The most interesting topics to me from Perception are those concerning malfunctions of senses. For example, I was fascinated by prosopagnosia, the condition where a patient can see and describe another person’s face but cannot identify whose face it is, even if the person was very familiar to them. Even an intimate partner’s face is unrecognizable to the patient.
Prosopagnosia is usually accompanied by damage to the brain in the regions of the temporal lobe. Interestingly enough, this area houses the fusiform gyrus which many psychologists have pinpointed as the face recognition area. However, subsequent research has shown that this is not only a face recognition area, but a quasi-expertise area. That is, when bird experts are shown pictures of birds, this area becomes activated as well. With novice people are trained to become experts in object recognition of an novel object, this area becomes increasingly activated as the participants get more practice. People who are experts in certain object recognition but have this impairment have been reported to lose their ability.
I went online to find blogs of people with prosopagnosia so I could put a face to this condition. I found this blog written by a Swedish woman named Cecilia Burman. She is a 30 year old with this condition. However, like many others, she did not recognize this disorder until she read about it on the Internet. It was a pivotal moment in her life and has actually helped explain many of the troubling things in her life.
Before searching for these blogs, I had wondered whether these people could ever have any sort of romantic relationships. It must be awfully hard to find a boyfriend if you can’t pick him out of a crowd. Also, imagine waking up next to someone you did not recognize. Must been pretty problematic. However, Cecilia is happily married to a man who understands this condition. Besides that, she can recognize his voice and, using contextual clues, she can identify the man that wakes up beside her in bed as her husband. But one can see how this condition can become dangerous. Imagine if someone took advantage of the situation and pretended to be Cecelia’s husband. She could go days without noticing if she were to base her decision on looks alone. However, like most conditions, the patients learn to adapt and she learns to recognize people through other means besides looks.
Someone else on a different blog described having the condition as having to discriminate between an elbow and a stone for people. I couldn’t possibly imagine living my life without the ability to distinguish between my friends and strangers. Even as I walk the paths at Vanderbilt, I get super excited when I see a familiar face. It actually brightens up my day, especially if I haven’t seen this person in a long time. Such is a pleasure that prosopagnosia patients will not have anymore.
