Prosopagnosia 1947 – The Inability to Recognise Faces

Imagine seeing your spouse, your child or your own reflection in a mirror and feeling as though you were looking at a stranger. Face blindness is another name for prosopagnosia, whose sufferers experience these symptoms, making social interactions very difficult. 

Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder in which the region of a person's brain responsible for recognising faces has not developed or has subsequently been damaged. The term prosopagnosia derives from the Greek words “prosopo” and “agnosia”, meaning “face” and “lack of knowledge”, respectively.

German neurologist Joachim Bodamer coined the term prosopagnosia in 1947 while discussing the symptoms of a young man who had been shot in the head and could not recognise family members or even his own face. The specific brain region often associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus, located in the lower part of the cerebral cortex. 

• Acquired prosopagnosia resulting from later damage and abnormalities is rare. 
• The vast majority of cases point to congenital (present from birth, developmental) prosopagnosia, which is thought to result from genetic mutations and gene deletions (removal of genes). 
• Although much rarer, tumour pressure in the region, damage due to carbon monoxide poisoning, surgical complications, encephalitis (brain inflammation) and Alzheimer's disease can also cause prosopagnosia. 
• Recent studies also show that prosopagnosia occurs at a high rate in patients with autism and Asperger syndrome.

In many cases, an affected person can distinguish objects unrelated to human faces normally. At more advanced stages, however, a person may be unable to recognise their own face in a mirror or even to distinguish faces from objects. If acquired prosopagnosia results from damage in early childhood, a child may grow up without fully developing the ability to recognise faces and without realising that they cannot recognise them.

For people with prosopagnosia, for which there is no specific treatment, therapeutic strategies to help recognise human faces or techniques that attempt to restore normal face-processing mechanisms are thought to be potentially useful. Research on prosopagnosia is important in the history of medicine because it not only sheds light on theories of face perception but also provides information about how perceptual representations are organised and stored in the brain.

Description of the article image: People with prosopagnosia have great difficulty recognising and distinguishing faces, including those of family members and close friends.

Historical figures mentioned in the article: Joachim Bodamer (1910–1985)

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