faces is like that of an average macaque.
In July 2019, Dingfelder turned 40 years old. Thanks to tests, she began to better distinguish faces, but the effect gradually disappears. Despite the inconvenience, she does not plan to go on therapy further.
“I'd rather spend my time doing things that I like, like playing the violin or studying birds. I love to sit in the park near my apartment, watch how these beautiful creatures live their day. Recognizing them, I feel delighted, ”says Sadie.
