Long misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, the details of what a patient actually sees while enduring ‘demon face syndrome,’ or prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), has long remained a mystery — until now.
Only about 75 cases have ever been documented of the syndrome, in which a person perceives unusual, often grotesque distortions when staring at a human face.
But a rare individual with the condition, a 58-year-old male who reached out to neuropsychologists at Dartmouth, has the unique ability to see faces normally on paper and on screens, despite seeing more eerie ‘demon faces’ in his real life. This split allowed him and the researchers to reliably illustrate, for the first time, what faces can look like for a person living with the haunting vision of PMO.
‘Most of the articles about PMO have been brief case reports about individual cases,’ Dartmouth Professor Brad Duchaine told DailyMail.com, ‘written by the neurologists who happened to encounter them in their clinical practice.’
‘Our report is especially interesting,’ he said, ‘because […] we can be confident that the distortions of his visualizations accurately reflect what he experiences.’
A rare individual with a variation of the ‘demon face syndrome’ has the unique ability to see faces normally on paper and on screens, despite seeing more eerie ‘demon faces’ in his real life. The divide allowed researchers to properly illustrate, for the first time, what faces look like to a person living with the demon-tinted glasses of prosopometamorphopsia (PMO)
‘It’s not uncommon for people who have PMO to not tell others about their problem with face perception,’ Duchaine, a coauthor on the new study, said in a statement. ‘They fear others will think the distortions are a sign of a psychiatric disorder,’ he added. ‘It’s a problem that people often don’t understand.’
Duchaine and Dartmouth PhD student Antônio Mellon ran their 58-year-old PMO patient through a series of tests not unlike modern ‘police sketch artists.’
The researchers, who work with Dartmouth’s Social Perception Lab, first took a photograph of a volunteer participant’s face. They then showed their case study patient that photo on a computer screen, asking him to stare at the real face of that same participant and give them feedback on the differences he perceived.
‘The distortions he perceives,’ Prof. Brad Duchaine (above) told DailyMail.com, ‘provide a nice illustration that we do not have access to the world. Instead, all of our experiences are constructed by the brain’
Using that real-time feedback from their 58-year-old, Mellon and Duchaine used computer software to adjust the photograph of the volunteer participant to match how his PMO condition was altering the faces that he was seeing.