What is face blindness?
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn’t recognize the faces of your family, friends or co-workers? Worse yet, what if you couldn’t recognize yourself in a mirror?The inability to recognize faces is known as face blindness, or prosopagnosia (from Greek: prosopon = face; agnosia = not knowing). People who suffer from prosopagnosia aren’t able to use someone’s face to determine their identity.
As a result, if you have face blindness, you’re forced to rely on cues such as voice, hair, clothing or gait to identify familiar people. But if someone changes their hairstyle or clothing, that visual cue is lost and, once again, you can’t identify your acquaintance.
Faceblind.org, a research consortium including Dartmouth, Harvard and University of London, estimates that about 1 in 50 people have prosopagnosia. Faceblind.org offers a free test as part of its research in which participants are asked to identify famous faces. The test will help researchers learn how the brain processes information about other people in a social context.
Since 2007, the Australian Prosopagnosia Register has registered people who suspect they have congenital face blindness to participate in research. Participants have reported severe, recurring, everyday face recognition difficulties, including not recognizing their child at day care or not being able to differentiate actors in movies.
What causes face blindness?
There can be several reasons for face blindness, including abnormalities, damage or impairment of a specific part of the brain responsible for coordinating the neural systems that control facial perception and memory. Stroke, traumatic brain injury or certain neurodegenerative diseases can also cause face blindness.
To better understand what’s happening in the brain of someone with prosopagnosia, consider a smart phone, with its touch screen, GPS, voice and data all providing different pieces of information to the phone’s core processor. All of that information is integrated in the core processor to provide a seamless experience to us as the end user.
Similarly, our brain gets input from eyes, ears, touch and motion sensors in muscles and joints and integrates all this information in certain discrete “integration centers.” When the specific area of the brain that integrates visual face recognition is dysfunctional, the result is face blindness.
These integration areas are so specific that, depending on the area affected, you can suffer from loss of self-recognition (your own face) or loss of face recognition of others.
Also, other portions of recognition – such as object recognition – remain intact. So you can recognize objects – cars, instruments, animals, etc., and make appropriate decisions – but can’t recognize faces.
What are the different types of prosopagnosia?
With acquired prosopagnosia, you once had the ability to recognize faces and then lost the ability. This can happen with stroke, brain tumors, certain diseases of brain aging/dementia such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, trauma or injury to the brain, and certain types of poisoning, such as carbon monoxide poisoning.
With congenital prosopagnosia, you were born with inability to recognize faces and never had the ability to recognize faces. This can happen with structural brain defects at birth, genetic mutations and certain metabolic disorders that affect the brain.
What are the treatments?
Unfortunately, there are no cures to reverse face blindness. Most treatments involve building structure or providing supportive measures for you to overcome the disability. For example, someone with face blindness may not recognize your face, but they can still identify you with your voice.
In nursing homes, one solution is to make the staff wear badges with names and titles to help patients identify them.
Someday, we may be able to harness the recognition technology in self-driving cars, security cameras, etc., to build assistive technology and devices to help patients with facial recognition.
When should you seek treatment?
If you find that you or your loved one frequently can’t recognize close friends, family members or regular coworkers consistently, it may be reasonable to approach your primary care physician or neurologist to seek help.
Kiran Rajneesh no longer works at Ohio State University.
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