Imagine waking up one day and suddenly seeing frightening distortions in the faces of everyone around you.
This happens in patients with prosopometamorphopsia or popularly known as “demon face” syndrome. It is an extremely rare neurological disorder that affects the way the brain processes the image of a person’s face.
Researchers from Dartmouth College in the US analyzed the case of Victor Sharrah, a 58-year-old man who had been suffering from symptoms of the disease for several years.
One day he woke up and started seeing his roommates’ faces distorted.
“I tried to explain to them what I saw and they thought I was crazy. “So I left home and since then all the faces I see are distorted,” he said.
From Sharrah’s stories, researchers managed to create 2D representations of the distortions this man sees and shared their finding in the journal The Lancet.
“Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everyone in the world looks like creatures from a horror movie. “It’s like seeing demons,” he said.
Distortions vary from patient to patient and can affect the shape, texture, position or color of facial features.
Therefore, the representations made in this study are specific to Sharrah. In their case, people’s faces stretch and their ears become perked.
According to experts, only a few hundred cases of prosopometamorphopsia have been recorded worldwide in recent decades.
In addition, patients with this condition are often misdiagnosed with psychiatric problems such as schizophrenia.
In any case, further studies are needed because medicine cannot yet say exactly what can cause the distortions of this strange “demonic face” syndrome.
In some cases, patients suffered seizures or suffered a stroke. Researchers therefore said that there is still a lot to know about this rare disease.
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