Do these faces look like demons to YOU? Doctors say you might have an extraordinarily rare condition

Their distorted features would be the subject of nightmares for many.

But that’s what ordinary people look like to people with a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia (PMO).

For the first time, researchers have been able to create realistic clinical pictures based on a patient’s experience of facial distortions experienced by someone with this ultra-rare disease.

“Prosopo” comes from the Greek word for face “prosopon,” while “metamorphopsia” refers to perceptual distortions.

The images were created by Dartmouth College based on a 58-year-old man from the Prime Minister’s Office.

He sees faces without any distortion when viewed on a screen and in paper, but he sees distorted faces that appear “demonic” when viewed in person.

However, most PMO cases find distortions in all contexts. His case is therefore particularly rare and constitutes a unique opportunity to precisely describe his distortions, according to the conclusions published in The Lancet.

The researchers took a photo of a person’s face.

They then showed the patient the photograph on a computer screen while he looked at the same person’s real face.

The researchers obtained real-time feedback from the patient on the difference between the face on the screen and the real face in front of them, by modifying the photograph using computer software to match the distortions perceived by the patient.

Lead author Antônio Mello said: “In other studies of the disease, PMO patients are unable to assess how accurately a visualization of their distortions represents what they see, because the visualization -same also depicts a face, so patients will also perceive distortions. .’

Because this patient does not see distortions on a screen, the researchers were able to modify the face in the photograph and the patient was able to accurately compare how similar his perception of the real face was to that of the manipulated photograph.

“Through this process, we were able to visualize the patient’s real-time perception of facial distortions,” Mello added.

The co-authors say some of their PMO participants sought medical care and were misdiagnosed with other health conditions, such as psychosis.

They hope that by publishing this case they will raise awareness about this disease.

Brad Duchaine, professor of psychological and brain sciences and principal investigator of the Social Perception Lab at Dartmouth, said: “We have heard from several people with PMO that they had been diagnosed by psychiatrists as having schizophrenia and that they had were put on antipsychotics. when their condition is a problem with the visual system.