Why do some people see the "devil's face"? It may be related to "visual impairment"...

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I have heard before that the reason why the portraits of Francis Bacon, a painter I like very much, were extremely distorted was that he might have suffered from a rare neurological disease. I have always been skeptical, but recently I accidentally saw a paper published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The author pointed out that Bacon was very likely suffering from a disease called "Dysmorphopsia".

Francis Bacon, Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970). © Sotheby's

Francis Bacon, Three Self-Portrait Studies, 1979. © Image Lab

The author of the article quoted Bacon's words in an interview: "When I look at you talking - I don't know what it is - I see a constantly changing image: the movement of your mouth, your head, somehow it keeps changing. I tried to capture this in the portrait." Severe image distortion is a rare clinical manifestation of higher-level visual dysfunction. It is said that the image appears normal at first, but if you look at it for a long time, hallucinatory changes will occur. The face appears distorted, contracted or expanded, usually in a dynamic way.

This makes me think: What is the relationship between the reality we see and the brain? I saw an interesting statement before: the brain is not the place where consciousness is generated, but the place where consciousness is limited. What does this mean? Please consider the reality that the brain allows you to see after taking hallucinogens: the ceiling flows down from a high place, and the plants become huge - all of these may be caused by hallucinogens changing the regular connections of brain neurons, an excessive visual feedback? If this is true, then the daily brain does limit your consciousness/reality feedback in a sense.
The "prosopometamorphopsia" mentioned in today's article was first proposed by British neurologist Macdonald Critchley in the 1950s. The term "prosopometamorphopsia" comes from Greek, meaning face (prosopon), distortion (metamorphoun) and vision (opsis).

One winter morning about three years ago, Victor Sharrah woke up to find his roommate heading to the bathroom. However, when Sharrah looked at his roommate's face, he was shocked to see that the man's facial features had been distorted to look like "a demon face from a Star Trek movie," he told Kaya Burgess of The Times of London.

Sarah saw his roommate with his mouth and eyes pulled back, pointy ears and deep furrows in his forehead. His roommate's face hadn't changed much — but Sarah's perception of him had. He was terrified, of course. The same thing happened when he saw other people's faces. "I tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing, and he thought I was crazy," Sarah told CNN's Sandee LaMotte. "Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everyone in the world looks like a monster from a horror movie." Sarah, now 59, who lives in Clarksville, Tennessee, was subsequently diagnosed with an extremely rare neurological disorder called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, which causes people to see faces in distorted forms .

With fewer than 100 cases reported worldwide since 1904, many doctors have never even heard of the condition. But Sarah’s case may now help raise awareness of this mysterious condition and provide new insights into the lives of people who suffer from PMO. A study published in The Lancet[1] has successfully digitally recreated for the first time the distorted faces seen by sufferers like Sarah. The faces were distorted only when Sarah saw them in person – when he saw the faces in photographs or on a computer screen, they looked completely normal. This difference allowed the researchers to use photo-editing software to recreate what Sarah had seen.

These digitally edited images show the distorted face through Sarah's eyes. © The Lancet

They asked Sarah to look at a photo of a person's face while the person stood in the room. As she described the differences between the photo and the real person, the researchers modified the photo until it matched Sarah's description.

Symptoms of PMO vary from person to person. Some people see faces that sag, change color or have strange textures, and specific facial features seem to move to different places on the face. When sufferers look in the mirror, their own features may also appear to be distorted.

So while these digitally edited images represent what Sarah sees when she looks at faces, they may not be exactly what other PMO sufferers experience. Even so, the images "help people understand the kinds of distortions that patients may be seeing," Jason Barton, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia in Canada who was not involved in the study, told Science News' Anna Gibbs.

Doctors often mistake PMO for mental health disorders like schizophrenia or psychosis. Although the symptoms are somewhat similar, one key difference is that people with PMO "don't think the world is actually distorted—they just realize that they see a little differently," said study co-author Antônio Mello, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at Dartmouth College.

Many people are afraid to talk about their symptoms because "they worry that others will interpret these visual distortions as a sign of mental illness," Brad Duchaine, a psychologist and brain scientist at Dartmouth College and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "This is an issue that people often don't understand."

Some patients have hemi-prosopometamorphopsia, meaning they see only one side of a face as distorted. © Semantic Scholar

For many people, PMO symptoms go away within a few days or weeks. But for some, like Sarah, they can linger for years. It’s not clear what causes PMO, but researchers suspect it’s caused by problems in the part of the brain that processes information about faces. Some people develop PMO after a stroke, infection, tumor, or some kind of head trauma, while others seem to develop the disorder spontaneously, without any apparent cause.[2]

For Sara, there were two incidents that may have led to PMO, according to NBC News. Four months before the onset of symptoms, he had carbon monoxide poisoning. More than 10 years ago, he fell backward and hit his head on the ground, severely injuring himself. However, Sara has been able to improve his symptoms with treatment.

In his case, adjusting the color of the light to a specific shade of green allowed him to see faces for what they really were. Catherine Morris, a volunteer in Sarah’s Facebook support group, found that this wavelength of light helped Sarah and ordered him a pair of green glasses. The researchers hope that the new paper, and the website they’ve launched about the condition[3], will help doctors more accurately diagnose PMO in the future. They also hope that their work will help people with PMO feel less alone, by letting them know that there are other people like them in the world.

Since the Dartmouth team first created the PMO website in 2021, about 80 patients have contacted them to describe their symptoms. “Sufferers who are properly diagnosed with PMO are in desperate need of talking to others who suffer from the disorder in order to share experiences and feel less lonely and isolated,” Jan Dirk Blom, a clinical psychopathologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who studies PMO but was not involved in the new paper, told Jaimie Seaton of Scientific American in December.

References:

[1]www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00136-3/abstract

[2]www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0028393223000519[3]prosopometamorphopsia.faceblind.org/

By Sarah Kuta

Tempura

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article/www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-extremely-rare-neurological-condition-makes-faces-appear-distorted-or-like-a-demon-180984015/

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