Bill Harvey: The small faces

Last year, we published an article discussing prosopagnosia, the condition leaving people unable to identify or recognise faces. Now, I have never been one for celebrity endorsements, but I was surprised to hear a certain Brad Pitt revealing that he has always suffered from the condition, or ‘face blindness’ as he described it.

In the clinic where I work, we are occasionally asked to assess people who have recently had a stroke. Many have motor impairment and a significant number have homonymous field loss. Some of the more subtle perceptual consequences, such as prosopagnosia, which can result from stroke damage to the right parietal lobe, are more difficult to confirm. I have tried using the Corvist Cortical Vision Screening Tool, where the patient is shown an array of faces and has to place them in order of age, but the results have never been impressive.