Prosopagnosia, or face blindedness, is a disorder of face perception. It can be caused due to an injury to the occipital and temporal lobes.
It's unbelievable... this means that it is possible for someone not to be able to detect faces, while its ability to recognize other objects is left relatively intact. I wonder, how your life can be evolved with this disorder. The face is often what you would associate with the people around you, with events, with memories of past events; now if you don't have the ability to assign a face to symbolize these things in your mind, then what would you use as a symbol?
This opens up a question though; so many face detection methods can be generalized to object detection methods. If the mechanism for detecting faces is the same as all the other objects, then how is it that we operate differently? How can a face-blind person detect other objects then? Should we take these rare cases of brain damage patients more seriously, and perhaps, learn a lesson from it?
Perhaps there could be some overlap between face detetcion and object detetcion mechanisms; it's so puzzling though, I wonder if there is an object-blindness disorder as well...
