What is face blindness?
Face blindness, known in medicine as prosopagnosia, describes the inability to recognize familiar faces. Thus, friends, acquaintances and even family members are not recognized by facial features, as is usually the case, but by other characteristics such as voice, hairstyle, movements and so on. In most cases, face blindness is congenital.
It is primarily a genetic defect that can occur alone or as part of an underlying disease. Rarely, brain damage, such as after a craniocerebral trauma or stroke, is the cause of face blindness. With a frequency of 2.5%, prosopagnosia is not so rare.
Causes of face blindness
The cause of face blindness is a faulty circuitry in the part of the brain that connects the sensory perception of vision with other areas of the brain. As a result, the impressions the patient sees cannot be interpreted correctly, and the faces of known persons are seen but not recognized. It is therefore not a mental disorder, as it can occur, for example, after traumatization, but simply a mediation defect in the brain.
In the congenital form, face blindness is noticeable in that the children do not maintain eye contact and do not immediately recognize known persons. Therefore, the suspicion of an autistic disease often arises. However, face blindness does not affect emotional and social competence and is therefore not a subform of autism.
It is more difficult to differentiate in some autistic patients who perceive people around them like objects and where the emotional connection in the brain is disturbed when looking at these people. Even then, these patients find it difficult to recognize other people by their faces. However, this is not due to the facial blindness caused by a defect in the wiring of sensory perception, but rather by the disturbed emotional connection in the context of autistic disorder. Face blindness is therefore completely different from autism or Asperger’s syndrome, but may initially show similar symptoms. This could also be of interest to you: Autism – diagnosis and therapy
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