Imagine waking up one morning and everyone looks like Helen Thomas.....
The street corners:
The crosswalks:
The lobby:
The elevator:
The office:
The grocery store:
The gas station:
The library:
Proof that life could always be worse!
Posted on 07/19/2006 6:22:21 AM PDT by neverdem
Some people never forget a face. Heather Sellers never remembers one.
She finds it almost impossible to recognize people simply by looking at them. She remembers the books she reads as well as anyone else, but movies and TV shows are impossible to follow because all of the actors’ faces seem so similar. She can recall a name or a telephone number with ease, but she is unable to remember her own face well enough to pick it out in a group photograph.
Dr. Sellers, a professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Mich., has a disorder called prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and she has had it since birth. “I see faces that are human,” she said, “but they all look more or less the same. It’s like looking at a bunch of golden retrievers: some may seem a little older or smaller or bigger, but essentially they all look alike.”
Face blindness can be a rare result of a stroke or a brain injury, but a study published in the July issue of The American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A is the first report of the prevalence of a congenital or developmental form of the disorder.
The researchers say the phenomenon is much more common than previously believed: they found that 2.47 percent of 689 randomly selected students in Münster, Germany, had the disorder.
Dr. Thomas Grüter, a co-author of the paper, said there were reasons to believe that the condition was equally common in other populations. “First,” he said, “our population was not selected in terms of cognition deficits. And second, a study done by Harvard University with a different diagnostic approach yielded very similar figures.”
Dr. Grüter is himself prosopagnosic. His wife and co-author, Dr. Martina Grüter of the Institute for Human Genetics at the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Wow a new lover every night!
Oops after reading the article in more depth maybe the same lover all your life!
Never heard of it before. Very interesting though.
It reminds me of this...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/
I have a similar problem with liberal arguments. It all turns into "Blah, blah, blah, inequality, blah, blah, Bush and Rove conspiracy, blah, blah, blah, you nazi, racist, blah, blah, Haliburton."
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
For those interested in this sort of thing, I suggest reading Dr. Oliver Sacks', "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". Very readable and interesting book.
He's the Dr. who was portrayed in the Robin Williams movie, "Awakenings"
That was a neat movie; it really kept me guessing.
Good one, Karl. LOL!
Imagine waking up one morning and everyone looks like Helen Thomas.....
The street corners:
The crosswalks:
The lobby:
The elevator:
The office:
The grocery store:
The gas station:
The library:
Proof that life could always be worse!
There was a show on Discovery Health about this - they showed a gentleman who couldn't even recognize his own son. For instance, there was a group of about 10 guys in the backyard, dad came out, asked his son a question, then went away. They switched shirts, and then dad came back out and, although he could see them, he couldn't tell which one was his son. He described it as "blurry faces" and that even his own face he couldn't tell that it was him. Very strange. I can't even imagine having that type of disorder (disease??).
Read the story again. It said HUMAN.
That was the scariest post I've seen in a long time. Maybe ever.
susie
I think Rush will have a ball with this if he gets to it. He will lump it right in there with "Restless Foot Syndrome", and other made-up diseases.
I have a mild form of this myself. I often have to give up on movies because I can't tell the actors apart.
I can't tell that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person.
No one here on FR deserves to wade through 24 Helen Thomas photos, even if it is for scientific or humorous reasons. I'm reminded of the Dave Chappelle quote (aping Samuel L. Jackson).
Sounds like 50 First Dates with the plot-line. I do remember watching a show in class on a guy whose memory lapsed every 2 hours or so, or when he woke up from sleep. He wrote all of the events in a diary, so that he would remember, possibly by the advice of his wife. In reality, that is the good thing about a partnership, help care, and life. It makes one sad with all of the divorces that have happened in the past. Anyways, that is my short little OT rant for the day.
One of his less-well-known superpowers.
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