The scientific name is Prosopometamorphopsia or Pmo, but it is better known as “the devil's disease”. It is a very rare syndrome, whose disturbing symptoms make the facial features of others appear distorted. The scientific newspaper The Lancet has now released the first images showing how those who suffer from this disorder perceive faces.
“It's like staring at demons. Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everyone in the world looks like a creature from a horror movie,” he explained to CNN Sharrah, who suffers from this disorder and who helped with her instructions “to create a 2D computer-generated image of what I see in faces”. A sort of identikit published in the “Clinical Pictures” section of The Lancet.
“I tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing and he thought I was crazy. Then I went outside and all the people's faces I saw were distorted and still are,” Sharrah said. “It's like staring at demons,” he added. “Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everyone in the world seems like a creature from a horror movie.”
This rare condition causes parts of other people's faces to appear distorted in shape, texture, position, or color. Objects and other parts of a person's body, however, generally remain undisturbed.
In the research, the distortions described by those suffering from the syndrome are reported: heavily elongated facial features, with deep furrows on the forehead, cheeks and chin. Distortions present on the face of every person he met, but which did not appear when observing objects, such as houses or cars nor – and perhaps this is one of the interesting points – on facial images that were shown to him on paper or on silkscreen.
“It is a visual disorder, not a psychiatric one”
Furthermore, the distortions – we read above TheLancet – are not accompanied by delusional beliefs about people's identities. This means that “theirs is not a mental problem, but rather a problem of the visual system”, explains Brad Duchaine, professor of psychology and brain sciences and senior author of the study whose lead author is Antônio Mello, doctoral student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Dartmouth brain. “And it is not uncommon – Duchaine remarks – that people with Pma do not talk to others about how they see faces for fear that they will consider it a sign of a psychiatric disorder”.
The aim of the study – explain the authors – is to understand what the “devil-seeing syndrome” is by raising awareness among public opinion and the medical community, so as to begin to trace a path to understand the origin of the disease and study its possible treatment.
