Prosopometamorphopsia: Human Faces Appear Distorted

Woman had rare condition that meant she saw human faces as dragons

by Harry Readhead for Metro.co.uk Thursday 21 May 2015 9:35 am

The 52-year-old was plagued with hallucinations all her life.

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but for one woman, seeing dragons instead of human faces was an everyday occurrence.

According to an Anglo-Dutch research team in the Hague, the Netherlands, a 52-year-old woman presented at a psychiatric clinic in 2011 plagued with something utterly bizarre – even to the experienced doctors.

For her entirety of her life she’d seen human faces metamorphose into the faces of dragons, with this same hallucination happening multiple times each day.

‘She could perceive and recognise actual faces, but after several minutes they turned black, grew long, pointy ears and a protruding snout, and displayed a reptiloid skin and huge eyes in bright yellow, green, blue, or red,’ the research team wrote in The Lancet.

‘She saw similar dragon-like faces drifting towards her many times a day from the walls, electrical sockets, or the computer screen, in both the presence and absence of face-like patterns, and at night she saw many dragon-like faces in the dark.’

The woman suffered from prosopometamorphopsia, a psychiatric disorder that causes faces to appear distorted. Even within the context of the condition, the woman’s case was rare in the specificity of her hallucinations.

A host of brain scans and blood tests found her to be completely healthy, although researchers weren’t surprised as it still unclear what causes the disorder.

The team eventually managed to stop the woman’s hallucinations with an anti-dementia medication called rivastigmine, which synthesises acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory.

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