This little-known disorder is actually more common than you might think: around one in fifty people is believed to suffer from it in one form or another. It is basically the inability to recognise faces. I went through a phase in my early twenties when, as a Psychology student who had recently learned about this disorder, I realised that I quite often walked past people I knew without recognising them. I also realised that in crowded places, like shopping centres, I was unable to spot my own mother. Convinced that I had prosopagnosia I read everything I could about it and became quite the expert. Then a routine eye test revealed that actually I just needed glasses.
I was rather relieved, though slightly annoyed at having become so hysterical about it that I had wasted valuable time researching it when I should really have been writing my dissertation.
It is a thoroughly difficult disorder to recognise (or have recognised by professionals, since it is not something that many GPs will have come across) and even more difficult to live with. People become mightily offended if they are apparently not recognised by someone they know or have previously met. They feel that the person who has not recognised them does not consider them worth remembering. As social creatures, this is a really pretty dreadful disorder to suffer from.
New research is being carried out by Bournemouth University and documentaries are due to follow on television to promote awareness of the condition. The research will involve recording eye movements using computer technology and hope to use the results to help people who say they are in a constant state of ‘low-level confusion’ and are not able to recognise even members of their own family, or even their own faces. Apparently people without the disorder tend to all look at faces with the same pattern of eye movements: they look in a triangular pattern between the eyes, nose and mouth. People with prosopagnosia tend to look more at other features like foreheads, ears and cheeks.
Dr Sarah Bate of Bournemouth University explains, “It’s absolutely specific to faces, they know what a face is, they know the basic configuration of a face but they just fail to identify individuals no matter how close those people are to them.”
When it was carried out on people without the condition, the test showed they looked at the face with a regular triangular pattern of movements, which moved about from the eyes, nose and mouth.
There’s no known cure at present. People tend to use other strategies to recognise people, usually by listening to the sound of their voice or remembering which clothes they are wearing on a given day, or remembering their hairstyle or colour.