There are a lot of bad afflictions out there — alien hand syndrome, for example — but this one might just take the cake as the weirdest.
Recently, a study was published in the medical journal The Lancet about a guy named Victor Sharrah. One morning in 2020, Sharrah awoke to find that everyone around him looked like a horrible, satanic demon. Where was he, Beverly Hills? Ayooo!.
“When he looked at people’s faces, they appeared ‘demon-like,’ with their ears, noses and mouths stretched back, and with deep grooves in their foreheads, cheeks and chins,” writes James Robinson for Sky News.
What Sharrah was about to discover was that he had a condition called “prosopometamorphopsia,” or PMO. No one knows how it happens or why, though Sharrah guesses it was either a recent bout of carbon monoxide poisoning or “a significant head injury 15 years earlier” in which he slammed his head against some concrete. Yeah, I would guess that isn’t great for your brain.
Thankfully, if you’re worried about getting this particular affliction, you shouldn’t be. Researchers say it’s incredibly rare and typically lingers for only a few days or weeks (Sharrah is an odd case, given how long it’s lasted). Plus, unlike other hallucinatory illnesses, people with PMO know something is messed up with their perception of reality. Is that better or worse? You tell me!
If you do get into Sharrah’s position, there are a few things you can do to prevent yourself from being completely, paralyzingly freaked out by the world around you. According to Sharrah, he finds that wearing glasses with green lenses can help, and that this effect doesn’t occur when he’s looking at screens. Plus, he’s recently made an effort to be around more people so that the random sight of a gremlin-like humanoid in his periphery doesn’t turn him into the Joker. Good for him!
Unfortunately, there’s currently no cure for this problem, but given this research, it’s possible that doctors will figure out exactly why some people turn faces into demons — and, hopefully, how to stop that from happening in the future.
In the meantime, I’ve got something he can try: reframing the issue. Instead of being scared by the demons, become attracted to them. Try jerkin’ it to Avatar and pictures of Klingons. I’m not saying it’s a great solution, but it’s a start.
Comments