What do you think it would be like to be unable to recognize faces? What if you woke up one day and you couldn’t recognize your parents faces, or even your own face. Would you think you’ve gone crazy? Well, more than likely you have been afflicted with acquired prosopagnosia. This rare disease renders the subject unable to recognize faces. Because of current technological advances we now know what the disease is like, how it’s caused, and how to help people deal with it.
Prosopagnosia supposedly originates in the left hemisphere of the brain. Although not much conclusive, definite research has been done to totally support these theories, it is said that the area it affects spans parts of the temporal and occipital lobes, inferotemporal cortex (a part of the cerebral cortex towards the back part of the brain), and the superior temporal sulcus (located in the left hemisphere and can contain Wernicke's area). To be more specific, in the ventral temporal cortex ( located inside the temporal lobe) resides the fusiform face area “FFA” which is most involved in recognizing faces. Recognizing a face is more than just recognizing its parts, and many people with prosopagnosia can still identify specific facial features. To recognize a face you must see all of the facial features and its unique configuration.
Today, about 2% of the world suffers from prosopagnosia. While not everyone is born with it, (developmental prosopagnosia “DP”) some people suffer from a stroke or head injury and have acquired prosopagnosia “AP”. Accounts from Evie Prichard, a sufferer of DP who lives in the UK said, “To me, a face is like a dream. It's incredibly vivid in the moment, but it drifts apart seconds after I look away until all that's left are the disjointed features and a vague memory of how it made me feel.” and, “Like a blind person who can recognise family by their footsteps, prosopagnosics are forced to develop unconventional ways of discovering who it is we're talking to … we rely on dozens of tactics to get through ordinary life.” Evie and many others have been forced to rely on dozens of tactics to recognize the people around them. They may use specific facial features, such as moles or freckles, or something like their posture or walk. They may even depend on something external, such as a backpack or purse. So how can you deal with prosopagnosia? Well, some places offer treatment options such as testing. They will put a face in front of you, let you examine it for a few seconds, and then take it away and give you a couple faces and ask you which one you just saw.
Another treatment option is pharmaceutical drugs. Supposedly, this is one way to treat prosopagnosia but not many conclusive tests have been done on the actual efficiency and reliability of these treatments. In one experiment, participants received an intranasal inhalation of Oxytocin and found an increase of recognizability of faces after taking a short test. While this is excellent news, more research still needs to be done on the safety of long term dosage of Oxytocin and the practicality of such a medicine. Would they need to take it every day? Every minute? This is why the experiment is interesting, but not helpful because it doesn’t provide significant evidence of a reliable treatment.
As you can imagine, living with prosopagnosia is an arduous and difficult task. Sometimes, the person with the illness cannot even recognize other things, like letters, although they can see the individual letters, they cannot see them together and form words. But, with treatment and therapy, the subject can learn to read again. So while prosopagnosia may not be treatable, you can still live with it and function normally.