Associated symptoms | Face Blindness

Associated symptoms

If face blindness exists from birth, as is the case with most people, the handicap is usually not noticeable at all, as they do not show any real symptoms. However, face-blind people often suffer from a certain degree of social insecurity and feel uncomfortable in large crowds because they do not recognize familiar people at first glance, which can lead to embarrassing situations. For example, they often walk past friends and acquaintances without greeting them because they simply did not recognize them.

They can therefore inadvertently appear unfriendly. Especially in childhood, face-blind people are therefore more often victims of exclusion and find it difficult to connect with their peers. In the worst case, this can have a negative effect on the child’s social development. Apart from such social difficulties, however, people with prosopagnosia have no other limitations, since congenital face blindness has nothing to do with psychiatric or neurological disorders. Their perception, concentration and intelligence are therefore completely normal.

Can face blindness be treated at all?

Face blindness is not a real disease and cannot be cured. In the vast majority of cases, those affected have compensated their handicap well over the years and may not even know about their condition. Therefore, if there are no limitations caused by face blindness, it does not need to be treated.

If the affected persons have problems in their everyday life, they can learn to identify friends and acquaintances by means of other characteristics, such as recognizing their voice. Such strategies can be learned and trained, if the affected person has not already done so subconsciously. So if the person comes to the doctor with his or her problems, these face-independent recognition strategies can be trained therapeutically. In the rare case of acquired face blindness, which is triggered, for example, by craniocerebral trauma or a stroke and the disorder can be clearly attributed to damage to the relevant brain regions, there is usually no proper therapy. In these cases, the exact cause is known, but in addition to face blindness, those affected usually have much more serious symptoms that require treatment.