Prosopometamorphopsia, a terrifying visual disorder that transforms you into “monsters”

Scientists have recently shed light on an extremely rare visual disorder, prosopametamorphopsia.

When you have this condition, people’s faces can become completely distorted before your eyes.

The cause of this disorder, which affects several dozen people, is not defined.

Men with pointy ears, wide eyes and mouths cut right off the edges of their faces? No, it’s not a bad movie, but an extremely rare visual disorder that was recently highlighted by a study. In Medical Journal The Lancet, researchers analyzed the causes of this disorder that officially affects only a few dozen people in the world. between them? Victor Sharah, 58-year-old American.

“World of Demons”

One day, this man gets up and walks his dog down the street. The faces of all the passers-by around him are distorted. “My first thought was that I had woken up in a world of monsters.”

he told AFP. “I started to panic.” And think that “I was going to intern in psychiatry”, the chef rewind. If he doesn’t have “I totally lost my mind”He suffers from an extremely rare visual disorder called prosopomamorphopsia (PMO), which distorts faces without preventing their recognition.

If Victor Sharah sees demonic-looking faces, others experience ghost-like features, Antonio Mello, an expert researcher at the PMO, explained to AFP. Some see one half face underneath the other, others see purple or green faces, or faces in constant motion. Sometimes the disease manifests itself only for a few days. More than three years later, Victor Sharah still suffers from it.

Is the brain involved in an unusual experience?

Unlike other patients, this fifty-year-old still sees normal faces when they are in two dimensions, on a screen or on paper. This unique feature allowed Antonio Mello and other researchers from Dartmouth College (United States) to create the first images, almost as realistic as photos, that represent the perception of the faces of people with PMO, they say in a study published in the Medical Journal. The Lancet

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To create these images, the researchers asked Victor Sharah to compare photos of Antonio Mello’s and another man’s faces on a computer screen with the distortions they could see in their real faces. Such comparisons have previously been difficult, because when other people with the same disorder looked at any facial image, they saw distortions.

The exact cause of the disorder remains unknown. According to University of British Columbia neurologist Jason Barton, they can be multiple. In most cases, “Something happened in the brain that is associated with this unusual experience”, he told AFP. If Victor Sharah has a brain lesion, the result of an injury he suffered while working as a truck driver in 2007, according to Antonio Mello, it is not connected to his disorder, as MRI images have traced his lesion to the hippocampus. the brain “Image processing network not associated”

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About 75 cases of prosopametamorphopsia have been reported in the scientific literature to date. But the researchers’ lab has been contacted by more than 70 patients over the past three years. The terrifying symptoms of the disorder mean it is often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia or psychosis.