Freaky Friday — A Peculiar Disorder

Imagine. It’s your birthday. You’re in a room filled with your closest friends and relatives. They are all gathered to celebrate a new year of life. As you survey the premises, you start to realize that everyone looks similar. It’s obvious that people are dressed differently, and it’s easy to distinguish between the men and women based on physical characteristics. But as you begin interacting with your closest friends and relatives you realize that you cannot distinguish the face of one person from the next. Everyone has two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth. But they all look the same, indistinguishable from one another. In fact, when your best friend presents you with a framed photograph, he is forced to inform you that you are actually one of the people in the photo.

This is a real condition. The scenario aforementioned is an everyday event for people with Prosopagnosia. This disorder results from damage to the fusiform face area located in the occipital-temporal cortex. Functionally, the brain is capable of all perceptive tasks except facial discrimination.

Facial processing is essential for human social interaction. Faces are integral to identity, expression, gaze, health, and age of a person. Evolutionarily, the brain has adapted to create a distinct region for all of these processes. The advantage of this localized processing is also its demise. Because the processing is localized to a specific region, damage to the fusiform face area impairs perception of the face without any supplementary deficits. Patients are able to recognize and distinguish between objects, but when they are forced to identify a face, they can’t process the differences.

This leads to a lot of awkward moments. For example, in one real instance, a woman met her boyfriend in a bar, gave him a kiss on the lips only to later realize that the person was a complete stranger.

People with this disorder adapt strategies for distinguishing between friends and strangers, and usually go on to live completely normal lives. Just don’t ask them to identify a criminal in a lineup anytime soon. But, there may be advantages to the rare disorder…

The artist Chuck Close, who is famous for his gigantic portraits of faces, has severe, lifelong prosopagnosia. He believes it has played a crucial role in driving his unique artistic vision. “I don’t know who anyone is and essentially have no memory at all for people in real space,” he says. “But when I flatten them out in a photograph I can commit that image to memory.”