{"id":6159,"date":"2024-03-26T20:54:39","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T01:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=6159"},"modified":"2024-03-26T20:54:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T01:54:43","slug":"this-extremely-rare-neurological-condition-makes-faces-appear-distorted-or-like-a-demon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/03\/26\/this-extremely-rare-neurological-condition-makes-faces-appear-distorted-or-like-a-demon\/","title":{"rendered":"This Extremely Rare Neurological Condition Makes Faces Appear Distorted or \u2018Like a Demon\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/this-extremely-rare-neurological-condition-makes-faces-appear-distorted-or-like-a-demon-180984015\/\">Smithsonian<\/a> For the first time, scientists have recreated what one patient suffering from prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, sees when he looks at faces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One winter morning roughly three years ago, Victor Sharrah woke up and spotted his roommate walking to the bathroom. However, when Sharrah looked at his roommate\u2019s face, he was startled to see that the man\u2019s facial features had stretched to look like \u201csomething out of a&nbsp;<em>Star Trek<\/em>&nbsp;movie, like a demon face,\u201d he tells the London&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetimes.co.uk\/article\/the-curious-case-of-the-man-who-can-see-goblins-xmjlcxlgs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Times<\/em><\/a>\u2019 Kaya Burgess. The corners of his mouth and eyes were pulled back, his ears were pointy and he had deep grooves in his forehead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nothing had actually changed about his roommate\u2019s face\u2014but something had shifted drastically in the way Sharrah perceived it. He was, understandably, terrified. The same thing happened when he looked at other people\u2019s faces, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing, and he thought I was nuts,\u201d Sharrah tells&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2024\/03\/22\/health\/demon-faces-prosopometamorphopsia-wellness\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">CNN<\/a>\u2019s Sandee LaMotte. \u201cImagine waking up one morning and suddenly everybody in the world looks like a creature in a horror movie.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sharrah, who is now 59 and lives in Clarksville, Tennessee, was later diagnosed with prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, an extremely rare neurological disorder that causes human faces to appear distorted. Fewer than 100 cases have been reported since 1904, and many doctors have never heard of it.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smithsonian For the first time, scientists have recreated what one patient suffering from prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, sees when he looks at faces. One winter morning roughly three years ago, Victor Sharrah woke up and spotted his roommate walking to the bathroom. However, when Sharrah looked at his roommate\u2019s face, he was startled to see that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":6160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coping-with-covid"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Screenshot-2024-03-26-at-21.53.27.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6161,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6159\/revisions\/6161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}