That man who mistook his wife for a hat was real. As far as I can tell, so is prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder that impairs the brain's ability to recognize faces. The word roughly means "face non-knowledge" in Greek, and those afflicted are either born with the disorder or have a particular area of the brain damaged . The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has this to say about prosopagnosia (ten-times-fast!):
"some will only have difficulty recognizing a familiar face; others will be unable to discriminate between unknown faces, while others may not even be able to distinguish a face as being different from an object. Some people with the disorder are unable to recognize their own face."
Cecilia Burman says that that she is "'face-blind' in the sense" that she "cannot recognize people by their faces." In a somewhat confusing attempt to describe "what it can be like to live with" prosopagnosia , she compares faces to the surface of mostly flat rocks. Attempting to identify individuals based on facial structure is like trying to recognize and identify different rocks. Kind of difficult, right?
Eva
Fred
Sten
John
Right? Prosopagnosians sometimes use other clues to identify individuals: voice, clothes, hair color and probably anything that isn't related to the face, I would think. A common symptom is a difficulty in recognizing characters on television.
The related Capgras delusion, on the other hand, is conscious facial recognition but with no accompanying emotional response, sometimes leading to the delusional belief that a relative or spouse has been replaced by an imposter (or a hat!). This leads me to my next post about panopticon-esque computer technology and the ability to recognize faces -- something which computers have trouble with as well.
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