So you think you are Brad Pitt?

So you think you are Brad Pitt? As Shania Twain once said,that don’t impress me much.

So you think you are Brad Pitt? As Shania Twain once said,that don’t impress me much. But you may also be Duncan Bannatyne, Paul Dirac, Hubert Dreyfus or Tom Stoppard? I don’t know, I cannot tell. But I do know they all suffer from a condition called prosopagnosia.

Do you find it difficult to remember faces? Or you are confused while watching TV about who the characters actually are, as they all look the same? It may be you have a mild form of the condition otherwise know as face blindness.

If your only problem is keeping track of who is who in a film, then your prosopagnosia is at the very mild end of the spectrum, and would likely not even be significant enough to earn the prosopagnosia label .

However a recent study conducted in Germany surveyed the face recognition abilities of a large group of students, and reported a prevalence rate of 2-2.5%. That is, as many as one in 50 people may suffer from developmental prosopagnosia. If this figure is correct, there may be 1.5 million prosopagnosics in the UK alone. Even if this is an overestimation, a prevalence of just 1% would indicate that 600 000 people suffer from the disorder. So if this is you, you are not alone: test yourself here.

I have a couple of friends who have the condition. For them, a group of loved ones might look no different than a band of strangers. Sometimes people with prosopagnosia have trouble identifying objects as well as faces, and other times their sole difficulty is face recognition.

You might enjoy (if you can remember who is whom) the film Faces in the Crowd , a 2011 film written and directed by Julien Magnat starring Milla Jovovich. The film’s plot is around a woman who develops prosopagnosia after being attacked by a serial killer. As she lives with her condition, one in which facial features change each time she loses sight of them, the killer closes in.

The reality is a little different. Try watching this short clip of a woman with prosopagnosia. Oliver Sacks, neuroscientist and author whose books including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; although he knew what prosopagnosia was and had studied it, he did not realise he had it until people became shocked that he confused one of his brothers with the other and then, discussing it with family members, learned that a number of them had similar difficulties with face recognition. He describes his symptoms in his book, The Minds Eye, in the chapter called Face-Blind.

For example, on one occasion he was to meet his personal assistant of six years in his publisher’s office. He sat in the waiting room without realizing that the young woman also sitting there and smiling at him was his assistant! After about five minutes she told him who she was; she’d been testing him to see how long he took to recognise her.

Like many people with prosopagnosia, Sacks also has a problem with recognising places: he can go for a walk around the block his house is in, and then be unable to find it: he walks past it time and again. Sacks’s difficulties are at the severe end of the spectrum of congenital face and place recognition problems. Most non brain-damaged people with prosopagnosia will be much less affected. Probably people very well known to them will be readily recognised, and it is only when they meet people they don’t see very often that they have difficulty.

Some prosopagnosics cope well with the face recognition impairment, and develop elaborate compensatory mechanisms to help them function effectively in everyday life. For others, however, the condition has a much greater impact on daily functioning. Some prosopagnosics have reported avoidance of social interactions, problems with interpersonal relationships, damage to career, and even depression. In extreme cases, prosopagnosics may develop social anxiety disorder, characterized by fear and avoidance of social situations that may cause embarrassment.

Many people with prosopagnosia report compensatory strategies that can often help them circumvent their difficulties. For instance, teachers have described how they use classroom seating plans to identify their pupils, or even recognize different children by an external cue, such as their backpacks. Other elaborate compensatory strategies have been described, such as accessories, clothing, voice or gait to recognise a familiar person. Of course these strategies do not always work, and particularly break down when a person is met out of context and logic cannot be combined with these external cues.

If you want to learn more, I suggest this excellent neuroscience lecture from Dr. Frank Longo, MD, PhD, and Professor Lucy Becker. They discuss the intricacy human mind and how different types of memory and memory loss function : Learning and Memory how it works and when it fails

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