Face blindness (Prosopagnosia) grip people: know some major reasons
Facial blindness is a rare syndrome but grabs attention to
clinicians, researchers and psychologists. In fundamental term, Prosopagnosia
is a neurological ailment in which people have difficulty in recognizing faces
of persons they know or they do not differentiate faces of different people.
Another name of face blindness is facial agnosia. Patients also can’t construe facial
expressions and cues. Face blindness is due to serious aberrations, injury, or
impairment in the right fusiform gyrus, a fold in the brain which synchronise
the neural systems that control facial perception and memory. The ailment of
face blindness grip persons from birth and they suffer with it in their whole
life.
Patients suffering from prosopagnosia show following
symptoms:
This contains two forms, one is apperceptive and another is
associative. In apperceptive prosopagnosia, patients cannot identify facial
expressions of persons or other non-verbal signals. In another form of
associative prosopagnosia, patients have difficulty in identifying faces which
are familiar to them. It is opined that main symptoms is inability to recognize
faces of persons. Patients can identify other person through their voice or listening
sound of their walk.
Major causes of prosopagnosia in persons:
Facial blindness is occurred due to some brain injury,
stroke or neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia. Children who grip under autism or Asperger’s
syndrome may show symptoms of face blindness.
Prosopagnosia is categorized in two types:
Person who has developmental prosopagnosia do not undergo
any brain damage. They simply unable to identify faces of people. They have
facial blindness since birth and do not realize such medical ailment. It can be
said that this disease is genetic and gets transferred to off springs.
Acquired prosopagnosia: This medical syndrome seems to be
uncommon case. In such cases, prosopagnosia is developed when there is
traumatic brain injury or a stroke. When this syndrome occurs in patients, they
instantly aware that they are not capable to recognize familiar faces.
It is to be mentioned that Prosopagnosia is not associated
with psychological dysfunctions like memory issues, vision loss or learning
frailties. It may be a repercussion of other developmental disorders, such as
autism spectrum disorder, Turner syndrome or Williams’s syndrome.
Neuropsychological Diagnostic Tests:
There are three types of diagnostic tests to detect this
syndrome:
1. Perception tests can precisely investigate the ability
of patient to distinguish between different visual facial stimuli.
2. Recognition tests is conducted to evaluate person’s
short and long term recognition patterns of faces.
3. Facial identification test is performed to check other
auditory or tactile cues like naming to recognize facial stimuli.
Negative impact of face blindness:
It is imperative to
take great care of patients suffering from facial blindness. Because there are
some negative outcomes of this syndrome such as social anxiety disorder in
which they try to escape from social situations like parties and have problem
in social interaction. This leads to avoiding social settings as they have
problem to develop friends, interaction with colleagues which may have serious
effect on their career. Patients may also
suffer with depression.
Treating tactics for Prosopagnosia:
There is no cure available for Facial blindness or
prosopagnosia. Researchers and doctors are constantly exploring the reasons of
this ailment and accordingly, they conduct training sessions to lessen the
impact of disease and help to augment facial recognition. Doctors believed that
compensatory strategies will aid patients to restore familiar faces.
Crucial factor that lead to this serious syndrome are
person's age at which brain injury happened, the type and severity of the brain
injury, and treatment timing.
To condense the factual information, Face blindness or
Prosopagnosia is pigeonholed as a brain ailment which makes people incapable to
recognize familiar faces. Certain conditions leads to face blindness are
stroke, traumatic brain injury, or some neurodegenerative syndromes.
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