Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a neurological disorder where people cannot recognize faces. There are varying degrees to this disorder, but the effects can be devastating for all sufferers. In a few extreme cases face blind people can’t even recognize their own face.
In a past blog, we reported that science has not yet been able to concretely say what areas of the brain are exclusively dedicated to face processing. But they do know that there are two sides to this spectrum. There are the sufferers of “face blindness” as mentioned above and there are a very few of us who find it difficult to NOT recognize a face even if they only encountered it briefly years ago. The latter are dubbed “super recognizers”.
NBC News reports on the progress that science is making in understanding the brain and where face recognition and face blindness originate. Researchers Parvizi and Kalant Grill-Spector, from Stanford, wrote an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience that they have found critical areas of the brain that are responsible for face recognition, which they call “mFus- and pFus-faces”.
Scientists have known for a while that people, and at least some primates, have an area of the brain that’s responsible for processing faces specifically. We’ve evolved it, Grill-Spector explained in an interview.
Parvizi and Grill-Spector concluded that if the fusiform gyrus, located in the temporal lobe, is injured, people can lose the ability to recognize faces, even of people they’ve known for a long time. People can also be born with prosopagnosia.
Grill-Spector goes on to state, “because we’re social beings. We need to know who our friends and enemies are, who’s a family member, who we can trust.“
To read the entire article click here.
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