Face Blindness: ‘60 Minutes’ Spotlights Rare Condition Of Prosopagnosia
HUFFINGTON POST: it like not to recognize your best friend’s face? How about your mother’s–or your child’s? What sounds unimaginable to most people is a daily experience for people with face blindness, aka prosopagnosia or facial agnosia, a rare and poorly understood neurological disorder that’s in the spotlight as the result of a “60 Minutes” segment that aired last night on CBS News…
As you might expect, prosopagnosia can be socially crippling. People with the condition have trouble establishing and maintaining personal and professional relationships, Stahl explained. And many face blind people complain that they have trouble following the plots of TV shows and movies, because they can’t keep track of the characters’ identities, according the Harvard website.
What causes face blindness? Researchers don’t know for sure, but they think it’s the result of abnormal function of a region of the brain known as the right fusiform gyrus, according to the website of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The abnormality can be congenital or the result of stroke, brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases. (more)
EDITOR: The Watchdog suffers from partial face blindness, enough so he had trouble identifying his own young children when they were with several others. At company gatherings, everyone wears a name tag. As indicated above, prosopagnosia is socially inhibiting.
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