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A rare disorder makes people see monsters
- notamy 2y agohttps://archive.is/FnS1W https://archive.is/FnS1W
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240802181317/https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-rare-disorder-makes-people-see-monsters https://web.archive.org/web/20240802181317/https://www.newyo...
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago[flagged]
- nostromo 2y agoI wouldn't be so quick to blame the journalist. It's likely not shown due to copyright concerns. (Yes, this would fall under fair use. No, that often doesn't matter since lawsuits are expensive.)
- Jtsummers 2y agoThe underlined text items are links. Click on them and you can find the artwork and other content referenced by, but not duplicated in, the article.
- jiveturkey 2y agoOr is it the sunglasses? (ref to They Live)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- card_zero 2y agoIt gets a reference in the article! (Eventually. Long read.) > “My whole scenario reminds me of the reverse,” he said. He held up a pair of green glasses that Morris made for him, which he sometimes wears to alleviate distortions.
- card_zero 2y agoProsopometamorphopsia: face change shape vision. Isn't it reassuring when you can put a name to your condition?
- wruza 2y agoHis case is also idiopathic: we don’t know why.
- zendist 2y agoSorry to anyone having this, that sounds awful. Would we easily know if the inverse phenomenon is happening in the rest of us? We're seeing people "better looking" than "they are"?
- olddustytrail 2y agoI believe the medical term for that is "drunk". A condition I've had the misfortune to suffer from myself on occasion.
- lo_zamoyski 2y agoSome do, after sobering up.
- layer8 2y agoExperiments have shown that we perceive our own face as more attractive than it really is. When presented with a series of morphed pictures of their own face, from less attractive to more attractive, people tend to not pick the unmodified picture as the real one, but one morphed slightly more towards attractive (where “attractive” mostly means “symmetric”, IIRC).
- bmicraft 2y agoSounds interesting, but I hope the study was done both with photos and photos flipped liked in the mirror.
- yarg 2y agoDon't know about that - but we're incredibly sensitive to some minor changes to faces; I saw a clip not too long ago of a face digitally transitioning between male and female, the changes themselves were incredibly subtle, and yet the result was obvious and undeniable. There's also the uncanny valley, faces that are almost human yet very slightly off, and somehow come across as incredibly creepy.
- timoteostewart 2y agoCan’t help but think of the 2002 Ted Chiang novelette “Liking What You See” and its tech “Calliagnosia,” a medical procedure that eliminates a person’s ability to perceive beauty. Excellent read (as are almost all his stories, imho). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen...
- bitwize 2y agoI'm reminded of that Japanese visual novel where you play a guy who sees everyone as grotesque monsters -- except there actually is a Lovecraftian eldritch abomination in the world, whom he sees as a beautiful woman.
- worble 2y agoYeah, Saya no Uta was my first thought as well. I wonder if there was some connection
- Onavo 2y agoMaybe they are a demigod child of a Greek deity.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoTangentially related, I just watched a comedy-horror anime called Mieruko-chan about a girl who sees horrible monsters everywhere. Interesting to learn that there is in fact an analogous real-world disorder.
- mathinaly 2y ago[flagged]
- IAmNotACellist 2y ago[flagged]
- disantlor 2y agoyes, if you don’t like flavor then soylent will do
- IAmNotACellist 2y agoSick of all these articles overflowing with filler. Bring back the inverted pyramid
- card_zero 2y agoNobody in the article mentions Star Trek movies, though. That guy mentions "They Live" and somebody else makes a comparison to Dementors in Harry Potter movies, but Star Trek was gratuitously inserted by your cranky chatbot.
- IAmNotACellist 2y ago>Nobody in the article mentions Star Trek movies, though. So I saved even more time by not reading it
- rembicilious 2y agoI initially read this: “A rare disorder makes people sea monsters” I have a disorder that makes see monsters sea monsters.
- ben_w 2y agoPut me in mind of this little ditty about Deep Ones of Y'ha-nthlei: https://youtu.be/3tTHn2tHhcI?si=BEkWRIqaTCj3Pw0K https://youtu.be/3tTHn2tHhcI?si=BEkWRIqaTCj3Pw0K (And now I'm also wondering if Lovecraft might have had something like this, or if it was "just" neophobia).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chfalck 2y agoAh yes dyslexseea
- srean 2y agoI have it the other way around. It affects my writing. I would write (right) a phonetically similar word instead of what I intended. This happens especially when I am sleep deprived. The weird part is I can spot it easily if I just read what I wrote after I am done writing. Its quite annoying.
