What Is Prosopometamorphopsia? Patient Diagnosed With This Condition Sees Faces As Demons

A man diagnosed with a rare condition sees others' faces in a disturbing way. He reportedly sees distorted faces that look like demons.

What Is Prosopometamorphopsia? Patient Diagnosed With This Condition Sees Faces as Demons
(Photo: Pexels/Rebecca Zaal)

Man With Rare Disease Sees Distorted Faces Like Demons

A new study detailed what a person with prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) sees. The condition causes them to perceive others differently since the latter's faces appear with altered shapes, colors, and sizes. The distortion makes others look like demons.

A 58-year-old man diagnosed with PMO shared his perception of others' appearance. The faces appear distorted in real life but not when seen on a screen.

Because of this, he was a perfect subject for the condition's study. The researchers could ask him to judge the degree of accuracy of the distorted faces they created on screen against his actual experiences.

Lead author Antônio Mello, a Ph.D. student in Dartmouth's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, notes that in other studies of the condition, patients with PMO are unable to judge how accurately a visualization of their distortions represents what they see because they observe the same in real-life and in the image itself. However, with the man subjected to the study, they could see the patient's impression of the facial deformities in real-time compared to what he saw in the image.

The patient was initially given an image of the subject's face, which he viewed on a screen while simultaneously seeing the subject's face in person. They then used the patient's real-time feedback to alter the image on the screen until it matched his perception of the individual.

"We've heard from multiple people with PMO that they have been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having schizophrenia and put on anti-psychotics when their condition is a problem with the visual system," senior author Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and principal investigator of the Social Perception Lab at Dartmouth, said in the statement.

Furthermore, it's not unusual for PMO sufferers to keep their face perception issues to themselves out of concern that others may mistakenly interpret their distortions as a mental illness. Duchaine added that people frequently don't understand this problem.

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What Is Prosopometamorphopsia (PMO)?

Prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) is a rare condition in which faces appear distorted in shape, texture, position, or color. Metamorphopsia describes perceptual aberrations, whereas prosopo is derived from the Greek term prosopon, which means face.

A complex network of brain areas is involved in face processing, and disruption in this network can result in various abnormalities related to face processing. Prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) is a condition in which faces or parts of faces are seen as deformed. The two most common subtypes of PMO are hemi-prosopometamorphopsia (hemi-PMO) and full-face prosopometamorphopsia (full-face PMO).

It should come as no surprise that looking at other people's faces might be unsettling for those who have prosopometamorphopsia. Thankfully, most cases typically last a few days or weeks, although some people experience facial abnormalities for years at a time.

Based on the 75 case reports published, PMO seems to be a somewhat uncommon illness.

Prosopometamorphopsia manifests in several ways. Features affected by the illness can appear twisted in various ways, such as drooping, being out of position, appearing stretched, or smaller or larger than usual. Usually, PMO is categorized according to the area of the face where distortion is present. Although the reasons for the various forms of PMO that people experience are not well understood at this time, it is one of the many issues that experts are eager to look into.