Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly finding that the people around you look like "creatures" from a horror movie, what would you do?
I believe that most people's first instinct must be that they are still dreaming and that what they are seeing is unreal.
It's hell when you open your eyes, it's scary to think about!
But this really happened to the American man Victor Sarah, and the scientists also painted the face of the "devil" for him.
About three years ago, on a morning in 2020, Victor woke up to find that his roommate was gone, replaced by a strange-looking man, with a reptile-like mouth, almost split to the base of his ears, elf ears, pointy pulled up, eyes flying up crookedly, and large nostrils still facing the sky.
However, listening to the voice, it seems that this "strange" creature is his roommate. Victor was confused and ran outside the house.
Surprisingly, everyone's faces outside were the same, all distorted into roommates.
"Did I wake up in a demonic world?" was the first thing that came to Victor's mind.
He also described what he saw to his roommates and his family, but they all thought that Victor might be mentally disturbed, and even wondered if he was suffering from paranoia.
After regaining his senses, Victor turned to the doctor for help.
Facial recognition dysmorphia
As it turns out, the demon that Victor saw was not a fictitious thing, and he was diagnosed with a disease called facial recognition degeneration.
It is a rare disease, with only 75 cases currently recorded, and the typical symptom is that it distorts the faces they see.
When he first went to the doctor, Victor's symptoms were mistaken for paranoia by other doctors, but he later met Professor Brad Duchaine, and under the leadership of Professor, the whole team studied Victor's case and painted a demonic image in Victor's mind.
What makes Victor special is that he is normal when he looks at faces in two dimensions, such as looking at a photo and looking at a screen.
Taking advantage of this feature, the research team hopes to use photo editing software to visualize the demon in Victor's heart.
They first showed Victor a human face, and then edited and modified the photo according to Victor's description, and finally got the following photo:
In Victor's eyes, he saw people with large mouths, eyes slanted upwards, ears pulled back, pointed, foreheads and cheeks with deep folds.
I feel that this image is a bit similar to the surface of Sanxingdui.
The research team speculated that Victor's sudden onset of facial recognition degeneration may be related to the fact that he was driving a truck in 2007 and hit his head with a truck door, or it may have been caused by carbon monoxide poisoning four months ago.
In his brain, the research team also found a one-centimeter cyst.
Normally, the symptoms of this disease are temporary, and many will disappear naturally within a few weeks, but Victor's symptoms have been going on for more than 3 years, and he admits that he has accepted this fact and can adapt to such a life.
With the help of the research team, Victor was equipped with a pair of green glasses, which allowed him to look at people without distorting his face.
Dragons grow on the face
Facial recognition degeneration, everyone's symptoms are different.
According to statistics, about half of the patients see a symmetrical facial distortion on both the left and right sides of the face, which is the same as Victor's, but some people see only half of the distorted face.
There is a 24-year-old woman, after giving birth, she found that the left half of the face of the person she saw was distorted, but the right half of the face was normal, which means that she can still recognize familiar people, but it is a little strange when she looks at it.
Of course, some people see not only facial deformation, but also dragons.
A 52-year-old woman looks at a person for the first few minutes, but after a while, her face will have long, pointed ears, a bulging nose, protruding eyes, and reptile-like skin.
In addition to the human face will become a dragon, the wall socket and computer screen will also become a dragon, and sometimes a dragon suddenly floats in the dark, which is really scary.
However, in another patient, she saw a person who was not scary, but a little funny, with an unusually long nose and a small round mouth, like A:
Another said that he always sees characters in comics, and all he sees is comic faces!
At last
Currently, the pathogenesis of facial recognition degeneration is unknown.
According to the research team, the disease is difficult to diagnose, most patients mistakenly believe that they may have other psychiatric disorders, and there are few subjects to study.
In order to make more people aware of the disease, the research team set up a website in 2021, and more than 80 patients have already contacted and described their symptoms.
Until now, scientists are still recruiting people with the same symptoms to join the study.
Because only in this way can this disease be effectively studied and there is a possibility of cure in the future!