- phendrenad2 2y agoThis is interesting. Why only faces? Presumably this has to do with "face blindless", in that our brains seem to have special processing for faces, and it's possible for that part of the brain (or whatever cross-brain process is responsible for it) to malfunction independently of the rest.
- layer8 2y agoIncidentally, Sean Carroll just had a podcast episode with a neurobiologist, touching on how the brain perceives faces: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/29/284-doris-tsao-on-how-the-brain-turns-vision-into-the-world/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/29/284-...
- kimbernator 2y agoInteresting that there are so many similarities between how people describe the distortions and fantasy creatures like orcs, vampires, etc. It makes me wonder how much our own fiction influences these peoples' conditions, or in reverse how people with conditions such as these have influenced our fiction. Realistically, the simple answer is that it's probably not much of either; There's a "built-in" concept of what is scary in terms of physical features that has an evolutionary benefit in keeping us safe from certain animals that we can easily transpose onto humans, and that system is being tapped into in some form for these people in the routine processing of faces.
- micheljansen 2y agoMy son has night terrors and if I were living in the Middle Ages, I would probably have called in a priest for an exorcism by now. I can absolutely imagine that in less enlightened times, where we did not have access to the internet, peer reviewed journals and MRI machines, people with night terrors were believed to be possessed by demons.
- smegsicle 2y agostill might work
- reverius42 2y agoWould be interesting to see a paper published on the efficacy of the placebo effect in exorcisms.
- asveikau 2y agoI sometimes get visual migraines and I can strangely relate to this. I don't have what is described in the article. But sometimes I have a tendency to "soldier on", push through and tune out the symptoms. One way it catches up with me and I know I'm about to have a bad time with it is when faces don't look quite right, in a way I can't describe. I guess I have trouble focusing on them when this happens. And when I do pay continuous attention, I notice I'm experiencing the visual migraine symptoms, and that I should take it easy in a dark room for a bit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aleph_minus_one 2y agoA visual novel that is quite related to the content of the article: Koncolos VNDB: https://vndb.org/v34195 https://vndb.org/v34195 Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1912490/Koncolos/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1912490/Koncolos/ Description: "At the place where Aras works, a woman makes a scene every night. Aras feels an oddness in what little information he has managed to find out and realizes that every clue points to a single fact. Monsters are real, and they live among us. Aras learns that in all those spooky stories that he has been listening to since his childhood, these creatures who have troubled people continue in their way."
- przemub 2y agoInteresting, thanks for linking - myself I thought of a classic, Saya no Uta
- uwagar 2y ago[flagged]
- rustcleaner 2y agoJust more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes. Remember this fact before making big decisions. You only have this now for a short while, and then it's back to the pre-conception infinite void.
- cooolbear 2y ago> Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes. Is it ...?
- rustcleaner 2y agoIs recognizing your mother's or spouse's face a spiritual/soul function? If the mind did not arise from the brain, how does one explain lesions in the fusiform face area making one unable to recognize faces? This is without blindness, you see everything and go about your day normally. It's just that the meaning of faces may as well be kanji characters in hanzi-land and all you know is English.
- cooolbear 2y agolook before you leap my friend
- standardUser 2y agoHas there ever been one iota of hard evidence for the existence of a soul? I've always categorized the idea of soul the same way as the Greek gods. Fanciful nonsense with no basis in reality.
- rustcleaner 2y agoI too conclude as much. I used to be christian until I read revelatians and realized it was classic mafia racketeering. I went full bore after discovering Conway's Game of Life, that it was Turing complete (and what that means), then Stephen Wolfram and his principle of computational equivalence. I can see exactly how I am a living computational program encoded and processed in a 3D particle automaton, I can see how from a few simple rules, simple systems, you get complex behavior no less complex than the Intel sitting on your desk can produce. When I read revelations, I felt god was an egomaniac if he actually cared for humanity at all. The perfection of the clockwork universe contrasts with the imperfection of the human spiritual and material conditions. Such a god is a bastard for punishing you for doing what you were destined to do by his very design for you. Satan is a far less cruel master. However, if no such monster exists in reality and we are the beautiful emergent results of natural computational systems, nature and the world become beautiful again. No longer is it a frail imperfect creation but instead a beautiful floral tapestry.
