While browsing the Internet looking for inspiration for a new story, I came across a November 2006 article from Wired.com about people who have a neurological condition known as "face blindness".
People who are otherwise "completely normal"(whatever that may be!) have trouble recognising faces. This is more than thinking that many people look similar or forgetting where you've met someone before; people with face blindness won't even recognise those closest to them like their own family and close friend.
In modern times, face blindness was first described in 1944 by German doctor Joachim Bodamer who termed it "prosopagnosia" from the Greek prosopo (face) and agnosia (without knowledge). According to the article "there [have] been reports of face blindness as far back as antiquity, but no one had studied it systematically, so the physician decided to make a detailed analysis."
In the coming decades researchers tried learning more about prosopagnosia, however as there were so few cases to study, face blindness remained mostly a mystery. That is, until the advent of the Internet when one man with face blindness, Bill Choisser, posted about it online in 1996, looking for others who suffered from the same condition. The first reply came after a few months, and from that point on, a select group of people found others who understood them and knew exactly what they were going through.
Read more about face blindness over at Wired.com, at Time Magazine or at the Faceblind.org website. Enjoy!
People who are otherwise "completely normal"(whatever that may be!) have trouble recognising faces. This is more than thinking that many people look similar or forgetting where you've met someone before; people with face blindness won't even recognise those closest to them like their own family and close friend.
In modern times, face blindness was first described in 1944 by German doctor Joachim Bodamer who termed it "prosopagnosia" from the Greek prosopo (face) and agnosia (without knowledge). According to the article "there [have] been reports of face blindness as far back as antiquity, but no one had studied it systematically, so the physician decided to make a detailed analysis."
In the coming decades researchers tried learning more about prosopagnosia, however as there were so few cases to study, face blindness remained mostly a mystery. That is, until the advent of the Internet when one man with face blindness, Bill Choisser, posted about it online in 1996, looking for others who suffered from the same condition. The first reply came after a few months, and from that point on, a select group of people found others who understood them and knew exactly what they were going through.
Read more about face blindness over at Wired.com, at Time Magazine or at the Faceblind.org website. Enjoy!
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