Faces are the primary way humans know each other. It's the first thing people notice in loved ones, friends, and strangers. Facial recognition is a process where a person can see and process others faces and then recognize them when seeing them again. Prosopagnosia is a disorder that makes facial regonition a problem for those that suffer with it. Prosopagnosia can range from a mild inconvenience to debilitating and it is through the media's portrayal of prosopagnosia that society gathers insight into this disorder. Through the work and life of Oliver Sacks, the world knows a lot more about this disorder and those that suffer with it. Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is a type of agnosia that makes it difficult for people to distinguish …show more content…
Sacks wasn't secretive about his own struggles with prosopagnosia but he also didn't speak or write about it openly until 2015 in his autobiography “On the Move: A Life”. The only place he's talked openly about it prior to that is during an interview for Radiolab alongside Chuck Close, an artist with prosopagnosia. Leach goes on to describe Sacks' own struggles with mirrors, or lack thereof. Sacks would often find himself apologizing to a man fumbling about in front of him only to realize it is a mirror and the man was himself. These are stories that Sacks doesn't tell about himself very often but they do offer insight into prosopagnosia. Alison Snyder is another writer who wrote about the life of Oliver Sacks after he passed away in 2015. Snyder talks about how he was able to write about his patients in such a way that Darwin wrote about plants; a sort of reverence and fascination. She also goes into how people percieved his writing, some thought he was exploiting his patients for his own monetary gain, while others thought he was sensitive to their stories, I thought that he had a way of humanizing them, making them more than the …show more content…
At Dartmouth College Martha J Farah and Todd E Feinberg go into it a little. According to them the first official report of prosopagnosia was a man from Wigan, England in 1844, who was unable to recognize faces but had completely perfect vision otherwise. Again in 1867 an ophthalmologist named Anotonio Quaglino treated a 54 year old man who could no longer identify people he previously knew. Prosopagnosia was coined in 1947 by a man named Bodamer who took the Greek word prosopon, meaning face, and agnosia, meaning inability to recognize and created