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For 59-year-old Victor Sharah, the terrible symptoms began on a winter day in Nashville.
“I just woke up and was sitting on the couch watching TV when my roommate walked into the room and[looked at him]'What am I watching?' Then his girlfriend came in and her face was the same,” Sharah told .
Each of the once-familiar faces had a terrifying grimace, long eyes, and deeply etched scars. As he turns to the side, the pointed ears suddenly pop out, just like Spock, Vulcan's first officer on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek.
“I tried to explain what I was seeing to my roommate, and I thought it was him. Then I went outside and all the people I saw were disfigured and still there.” said Sharah.
He added: “It's like looking at demons. Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everyone in the world looks like a creature from a horror movie.
Sharah has a rare condition called prosopametamorphosis, or PMO, in which parts of other people's faces appear distorted in shape, texture, position or color. Objects and other parts of the human body, however, normally remain intact.
“I helped create a 2D computer-generated image of what I see in faces, but there's a lot more to it,” Sharah says of the research on the subject, published inClinical pictures Lancet Thursday section.
“What people don't understand from a picture is that the distorted face is moving, swaying, talking, making facial expressions,” he added. “It makes me a little more distant from other people. I try not to let it be PMO because I know what it is. But I still feel like I'm not as close to people as I used to be.”
Prosopometamorphopsia is different from “.Face blind” The situation shared by actor Brad Pitt, who was the former governor of Colorado John HickenlooperThe famous neurologist Dr. Oliver SacksCrown Princess Victoria of Sweden and probably more 1 out of 50 people. In face blindness, faces are not distorted; Instead, the brain simply has trouble recognizing faces, even familiar faces—making almost all of them strange.
But with PMO, a person often has no problem recognizing the face of a loved one or a familiar face, but this face becomes distorted, often in predictable ways.
“For me, the basic deformity is the same for everyone, the lines on the face, the stretching of the eyes and the mouth and the ears,” Sharah said. But the size and shape of a person's face or head, as well as the way it moves, can vary and change how distorted it can be.
Some people with PMO find their face distorted or disfigured. Two patients “stood in front of a mirror and saw one eye sticking out of its socket and down the cheek,” he said. April 2023 Literature Review.
For people with this disease, like Victor, every other person's face looks like a “fungus mirror” that is wrong. A published case study. Others see only half of the face as crooked or disfigured.
A patient after the removal of a tumor from the left side of the brain It is described On the right side of the doctor's face, “His eye became a loving socket, his cheekbone a hollow.” It had teeth on the upper lip, often two ears. Others with PMO have described their faces wistfully as “clocks in a Dali painting” or “changing kaleidoscopically.”
Still other faces were seen turning inside out. Dragons Or fish heads, or ears sticking out of people's heads. Some sufferers report seeing short arms attached to faces, people's eyes protruding from the skull and rotating in front of them, or third eyes looking between people's foreheads.
“The woman who saw dragons started seeing them at a young age, so there are cases of PMO development where people grow up with this disease and don't know that faces are different,” says psychology professor Brad Duchaine. and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
There are only 81 cases of PMO in the published literature; As of June 2021 reviewBut there may be more people living with the disease, said Duchaine, senior author of the Lancet case study.
“We He started a website So people can learn about PMO, and we've heard from at least 80 people so far,” he said. “And we're finding that people from all over the world are reporting the same symptoms without knowing that others have the disease.”
“With so little knowledge, many people with PMO may be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other similar hallucinological conditions and put on antipsychotic drugs or even institutionalized,” said Antonio Vitor Reyes Goncalves Mello, a doctoral student in psychology and psychiatry at Dartmouth. He is the first author on the case study.
However, science now knows that people can develop PMO after a brain injury, tumor or infection, or after seizures such as epilepsy, he said.
“One good piece of evidence is that in more than 50% of half-faced cases, for example, the patient has damage to a specific part of the brain,” he said. “We're pretty sure they wouldn't do it under those circumstances, so when other people come along and report similar experiences, it seems unlikely that they're not true.”
'Evil, twisted and distorted'
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a youth, Sharah struggled with a mental illness that worsened into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a stint in the US Marine Corps.
“I was in Beirut. October 23, 1983 When they bombed our neighborhood. And whenever something goes wrong in my life, my biggest battle is suicidal ideation – that's the first place my mind turns to,” he said.
As part of the settlement, Sharah is a longtime member of Facebook's suicide support group. Adding to his fears that he was being abused after he began to misbehave, he posted his symptoms online.
“I feel like I'm shutting down. Like I'm dying inside. Every face I see that isn't on the screen looks evil, twisted and distorted. I mean it literally looks like something out of a John Carpenter movie,” he wrote in January 2020.
“I've become cold, hateful and apathetic. I don't know how to stop. It might be too late.”
In Casper, Wyoming, Kathryn Morris was waiting for a meeting to start and happened to check Facebook, where she volunteered for a similar suicide support group. After working in schools with the visually impaired for more than 30 years, she knew how people sometimes see visual disturbances, how their brains perceive different colors and light intensities.
“I saw his post come up and I thought, what can I do? I can reach out and maybe help him, but I don't want to give him false hope,” Morris said.
Morris learned from her training that such distortions can occur in a part of the brain called the facet gyrus, which is responsible for face perception, object recognition and reading. Light distorts, so she thought the solution might be to find a different color or amount of light that could reduce the signal.
“I bought one of the multi-colored light bulbs that Kathryn from Wyoming managed through an app,” says Sharah. “Then we got on the video call and did a lot of our own testing.”
Fearing for his mental health, Morris asked Sharan for his phone number and address before the tests because “I was going to call 911 if he got really mad.”
Then she had him look into a mirror as she used light colors.
“When I got to the wrong color of light, the red light that aggravated the distortions, I watched it happen. He began to panic. He came off the screen and the expression on his face was horrifying,” Morris said.
“I told him to close his eyes and remember that this is not real, that his mind is playing tricks. “Then I moved the light to green and asked him to open his eyes. He did and the twist disappeared. And he just sits there and bawls like a baby.
Buoyed by their success, Morris ordered glasses painted in the correct shade of green. Shara sent them a quick delivery, knowing that he would soon be able to see his estranged daughter and meet his grandchildren for the first time.
“And they arrived in the morning to meet the grandchildren,” she said. “I met them for the first time and they seem familiar.”
Treatment and education is the goal
Today, Sharah is working closely with Duchaine and Mello in their lab at Dartmouth, testing various interventions to alleviate or reverse PMO symptoms.
Research has replicated the benefits of green lenses for treating PMS symptoms and found that using the colors in the lenses has helped other people with PMO – although the colors that work may vary. Another promising treatment – showing people with PMO a fully balanced face, which reduces distortion.
“If this stands up to further testing, perhaps glasses can be made to help people see faces more accurately,” Mello said.
But one of the big breakthroughs came when the team realized that Sharara didn't see distortions in 2D images.
“Most participants with PMO see faces in real life with distortions and faces in images, which makes us misrepresent what they're seeing,” Morrow said. “With Victor, we were able to get him to describe a real person's face while looking at a picture of them until he reflected the distortions he saw.
The study is “an amazing piece of work” and the first time an accurate description of PMO has been established, said Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, a psychiatrist who heads the outpatient clinic at the Parnassia Institute of Psychiatry in The Hague, the Netherlands.
For Sharah, the research is a way to help save someone else from being misdiagnosed by doctors who don't know about a rare syndrome.
“I committed myself to a mental hospital, and one of the people who got to Dartmouth was institutionalized for psychosis. How many other people are institutionalized…