Is face blindness hereditary?

In life, many people often experience the feeling of not being able to recognize others. Some people can recognize others immediately after seeing them, but some people look confused after seeing others. This kind of thing is not intentional, but may be caused by face blindness. Most cases of face blindness may be hereditary, but there may be many others.

How to treat face blindness

In life, most people can easily recognize the person they are interacting with after a few contacts. However, there is a type of person, whether they are friends or family, who often become strangers to them and they just pass each other by. Jem Hurd, a professor in the art department of an American university, is one of them. Acquaintances often greet Hurd on the street. But he had no idea who this person was, so he could only pretend to know him to avoid causing misunderstanding. Among the many faces that Hurd could not recognize, his own was also one of them. This is the so-called "face blindness", scientifically known as "prosopagnosia" or "face amnesia".

There are many patients with face recognition loss. Many people have some deficiencies in facial recognition ability, whether mild or severe, but it does not affect their normal work and life. However, some people have more severe symptoms.

The first person to study face blindness as a disease was German neurologist Joachim Bodamer, who in 1947 recorded three brain-injured patients who were unable to recognize medical staff or even relatives. So he named this disease prosopagnosia, and later this disease became popular because of the American science fiction "A Man Who Can't Tell the Difference Between His Wife and His Hat".

There are two types of patients: one is unable to see other people's faces clearly, and the other is unable to recognize other people's faces and can only rely on other details to identify them, such as hairstyle, voice, walking posture, color of glasses, etc. However, when these external features change, the face recognition patients cannot tell who the other person is.

Prosopagnosia is highly hereditary. If you have facial recognition problems, your parents are likely to also suffer from prosopagnosia. The prevalence of the disease in the general population is about one in fifty. , 2% to 3% of people worldwide suffer from this perceptual defect.

The brain of a person with prosopagnosia:

Although patients with prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing faces, their brain memory ability is no different from that of ordinary people, and they have no other problems. So what exactly causes patients with prosopagnosia to be unable to recognize people's faces?

In the human brain, there is a mechanism specifically designed to process facial information reflected by the visual system. If something goes wrong in any link during the processing, it will lead to obstacles in facial recognition. Congenital weakness in a certain brain function is the cause of prosopagnosia. Similar situations include dysgraphia and dyslexia. Dartmouth College Psychology

Professor Du Ji, a brain expert, once recruited 12 patients with prosopagnosia and used high-end conduction equipment to monitor the patients' brain function when they looked at celebrity photos. He found that when the patients saw the photos, the area of ​​the brain responsible for storing visual memories was indeed triggered, but there was a problem in the process of transmitting the information.

Neurological experts believe that the brain sets up different areas to recognize and process information for different objects seen by the eyes. Four areas have been discovered so far: one is the area that processes information about the human body, such as hands, feet, limbs, and torso; the second is the area that processes information about places, locations, and building locations, such as the structural layout of halls, rooms, and corridors; the third is the exclusive area for recognizing faces; and the fourth is the non-exclusive area for identifying all other objective objects. However, if there is a problem in the communication between the face-specific area and the memory area in the brain, face blindness will occur. For example, after the face of a family member is recognized in the face-specific area, no subsequent reaction can occur in the memory area, and no related memory can be formed.