He saw deep grooves in people’s foreheads, cheeks, and chins, and their lips, ears, and noses were all extended back, giving them a “demon-like” appearance.
“It was really terrifying,” the 59-year-old resident of Clarksville, Tennessee, remarked.
Prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, is an extremely rare neurological disease that causes distortions similar to what he was truly seeing.
What made Mr. Sharrah’s situation even more peculiar was that people’s faces showed up regularly when he stared at a computer or phone screen.
“As the patient reported no distortion when viewing facial images on a screen or on paper, we asked him to compare an in-person face to a photograph of the face taken in the same room under identical lighting conditions,” according to the report’s authors.
He gave real-time feedback on the apparent differences by switching between examining the face in person—seen as distorted—and the photo on a computer screen—perceived as undistorted.
“We then used image-editing software to modify each photo until it matched his in-person perception.”
