Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder which is characterized by the inability to recognize faces. It is also known as facial blindness or as facial agnosia. The term prosopagnosia game from a Greek word- prosop means face and agnosia means lack of knowledge. In this disease, people face difficulty to recognize a familiar face and some others will be unable to discriminate between unknown faces or in some cases people are unable to distinguish faces as a different beings from an object and some are unable to recognize their own faces.

Prosopagnosia is not a memory dysfunction, impaired vision, memory loss or some kind of learning disabilities. It is basically the abnormalities, impairment or damage in the right fusiform gyrus, it is a part which is situated next to hippocampus in the brain and appears to coordinate the neural systems that control the facial perception and memory.

In some cases it is a congenital disorder which takes place while both due to any kind of brain damage, and in this case sometimes it runs in the families generation to generation, which is why sometimes it is called as a genetic mutation or deletion. It also can came from some sort of traumatic brain injury or certain neurodegenerative diseases and as a result of strokes. Sometimes it’s also shown on the children to which is known as Autism and Asperger’s syndrome.

In the case of prosopagnosia people initially uses other ways to identify people, such as relying on voices, clothing or some kind of unique physical attributes, but this couldn’t help them to identify the face.

Conclusion:

The National Institute of neurological disorder and stroke in bracket (NINDS) Conduct research related to prosopagnosia in their laboratories. More of these researchers focuses on the findings of better ways to prevent and treat people with such disorder and ultimately to the cure of this dysfunctions. The focus of any kind of treatment should be to help the individual with prosopagnosia to develop other compensatory strategies to cope up with.

Written By:

Ms Susmita Das 

Volunteer of AFRS