Prosopagnosia - Face Blindness

The term prosopagnosia is derived from Greek words prosop which means face and agnosi which means without knowledge. The other name used to refer to prosopagnosia is face blindness. This is a condition where the affected person is unable to recognize the distinguishing features of any human face. The world has come to know about this disorder just half a century ago. The degree of this inability often varies from mild to moderate in every individual cases. In mild forms of prosopagnosia (face blindness), an individual can differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar faces. In some rare cases, the problem is so severe that the sufferers are unable to recognize their mother and may even fail to identify their own faces when they look at the mirror.

Causes

There are two different forms of prosopagnosia - developmental and acquired. Developmental prosopagnosia occurs much before the brain has started learning about recognizing faces. The possible causes of this order is likely to be pre-natal injury and genetic causes. Enough evidence has been found so far that suggest that this disorder could be hereditary and run in the families. Children who have autism and Asperger Syndrome may also suffer from this disorder. In all these cases, the disorder could be existing since childhood but are realized when they grow up and fail to identify people from their facial features. Acquired prosopagnosia often happens after any kind of brain injury due to head trauma, stroke or neurodegenerative diseases. In such cases, people are not born with this disability but acquire it after sustaining injury in the brain. In both conditions, one thing is common that the system of the brain that enable it to process the received data for facial perception get disrupted.

Symptoms

The symptoms are often quite confusing. Even if it happens in the early childhood days, mildly affected people may not be able to figure out the malfunction for many years as they think that they do not remember the faces just out of laziness. Some people may not exactly recognize the faces but still show some kind of emotional response when they look at familiar faces. Others may not react at all. In some people, the problem may not be just confined to recognize faces. For them, it is like a disorder of recognition where they cannot even make out the difference between two different objects. It has been found that people have problems in distinguishing two absolutely different things like a car and an airplane!

Treatment

A prosopagnosia test is an effective technique that helps to diagnose this disorder. In this test, large number of images of different objects like houses, landscapes, vehicles, tools, instruments as well as pictures of human faces are displayed randomly in front of the affected person. Many of the images are repeatedly shown during the process. Those who are prosopagnosics often fail to realize the repetitions of the faces in particular. There is no cure or treatment for this kind of a disorder. The only thing that can be done is to help such people to cope up the situation in a better manner. They have to work out some strategies for themselves so that they can identify those people whom they meet regularly. They can take clues from their voices, hairstyles, gait, clothes or glasses they wear. Other sources of hint could be the cars the particular individual possess of the house in which he or she lives in. At the workplace, colleagues can be identified with the type of job they do.

People with prosopagnosia tend to become shy and withdrawn characters as they have to face a lot of embarrassment in various social situations. Many of them even avoid watching movies or television shows as they cannot perceive the faces of the characters. Presently, several research studies are going on to understand the neurological basis of the problem. Once that gets confirmed, researchers can find out many more methods that will improve the ability of the prosopagnosics to recognize faces.