OK, class, please take out a sheet of paper and a pencil and write down today's vocabulary word. It's prosopometamorphopsia.
You can call it PMO for short, and what it is, is a malperformance of the noggin that makes people you see appear to be demons, with ears, noses, and mouths pulled back, and groove lines in their cheeks, chins, and foreheads.
Victor Sharrah, out of Clarksville, Tennessee, woke up one day and found this sight problem going on. He says, “My first thought was I woke up in a demon world. You can’t imagine how scary it was.”
Oh yes, we can.
Prosopometamorphopsia is not a common thing. It's a perception disorder that distorts how its victims see the faces of others. And it only happens when the patient sees people live and in person, not in pictures or via computer screen.
Based on Sharrah's descriptions, scientists at Dartmouth College made a visual of what he sees...
In most cases, doctors say the symptoms resolve after a few days or weeks, but Sharrah's case persists and he still sees the demons.
So far, fewer than 100 cases have been documented. Researchers think it all has to do with a dysfunction in the part of the brain where we process facial recognition, but they have no idea why, so far.
Some of the victims of the disorder had head trauma, stroke, epilepsy or migraines in their history, but some had no such touchpoints in their history and still deal with PMO.
In Sharrah's case, he had a head injury at the age of 43, which he sustained by falling onto concrete. He has a lesion on the left side of his brain.
Antônio Mello of Dartmouth is the lead on this study, and he reports that other patients have presented with different symptoms and histories, with no single event apparently responsible.
And more and more people are coming forward to report PMO symptoms of their own, having refrained from saying anything before, for fear of what others would say.
I would say it's all the more proof that we think we have everything just about figured out, only to figure out that we really don't.
It's interesting.
1 comment:
Wow, yeah, these niche brain disorders can really knock the pins out from under our belief that, although our thoughts may err, our thinking "hardware" is infallible. Some people never see a face they don't [think they] recognize -- they often find themselves in trouble for greeting strangers too familiarly. Most end up developing strategies for testing people for signs of mutual acquaintance before interacting with them further.
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