[imagesource:befunky]

Victor Sharrah’s life must be frightening at times. The 59-year-old suffers from a very rare medical disorder that makes people’s faces appear ‘demonic’, with their ears, noses and mouths stretched back, and deep grooves in their foreheads, cheeks and chins.

Trying to describe what he saw likely made him sound mad until a friend suggested he might have a condition called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO.

The extremely rare neurological ‘disorder of perception’ causes faces to appear distorted in shape, size, texture or colour. Sharrah felt the symptoms were a match, and he was formally diagnosed last year.

“My first thought was I woke up in a demon world. You can’t imagine how scary it was.”

Finally learning the reason behind his living nightmares, Sharrah has now been working with doctors who believe that they finally have a way to visualise what the poor man sees.

The ‘distortions’ appear only when he sees people in person — not in photographs or through computer screens – which made it possible for researchers at Dartmouth College to create a digital representation of what Sharrah has been experiencing. The resulting images were published in The Lancet.

[image:lancet]

[image:lancet]

To create the visuals, the researchers asked Sharrah to describe the differences between photographs of people’s faces and the real-life people standing in front of him. The researchers then used image-editing software to modify the pictures to match Sharrah’s description.

PMO symptoms often resolve after a few days or weeks, though in some cases they can linger for years. Sharrah said he still sees demonic faces. There are fewer than 100 published cases of PMO.

NBC reports that researchers suspect it is caused by dysfunction in the brain network that handles facial processing, though they don’t fully understand what triggers the condition. Some cases have been linked to head trauma, stroke, epilepsy or migraines, but other people have PMO without obvious structural changes in their brains.

The study’s lead author, Antônio Mello, a PhD student working in Dartmouth’s Social Perception Lab, said other people have reached out to the lab with PMO symptoms that differ significantly from Sharrah’s.

Some people “have seen face distortions since they remember, since they were a child,” Mello said. “For them at least, it’s impossible to find a single event responsible.”

Researchers even suspect the condition may be underreported. “We’re hearing from somebody new every week or two” who describes symptoms consistent with PMO, said Brad Duchaine, a co-author of the study.

People suffering from PMO have also reported “drooping faces”, as well as a woman who sees two faces when she stares at someone: one in front of the other. Another woman recently began seeing “witch-like” faces with large noses and sharp ears.

“The first time it happened, she was on a beach in Jamaica, looking at two women standing in the water. They had this witch-like appearance at one point, and then they didn’t for a while.”

No matter how big a fan of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings you may be, seeing these faces must be very unsettling, especially if you’re unaware of the medical reason.

[source:nbc]