Face blindness is the inability to recognize faces. Strangely enough, one who suffers from this disorder still has the ability to recognize other objects. Cases of this disease are rarely reported as they are dismissed as being anything more than forgetfulness. But lately it has been discovered that more and more people are suffering from face blindness. Other symptoms that are carried by this disability are impairments in place recognition and facial expressions.
There are three types of this disorder: Apperceptive Prosopagnosia, which is face blindness in the earliest of stages; Associative Prosopagnosia, which is believed to be a problem in the link between face perception and information that is held about people in our memories; and Developmental Prosopagnosia, a kind of selective disorder that is affects the recognition and perception of faces.
In the case of Apperceptive Prosopagnosia, people cannot make any sense out of the faces that they see and they cannot tell the similarities and differences of faces when they are presented pictures of people. They also cannot distinguish particular factors in a face such as age and gender. Interestingly, those who suffer from this are still able to recognize peoples through the clothing that they wear, hairstyles, and through voice patterns.
Unlike the aforementioned, people with Associative Prosopagnosia are able to recognize faces and also distinguish them apart from looking at pictures. They can also tell the age and gender of a person by looking at their faces. What they cannot do is actually identify the person or give any information such as a name, what they do or the last time they met with them.
Developmental Prosopagnosia is believed to be inherited and it is therefore suggested that there are people who are more than likely to be born with it. Other developmental disorders include autism which is also somehow connected to a difficulty of face perception. How this happens is still unknown to most of the medical community.
This disease has also caused many to sacrifice their social lives in general. People who suffer from this decision have found it difficult to recognize people so they try to avoid people as much as they can. Another problem is security. If a person suffering from this condition is harassed or victimized in any way by a third party, chances are that person will not be able to point out his or her attacker when presented the opportunity to do so.
It was originally thought that this was an extremely rare condition. Now that the statistics say otherwise (probably 1 in 50 people suffer from this disease), scientists are more determined to find the cause of this disease which is now believed to be affecting a very large population worldwide. However, most of the cases that are known to be affecting people are mild. Doctors around the world hope that more people can come forward so that more data can be collected to make an even more substantial study on the disease. There is still no known cause of the disease but it is suspected to be problem that stems from the brain.
