Often times in life, we tend to take things for granted on a day to day basis. Things that help us so often that we fail to be thankful for. Some of these things are more important than others and they should be. Knowing that we have to breathe to stay alive is probably the easiest example of something we do automatically without even thinking about it. Or for the purposes of this class, we think about the senses we have and the impact of how much different our lives would be if we did not have the ability to carry out these functions. For this paper I want to focus on one of the senses, sight. Now, it is not a stretch to think about how much different and more difficult our lives would be if we didn’t have the capacity to see at all. We would
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What if I told you when you walk into a room of only one hundred people, you could likely find a couple who don’t have the same visual capacity as you do. Well, this is a very real scenario and it deals with the visual phenomenon known as prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is defined as difficulty in recognizing the faces of familiar people (Goldstein, 2010). It is derived from two Greek words. Prosopon meaning face and agnosia meaning not knowing (Prosopagnosia Research Centers). Your imagination does not have to travel to far to think about the real life implications this could have on you or someone you love. That is precisely what made me want to find literature on this topic. My research included what exactly prosopagnosia is, different types, who it affects, how it is treated, other disorders that may be associated with prosopagnosia, and much …show more content…
For a long time, people dealing with it had no idea what was wrong with them. It is important to note that there are varying degrees of this condition. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “some people with prosopagnosia may only have difficulty recognizing a familiar face; others will be unable to discriminate between unknown faces, while still others may not even be able to distinguish a face as being different from an object” (National Institute of Neurological Disorders, 2007). These are certainly a wide range of symptoms. From simply having difficulty in recognizing a familiar face to not even being able to distinguish a face from a rock is quite the discrepancy. But how did all of this research come about in the first place? Prosopagnosia has been around for a long time. The earliest cases were with the ancient Greeks. They describe stories of soldier coming back from the Peloponnesian War and had strange memory problems and couldn’t recognize friends and family (Rivolta, 2014). However, it was never studied extensively until Bodamer decided to research it in 1947. His research also dealt with soldiers. He studied three soldier who had suffered head injuries during the war and this led him to coin the term,
What if I told you when you walk into a room of only one hundred people, you could likely find a couple who don’t have the same visual capacity as you do. Well, this is a very real scenario and it deals with the visual phenomenon known as prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is defined as difficulty in recognizing the faces of familiar people (Goldstein, 2010). It is derived from two Greek words. Prosopon meaning face and agnosia meaning not knowing (Prosopagnosia Research Centers). Your imagination does not have to travel to far to think about the real life implications this could have on you or someone you love. That is precisely what made me want to find literature on this topic. My research included what exactly prosopagnosia is, different types, who it affects, how it is treated, other disorders that may be associated with prosopagnosia, and much …show more content…
For a long time, people dealing with it had no idea what was wrong with them. It is important to note that there are varying degrees of this condition. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “some people with prosopagnosia may only have difficulty recognizing a familiar face; others will be unable to discriminate between unknown faces, while still others may not even be able to distinguish a face as being different from an object” (National Institute of Neurological Disorders, 2007). These are certainly a wide range of symptoms. From simply having difficulty in recognizing a familiar face to not even being able to distinguish a face from a rock is quite the discrepancy. But how did all of this research come about in the first place? Prosopagnosia has been around for a long time. The earliest cases were with the ancient Greeks. They describe stories of soldier coming back from the Peloponnesian War and had strange memory problems and couldn’t recognize friends and family (Rivolta, 2014). However, it was never studied extensively until Bodamer decided to research it in 1947. His research also dealt with soldiers. He studied three soldier who had suffered head injuries during the war and this led him to coin the term,