Prosopometamorphopsia
rare neurological perceptual distortion of people's faces or specific parts of faces
Prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), also known as demon face syndrome, is a neurological disorder characterized by altered perceptions of faces. In the perception of a person with the disorder, facial features are distorted in a variety of ways including drooping, swelling, discoloration, and shifts of position.
Prosopometamorphopsia is distinct from prosopagnosia, which is characterised by the inability to recognise faces.
About 75-81 cases of prosopometamorphopsia have been reported in scientific literature since 1904. In about half of the reported cases, features on both sides of the face appear distorted. In the other half of the cases, distortions are restricted to one side of the face (left or right), called hemi-prosopometamorphopsia.
Signs and symptoms
Faces tend to appear distorted to a person who is affected by prosopometamorphopsia. Those who suffer from this condition are able to recognize faces normally but perceive them as strangely disfigured. These facial hallucinations are usually described as ugly, and have prominent eyes and teeth. Some have described the faces as having a cartoon-like quality.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Prosopometamorphopsia” is rare neurological perceptual distortion of people's faces or specific parts of faces. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Prosopometamorphopsia, rare and neurological, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prosopometamorphopsia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.