2024-03-24 17:40:50
Scientists have recently highlighted an extremely rare visual disorder, prosopometamorphopsia. When you suffer from it, the faces of human beings can then be completely distorted to your eyes. The cause of this disorder, which affects a few dozen people, is not known. is not defined.
Humans with pointy ears, gigantic eyes, and mouths cut right to the edges of their faces? No, it’s not a bad film, but an extremely rare visual disorder recently highlighted by a study. In the medical journal The Lancet, researchers analyzed the causes of this disorder which officially affects only a few dozen people in the world. Among them ? Victor Sharrah, a 58-year-old American.
“A world of demons”
ANTONIO MELLO / DARTMOUTH COLLEGE / AFP
An abnormal experience in the brain involved?
Unlike other patients, this fifty-year-old still sees normal faces when they are in two dimensions, on screen or on paper. This unique feature allowed Antonio Mello and other researchers at Darthmouth College (United States) to create the first images, almost as realistic as photos, representing the perception of faces by people with PMO, they explain. in a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.
To create these images, researchers asked Victor Sharrah to compare photos of Antonio Mello and another person’s face on a computer screen with the distortions he might see in their real faces. Such a comparison was previously difficult, because when other people with the same disorder looked at any image of a face, they saw distortions.
Around 75 cases of prosopometamorphopsia have been reported to date in the scientific literature. But the researchers’ laboratory has been contacted by more than 70 patients over the past three years. The disorder’s terrifying symptoms mean it is often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia or psychosis.
IN with AFP
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