I watched the playthrough of ‘9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors’ a while back (I tend to watch gamers play if I am not able to play it myself), and I’ve always been intrigued with the theories and discussions that were incorporated into the game itself. For example, they talked about the morphogenetic field and espers, the bootstrap paradox, Schrödinger's Cat, the Ganzfield Experiment and of course, prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia wasn’t known to me until the release of this game. It’s also known as ‘face blindness’.
According to the game Wikipedia page, Prosopagnosia can be categorized into two types: Development and acquired. Development prosopagnosia occurs when the brain is unable to distinguish between people's faces, and their features. This leads to the person with the disorder having trouble remembering a person's face. This even occurs with members of their family. Acquired prosopagnosia is different from developmental prosopagnosia in that the person with the acquired prosopagnosia is able to identify the features of the face but cannot determine who it is.
So basically, it’s like us trying to differentiate monkeys by their facial features: they all look the same to us!
Warning: spoilers from the game!
Examples from the game that point to one of the characters, Ace, having prosopagnosia are when:
- Ace murdering someone else by accident due to the victim wearing similar clothes worn by the original target as he couldn’t differentiate faces, so he differentiated the participants by their clothes instead.
- Ace also mentions his prosopagnosia during the First Nonary Game, by telling young Akane, "You don't know what it's like to spend every day surrounded by monkeys."
- Ace not being able to solve a puzzle requiring him to match the faces of the ‘participants’ to their corresponding numbers in the game, but claims that he’s tired because he didn’t want anyone to know he has prosopagnosia, as seen below:
There aren’t many well-known people who suffer from prosopagnosia, but Brad Pitt thinks that he does suffer from it due to his inability to recognize or remember faces of anyone, but he wasn’t tested or diagnosed officially.
It's interesting how once again,that not many people know of this, even though this condition isn't as rare as i thought (stats show that there are 1.5 million people in the UK suffering from prosopagnosia alone.)
Do you guys know anyone with this disorder? Would love to see it from their point of view also! :)