Prosopagnosia

                                                     

     Imagine just for a moment if you woke up the next morning and you loss the ability to recognize the faces of the people around. Picture being able to remember who your members are but unable to recognize them if they came up to you, this neuropsychology is called prosopagnosia or face blindness. This rare and often debilitating neuropsychological disorder of face perception where the brains ability to recognize faces have been damaged or impaired by a stroke or brain injury of some kind, which results in a person to lose the ability to recognize the faces of people. Also nobody knows how the human brain’s facial recognition system works or how we are able to recognize the faces of different people. Prosopagnosia is broken up into two distinct types apperceptive and associative each subtype is very unique and affects an individual’s facial recognition system in its own way.

            Appreceptive prosopagnosia is a disorder by which an individual cannot make sense of faces and are unable to make same and or different decisions when ether they are presented with pictures of different people or when they see different people (pedia). Individuals with this disorder are unable to distinguish people’s faces from one another. These people are unable to recognize the similarities and differences between different people faces, so to them everyone looks the same. For example an individual may not be able to tell the difference between their spouse’s face and the faces of their children or people they may encounter on the street.

            The second type of prosopagnosia is associative prosopagnosia this disorder is characterized by an individual’s inability to identify a person or recall any information about that person such name or where they know them from even if the person is a family member. What makes associative prosopagnosia so unique is that the individual with this disorder can still describe the similarities and differences between the faces of different people and determine their age and gender. Individuals with this disorder can recognize faces they just cannot remember who the person is. For example the sufferer may be able to tell that a person is male or female and maybe the ethnicity of that particular person but they just cannot recall who that person is. But these people maybe still able to recognize and produce such information based on non-facial cues such as clothing, voice or hair color (crystal). A person Associative prosopagnosia is a disorder where the link between an individuals ability to recognize a person’s face and information they hold about that person in their memories is somehow is damaged.

            One of the most fascinating features of prosopagnosia is that highlights the link between conscious and unconscious facial recognition. Research has shown that when people with prosopagnosia are presented with a mixture of pictures with familiar and unfamiliar faces people with prosopagnosia are unable to recognize the faces. But when their emotional response to the pictures of the familiar and unfamiliar faces were measured the individual would produce an emotional response to the photographs of the familiar faces without them consciously knowing it (crystal). The individual with prosopagnosia is unable to recognize the familiar persons face or recall any information about but the emotional connection the sufferer has to that person is still intact.

            Prosopagnosia is neuropsychological disorder which there is no cure for. One cannot imagine life without being unable to see or recognize the faces of the people they love or unable to remember anything about them.  Prosopagnosia is neuropsychological disorder that forces a person to live in a world of strangers. It forces them to live in a world where the faces of their family and friends are unrecognizable and its strips away the sufferer’s identity as while because they are unable to recognize their own face when they look in the mirror.