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The
disorder was thought to be exceedingly rare and mainly a
result of brain injury. Until a few years ago there were
perhaps 100 documented cases, says Ken Nakayama, a
professor of psychology at Harvard. But a team of German
researches recently took the first stab at charting its
prevalence, and the results, published in June in the
American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, were
remarkable. The new study showed that prosopagnosia (from
Greek prosopon for face and agnosia for
ignorance) is highly heritable and surprisingly common,
afflicting, in some form, about 1 in 50 people - more than
5 million in USA alone.
Within
that group of sufferers, however, the condition varies
widely. For the vast majority, the problem is not so much
about detecting a face - prosopagnostics can see eyes,
noses and mouths as clearly as anyone else - as it is
about recognizing the same set of features when seeing
them again. It’s a disability that complicates
everything from following a movie plot to perp of a
lineup. While mild prosopagnostics can train themselves to
memorize a limited number of faces (it’s said to be like
learning to distinguish one stone from another), others
grapple with identifying family members and, in extreme
cases, their own face.
Most
prosopagnostics learn to cope early on. They distinguish
people based on cues like hairstyle, voice, gait or body
shape. They avoid places where they could unexpectedly run
into someone they know. They pretend to be lost in thought
while walking. They act friendly to everyone - or to no
one. In short, they become experts at masking their
dysfunction. That is probably why the disorder went
unnoticed for so long.
Sora
Song: Do I know you, Time, Sep 18, 2006, p.49.
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