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.