Can’t you recognize people? Maybe you suffer from prosopagnosia

Can’t you recognize people’s faces, not even the ones you see most often? You could be part of the 2.5% of the population suffering from prosopagnosia.

Have you ever heard of prosopagnosia? It is one of those diseases which, although it does not carry any real health risk, can cause many difficulties for those who suffer from it. This is a disorder that, if compared to other diseases, affects a fairly large portion of the population: it seems that 2.5% of the world population suffers from it and the count may reach 10% if even the mildest forms are taken into account . But what is prosopagnosia? What leads to the development of this disease? Let’s find out.

What is prosopagnosia?

To whom has it never happened not to recognize a person with whom one has already dealt or to forget a name? These experiences, although rare, can give us a vague idea of what patients with prosopagnosia (from the Greek prosopon , face and a-gnosis , not knowing) live every day. In fact, this disease is commonly called face blindness for a reason.

Individuals affected by this disorder, even after very slight changes , are no longer able to recognize people with whom they have had to deal or with whom they have contact every day. Well yes, in the most severe forms of prosopagnosia the subjects come to not recognize their own child, partner or parent.

The change that causes this inability to remember a person could be very simple, such as a haircut , a slight alteration of the tone of the voice or simply a change of clothing .

Prosopagnosia: the causes

Prosopagnosia can be a congenital pathology , therefore present from birth, or acquired . Usually it is caused by an anomaly present in the nervous system, more precisely in the fusiform convolution , the part of the brain responsible, among other things, for face recognition.

It is a disease for which it is difficult to make a diagnosis, especially in mild forms. In this regard, City University and King’s College of London have created a test that allows to identify the possible presence of the disorder. The test, in English, is available online at troublewithfaces.org .

Photo source: https://pixabay.com/it/photos/persona-maschio-uomo-rrait-828630/