A very rare and unheard disorder was detected in a man in the United States in which the faces of other people appeared to him distorted and demonic even though he always had a sharp vision.
This rare disease was detected in the man on one fine day in November 2020, he noticed out of the blue the faces of people started appearing demonic to him.
The nose, ears and mouth in everyone’s face appeared stretched back and deep grooves appeared on the chins, cheeks and foreheads.
“My first thought was I woke up in a demon world. You can’t imagine how scary it was,” said 59-year-old Sharrah, of Clarksville, Tennessee, as reported by NBC News.
Sharrah’s one acquaintance, who taught visually impaired people, said to him that he is likely to have been suffering from prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO.
The man felt that his symptoms matched with the disease and was formally diagnosed last year.
What is PMO?
PMO is an extremely rare neurological disorder that a person suffers in his/her perception and makes other people’s faces appear distorted in size, shape, size, colour or texture.
The distortions are only seen when the person, suffering from the ailment, sees the other person in real and not in photographs or on computer screens.
The case gave scientists a chance to visualise how the warped faces appeared for someone with PMO. Dartmouth College’s researchers created a digital representation of what Sharrah has been seeing. The digital representation was published in The Lancet on Thursday (Mar 21).
For creating the visual images, Sharrah was asked by the researchers to describe how the photograph of people appeared different from their real-life faces.
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Then, image-editing software was used by the researchers to modify the pictures and match them with the description given by Sharrah.
In some cases, the PMO symptoms get resolved after a few weeks or days and in others, it can linger for years. Sharrah added that he continues to see demonic faces.
Till now, there are less than 100 published case reports of people suffering from PMO. According to the researchers, the dysfunction in the brain network which manages facial processing leads to the disease.
In some cases, it has also been linked to migraines, epilepsy, head trauma and stroke but others have been found to suffer PMO without any structural changes in their brains.
The study’s lead author and Ph. D. student Antonio Mello, who works in the Social Perception Lab, at Dartmouth, said that others have also approached their lab and informed about the PMO symptoms which differ significantly from Sharrah’s symptoms.
Some people “have seen face distortions since they remember, since they were a child,” said Mello. “For them at least, it’s impossible to find a single event that was responsible,” he added.
(With inputs from agencies)
