Sorry Who Are You?, is a documentary Produced by Wake Up Call Productions. It looks into the lives of three individuals, who suffer from a condition called Prosopagnosia.
I liken it to recognizing a dog's face. If two dogs are the same color, & size, can you tell them apart by looking at their faces? They probably have distinctive facial features, just like humans, but we aren't wired to recognize faces of another species like we are of our own species.
Prosopagnosia is not the inability to remember things (the daughter sort of mis-speaks toward the end) or the inability to see properly, it's the inability to recognize people. The brain doesn't put the facial features together into an identity you can recall when you see it again. People have mild to severe cases so someone might have trouble recognizing characters in a film but have no trouble recognizing their family members while someone else might not be able to recognize even their children. It's not that he doesn't remember his son's name it's that he doesn't put that name on a particular face. He knows his son, he loves his son. His brain just doesn't connect his son as a person to his son's face. You can be born with it or, apparently, have brain damage that causes it. There is no treatment. No kind of food you can eat, no mental exercises you can do, no medicine you can take, it's just how your brain works. It's like dyslexia. You can develop coping mechanisms to help you recognize people like where they are, what they're wearing, their mannerisms, how they speak, what their voice sounds like or how they act toward you. That makes every encounter with another person (depending on the severity of the condition) a puzzle when, for the first few seconds your brain is frantically scrambling trying to put everything together so you can put a name to this person. Same with photographs of people or movies/tv shows. Yes it's frustrating but what are you going to do? It's the way it is. You just get on with all the other more interesting things you have to do in your day :)
Just adding a little bit of info if that's alright! As more research has come about, psychologists believe that prosopagnosia is caused by damage/malformation of the fusiform area, in the occipital and temporal cortices. There are also other forms of visual agnosia that are caused by similar damage to the cortices, and can prevent people from distinguishing defining features/characteristics of objects, or recognizing objects in different orientations. It's believed that humans process faces holistically, meaning that they view the whole face and not so much the individual features of the face, so when the brain cannot perceive faces, it is not prepared to perceive them with any other processes, and people only see individual features which they cannot distinguish from one another (can you really identify someone based on their eyebrow? or nose?) or compile into a face. The fusiform area and face recognition module likely developed as a mechanism to determine which humans were immediate threats to them, and which ones were friendly since humans are very social animals. As John has already stated, it's very important to understand that these sorts of disorders have nothing to do with memory processing and isn't related to other vision problems (nearsightedness, color blindness, etc). The forms of visual agnosia can operate independently from one another (i.e. it's possible to be only afflicted by one), but if the damage or malformation is large enough it can cause more than one disorder.
i know this problem !! actually my grand mother is suffering from prosopagnosia, she takes medicine from a Homeopathic doctor and now she has almost over come this problem
I'd like to think friends and family would help out by trying to be understanding. I don't have prosopagnosia, but I do have Aspergers, and most of my friends and family act a bit put out when my AS traits show.
Maybe caption-makers for movies and TV shows should start identifying characters by name along with showing what they are saying. It seems that this would be helpful to those who have prosopagnosia.
+jamier11 Pretty much, I am going in for tests but i can't remember what my sister, bother or father face looks until I see them, then I just use context
I don't understand. They must be able to recognise individual features, such as hair/eye colour, nose breadth, lip size, etc. which is the same way the rest of us process faces; we just do it sub-consciously. So, why can't they recognise faces with conscious concerted effort. Even if they don't know who someone is at first, they must see some face before them; what face do they see???
Jason David they see the face they just dont know who it is, they can see it is a face but they cant recognize from vision who it is. they can hear or touch them and then recognize them or look at their clothes and understand. they know who people are, they just cant recognize human faces. they can recognize animal faces because they are not that complex
Jason David get a photo of a person you haven't seen, flip it over and try to memorize it. next day have someone prepare a row of photos of faces, only one of which you've seen. i'm pretty sure you can't pick it out. you can see the lips, eyes but not the whole picture.
I liken it to recognizing a dog's face. If two dogs are the same color, & size, can you tell them apart by looking at their faces? They probably have distinctive facial features, just like humans, but we aren't wired to recognize faces of another species like we are of our own species.
