He could not remember his face

Heather Sellers entered the familiar eatery. Everyone smiled and nodded to her. But Heather didn't recognize any of them. For her, all are strangers. Even her own face, she did not realize.

Heather Sellers.
(Photo: ABCnews, VNE)

From a young age, Heather was very miserable with her quirky illness. She never recognized her mother and often kissed strangers passing by the door because she thought it was her mother. The bigger the illness, the smaller her world will shrink. She didn't have friends because she couldn't remember who she was. Heather's career has been bleak for years because she never greeted her boss and colleagues. She didn't know who they were.

Even Heather didn't recognize her husband. Every day when she came home from work, she was startled because there was a strange man in the house and just sighed "it was my husband" after watching what he was wearing. But worst of all, she couldn't remember her own face in the photos.

Heather is not the only victim of this strange disease. Jim Heard, a retired art teacher, has been struggling to deal with it for more than 60 years. In order to integrate with society, he tried to memorize other details such as dress, voice, gait. The sad thing is that Jim's daughters also had the same disease as him.

The trouble that Heather, Jim, and children encounter is called medicine called blindness identification or Prosopagnosia. The image of the faces of those who just met immediately slipped out of the patient's memory as soon as they left. The cause is not visual because both Heather, Jim and other patients have perfect vision.

Blindness is also not due to poor memory . Heather is an English teacher. She remembers all the lectures, belonging to countless idioms that are dangerous and never forget the contents of the books read. And Catherine Heard's daughter, Catherine Heard, is a painter whose memory is superior. She could paint the picture of Monet's Water Lily exactly to the small detail. Yet none of them remembered even one face.

Experiments conducted by Harvard researchers show that people with Prosopagnosia can recognize the emotional states expressed on other people's faces like being happy, sad, or angry. They can also distinguish the sex, race and even the beauty of each face; But the strange thing is that they can't remember whose faces.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also studying this mysterious disease. At first, they believed that Prosopagnosia patients lost a part of the brain with recognition function; but the test showed that not only Heather and the others had this part of the brain but they also seemed perfectly normal.

So far, Prosopagnosia is still a big question for researchers. Nor are there any measures to mitigate the disease. Every time she picks up her child at school, Heather still has to ask her teacher to help. She had mistakenly mistaken other children for thinking it was her child.