- gyomu 2y agoAnecdotal but this happens to me on LSD. While the experience can be sublime in many ways, people’s faces appear much uglier and distorted. Like every imperfection gets magnified. Much like the person in the article, I also have poor face recognition skills in general.
- baerrie 2y agoFor a period of 8 or so years in my twenties I had an extremely pronounced experience of seeing faces everywhere (pareidolia). Not in isolation like in an electrical outlet, but often many at once and each with a distinct character that remained even when I would look again later. I would see them in things like tree canopies, textured surfaces, cut wood, and my own free form drawings. In more recent years this has diminished greatly to a point where it hardly happens at all.
- matrix87 2y agoSometimes when I'd get really stoned in college I'd go through the same thing
- Unbefleckt 2y agoI've experienced something similar that I assume anyone can replicate: Many years ago I was exhausted from a long week of training and had a bath. There was a mirror at the end of the bath and I slumped in the water. I was really relaxed and just stared into the mirror. Perhaps the humidity in the air helped me not need to blink for an incredibly long time, but after a while my peripheral vision started to burn away, and then what I could actually see began to pixelate in places, I noticed my face distorting slowly and just kept staring, my face went very dark as described in the article, and then I began picking out details, and I eventually realised I was looking at some sort of devil. Sort of like the one from the Tekken games but much darker flesh and longer ears and witchy nose. I was surprised and moved my eyes a little and it all faded away gently in a second. I am not religious at all and the experience had no religious significance for me, I think devils look lame. I simply haven't repeated this because I don't like taking a bath or staring at myself in the mirror for 20 minutes. I feel the humidity of the hot bath was important for keeping ym eyes moist though, but maybe it can work just say in comfort somewhere else with a mirror.
- wruza 2y agoI had interest in esoterics in my around-20s and one of the “practices” was to see the past self in a reflection, or past someone in their face (the specific term was something like moving your “build point” back in time, I believe it was from castaneda). We did it a few times with a friend and when you stare long enough at someone’s real face, pretty strange things started to happen. Sometimes the effect disappeared even because fear forced us to disfocus. Faces would distort, change skin color, eyes go “snake eyes”, etc. I never experienced much darkening, but in the mirror I’ve seen someone relative to me like e.g. a young grand-grand-…-parent looking at me from a mirror. It felt like he even had its own emotion or ~~interest looking back. So yes, our minds may play interesting tricks when used not as intended.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoCan you describe the exact procedure so I may try it? I’d like to experiment. Thank you!
- kazinator 2y agoIt's as if signals from a face recognizing network in the brain are misdirected into the visual cortex where they inappropriately influence perception of basic shape. Because I think here's the kicker. Semantic info about faces has to be correlated back to their position in your visual field. If you're looking at a crowd of people, your brain can't just come up with a list of the ones you know. The correct info has to be attached to and track each respective face. There's kind of a tagging going on which has to merge into the representation. Normally the tag is not visible: it is in the semantic layer that has no color or shape, so it doesn't influence what you're seeing. But it is pinned to something you're seeing. Imagine some wires get crossed there. Information is pinned in the wrong way, corrupting the visual.
- ralusek 2y agoEncountering this article title while using a screen reader must really be something else
- ralusek 2y agoI imagine that the various scenes from the movie The Devil’s Advocate must be a good representation of what this is like: https://youtu.be/cYcCxdUy3I8?si=B-ghZmK6qca7g8Uy https://youtu.be/cYcCxdUy3I8?si=B-ghZmK6qca7g8Uy For some reason, this phenomenon is one of my greatest fears, but I don’t actually have this condition
- tpoacher 2y agoThere is a famous experiment where faces are alternated very quickly, and after a while they all start to look grotesque until you pause the effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effe...
- chatmasta 2y agoThis phenomenon has also been known to occur on dating apps.
- lawrenceyan 2y agoIf you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark that is all you will ever see.