Living with and researching faceblindness
The condition prosopagnosia – or face-blindness – was the subject of a fascinating public lecture held...
Living with and researching faceblindness
The condition prosopagnosia – or face-blindness – was the subject of a fascinating public lecture held at Birkbeck on 20 September.
People with face-blindness are unable to recognise faces, sometimes including those of their family members, or their own faces in the mirror. Although there are some rare cases in which face-blindness is the result of brain damage caused by an accident or a stroke, most sufferers (an estimated 2% of the population) have a “developmental” form of the condition, where it typically emerges at an early age, and without any visible brain abnormality or damage. Many people never have the condition diagnosed, and sometimes don’t even realise that they see faces differently to everybody else.
Famous people with faceblindness include the journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, Duncan Bannatyne of Dragon’s Den, and Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author of The Man Who mistook His Wife for a Hat.
With a view to raising awareness and understanding of the condition, Birkbeck held a public lecture on the subject of face-blindness on 20 September. This was the largest gathering of people with face-blindness that there has been. Researchers presented the latest neuroscientific insights into our ability to recognise and perceive faces, and described how this ability is impaired in face-blindness, and people with the condition talked about how it affected their lives.
One sufferer, Jo Livingston, was sixty years old before her inability to recognise faces was diagnosed as face-blindness. “I look at my daughter or at pictures of my husband, and I don’t recognise them,” she said. “Over the years you develop strategies to help you identify people, like where a particular colleague sits in the office, or their hair, or how they walk, but inevitably there are situations where these strategies don’t work, and it can be upsetting and awkward when you can’t work out who it is you’re talking to, or mistake them for someone else.”
Professor Martin Eimer of Birkbeck’s Brain and Behaviour Lab commented: “Initially research was focused on acquired face-blindness, which is caused by brain damage, but over recent years it has become apparent that developmental face-blindness is far more common than we initially realised. As these people have never had normal face recognition abilities, they often don’t realise that they have a condition and are not diagnosed until they are teenagers or adults. Our research is trying to understand how the brain processes information about faces, and which aspects of face perception or face recognition are impaired in individuals with face-blindness.”
Birkbeck’s Brain and Behaviour Lab studies perception, attention and the control of action. Their primary aim is to uncover cognitive mechanisms responsible for the normal performance in healthy adult humans, but they also study the disruption of such mechanisms caused by developmental factors or by brain damage.