Face blindness (prosopagnosia) is the inability to recognise faces. Much as people with dyslexia find it difficult to distinguish letters, people with face blindness are unable to “read” the special features that make faces unique, and which enable those without the condition to distinguish between people and recognise those we have met before.
Approximately 2% of the population have severe problems in recognising faces. Nobody knows why, and the researchers set out to identify what is different about the brains of this particular group. A Danish-Norwegian team of researchers scanned 15 adult Danes with face blindness and 33 control subjects while they looked at pictures of faces, objects, buildings or words, and compared the two groups’ brain activity. The surprising findings are described in an article in the scientific journal Brain Communications (Oxford University Press)
Human beings process different visual impressions in different parts of the brain. The research team expected that activity in a particular area on the right-hand side of the brain (the “fusiform face area”) would be different in people with face blindness, as this is a key part of the brain network we use when looking at faces.
“It seems that we have been looking in the wrong half of the brain to identify what is different in people with face blindness. However, we are now closer to pinpointing the coordinates for face blindness in the brain,” says Randi Starrfelt, professor in neuropsychology, University of Copenhagen.
Face blindness as a result of brain damage was first documented in 1947. The condition has since been observed in a number of people after stroke or some other form of brain injury. Congenital face blindness was first described in 1977, but it is only recently that researchers have discovered how common this condition is.
Life can be quite difficult for people with face blindness, many of whom are unable to recognise family members and friends. Some even find it difficult to recognise themselves in photographs or in the mirror.
