Victor Shara has always had keen eyesight. But on a life-changing day in November 2020, he suddenly noticed that the faces of the people around him looked demonic.
Their ears, nose, and mouth were stretched back, and their foreheads, cheeks, and chins had deep grooves.
“My first thought was that I had woken up in a demonic world,” said Shara, 59, of Clarksville, Tennessee. “You can’t imagine how scary that was.”
An acquaintance of his who teaches blind people suggested that he might have myopic metamorphopia (PMO). A very rare sensory nerve disorder that causes the face to appear distorted in shape, size, texture, and color. Shara felt the symptoms matched and was officially diagnosed last year.
The distortion only appears when he looks at people directly, not through a photo or computer screen.
This gave scientists the opportunity to visualize what the distorted faces of PMO patients look like. This has never been possible before. Researchers at Dartmouth College created a digital representation of what Shara experienced. The resulting image is published The Lancet Thursday.
To create the visuals, researchers asked Shara to explain the difference between photos of people’s faces and real people standing in front of him. Researchers then used image editing software to modify the photo to match Shara’s description.
PMO symptoms often resolve within a few days or weeks, but in some cases they can remain for years. Shara said he still has a devilish look on his face.
Fewer than 100 PMO case reports have been published. Researchers suspect that this condition may be caused by a dysfunction in the brain networks that handle face processing, but they do not fully understand what causes this condition. Some cases are associated with head trauma, stroke, epilepsy, or migraines, while others have PMO without obvious structural changes in the brain.
Researchers have identified two possible triggers for Shara’s incident. First, he had carbon monoxide poisoning 4 months before his PMO symptoms started. Secondly, Shara experienced a serious head injury when he was 43 years old. Shara fell behind him and hit her head on the concrete as she tried to take off the handle of his trailer. According to the study, an MRI scan found a lesion on the left side of his brain.
The lead author of this study is Antonio Meloa Ph.D. student who works in Dartmouth’s social cognition lab, said some people have approached the lab with PMO symptoms that are very different from Shara’s.
“Some people have seen facial distortions for as long as they can remember, even as children. It’s impossible, at least for them, to find a single event that caused it,” Melo said.
Researchers even suspect that the condition may be underreported.
“Every week or two, we are contacted by a new person who describes symptoms consistent with PMO,” said Brad Duchaine, co-author of the study and principal investigator at the Social Cognition Institute. Ta.
He added that some of the patients he worked with in the lab “didn’t tell anyone about it, or told very few people, because they were afraid of what other people would think.”
Additionally, Melo said many doctors are not aware of PMO and may instead misdiagnose people with mental health disorders. As a result, some PMO patients are prescribed medications to treat schizophrenia and psychosis, which are not appropriate for their condition, he said.
The main difference between PMO and a mental disorder is that people with PMO “don’t think the world is actually distorted; they just notice that something is wrong with their vision,” Melo said. Ta.
Although there is some overlap in the symptoms described by different PMO patients, there is also considerable variation, Duchesne says. Therefore, the images in the case study may be specific to Shara’s experience.
Duchesne said she has spoken to people whose faces appear to be downcast and women who say that when they look at someone, they see two faces, one on the front and one on the back. Another woman he spoke to recently had a “witch-like” face with a long nose and pointy ears, Duchesne said.
“The first time it happened, she was on a beach in Jamaica and saw two women standing in the water. They looked like witches at one moment, but , after a while it stopped being so,” he said.
a Case Study A paper published in 2018 describes a 68-year-old woman who developed PMO after a stroke. Although her neurological examination and her eye examination were normal, she reported that her left eye would move upward and sideways when she looked at people directly or on television. However, her own face in the mirror looked normal.
“On TV, she saw people with half their faces distorted, but it was the left half. Her stroke was also on the left side,” said co-author of the case study, Duke University School of Neurology. said Dr. Nada El Husseini, Associate Professor of Science.
Husseini said PMO symptoms can be exacerbated when looking at moving faces, which may explain why some people don’t notice facial distortions in photos.
Shara said that was consistent with her own experience.
“When I look at a person, their face is moving, speaking, gesturing. So the effect is really heightened,” he said.
Shara said she has found several ways to cope with her symptoms. He lives with his roommate and her two children, and he thinks that helps because he’s used to having people around him and doesn’t get scared as much when he sees new faces in public. he said. For reasons unknown to researchers, Shara has also noticed that green light reduces symptoms, so she sometimes wears glasses with green lenses when she’s in crowds.
He wants others to know that this condition can be managed.
“I got to the point where I could be institutionalized,” Shara said. “If I can save someone from the trauma that I went through and prevent them from being institutionalized or addicted to drugs because of it, that’s my number one goal.”
