Prosopagnosia is thought to be caused by abnormalities, impairment or damage of a fold in the brain called the right fusiform gyrus. This area in the brain plays an important role in coordinating the neural systems that affect facial memory and perception.
Prosopagnosia can be caused by stroke, injury to the brain, or some neurodegenerative diseases. In some cases people are born with face blindness. It seems to be a genetic link, as it runs in families.
People with face blindness may struggle to notice differences in faces of strangers while others may even have a hard time recognizing familiar faces. It’s estimated to affect about 2 percent of the population.
The most common symptom is an inability to recognize or discriminate between faces. This may make forming relationships more difficult and it may be extremely difficult for people with face blindness to identify a person who shows up in a different setting than the one they’re used to.
People with a mild case may just have difficulty differentiating or identifying faces of strangers or people they don’t know well. Those with moderate to severe cases may struggle to recognize faces of people they see regularly, including family members and close friends. In very severe faces, people with face blindness may not recognize their own faces. This may cause social anxiety or depression.
In the case of children with face blindness, they may wait for their parent to wave before they come over to the car when being picked up from school. Or, they approach strangers thinking the stranger is their parent or someone they know. They may also fail to recognize people like neighbors, close relatives or family friends.
Additionally, such children may become withdrawn in public places and they may have difficulty following plots of characters in movies or TV shows. They will also have have difficulty making friends and can seem withdrawn at school, but confident at home.
Acquired prosopagnosia results from damage to the area of the brain associated with facial recognition.
There is no cure for face blindness. Treatment focuses on helping people mechanisms to better identify individuals such as hair type/style, height, body shape, voice, mannerisms and such.
The opposite of prosopagnosia is the skill of superior face recognition ability. People with this ability are called Super Recognizers.
Super Recognizers never forget a face. They can spot the same nameless extras that appear on different TV programs and advertising.
Research shows that Super Recognizers outperform most people at learning new faces and then recognizing them from head shots, they are better at deciding whether two photos of unfamiliar people are the same person or two different people and the ability appears to be inherited and is limited to faces.
While research has shown that in most circumstances training and experience don’t make people better at recognizing faces, certain government agencies have learned that recruiting Super Recognizers can be beneficial in, for example, situations where a person's face doesn’t seem to match their passport photo or it can decrease false conviction rates from evidence based on a suspect’s face being incorrectly matched to CCTV footage.
At present though it's not clear if Super Recognizers can use their ability to recognize faces outside their own ethnic group. It is well established that recognizing faces from another ethnic group is significantly harder than recognizing faces from your own ethnic group.
FBI Facial Recognition Technology
This is a government site so don't believe everything they say! This technology was used to track down some of the insurrectionists that stormed the capitol during the inauguration of President (yes, he IS the President!) Biden. READ
Washington state's largest county bans government use of facial recognition software...the county is home to facial recognition software makers Amazon and Microsoft. READ
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