Prosopagnosia

During prosopagnosia people can't recognize faces and have to rely on some other characteristic to aid them in recognition such as voice or body shape. These people are born with this condition and they may even have difficulty recognizing their own faces too. It however does not impact them intellectually but it could make it more difficult in social situations when they can't recognize someones face and the other person interprets this as a sign that they are being a jerk. There are some people who are in another minority group where they are super recognizers and can recognize faces they have only seen a few times in their lives. An example of this is seeing an actor once in a commercial. It is also thought that there is no way to improve upon face recognition with training and is largely the result of neurological programming in the brain. Researchers are still working to understand what these traits are and is it somehow related to intelligence or some other unknown skills.

What researchers do know is that there is a genetic component caused by a defect in a dominant gene. Inheritance of the disorder is also 50%. There is currently no treatment for this disorder and usually those who suffer with it have to learn to adapt to the defect it causes in recognition. Though the effects of this disorder are inconvenient and at times harmful the disorder is not overly common and as time goes on more research will be done to learn more about it.