One morning in 2020, Victor Sharra woke up to a shocking sight: his neighbor had pointed ears, giant eyes, and a wide mouth to the edges of his face. Then his friend entered the room and her face was the same, Sharra told CNN, according to News.ro.

Trying to keep calm, the 59-year-old man went out for a walk with his dog, but noticed that the faces of passers-by were also distorted. “My first thought was that I woke up in a demon world,” he told AFP by phone from his home in Tennessee, US.

Each of the once familiar faces now had a grotesque grimace, elongated eyes and deep lines. When they turned to the side, they would suddenly have pointed ears, similar to those of Spock, the Vulcan first officer on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek, he said.

“I started to panic” and think “I’m going to be put in a mental ward,” recalls Sharra, who is a chef by trade.

PMO: The Disease That Makes You See ‘Demons’ and ‘Elves’

But he was not “totally out of his mind.” A study has shed light on this extremely rare visual disorder known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), which distorts faces but does not prevent them from being recognized.

And while Victor Sharra sees a face of demonic appearance, others perceive elven features, Antonio Mello, a researcher specializing in the PMO, explained to AFP. Some see one half of the face under the other, others see purple or green faces or faces in constant motion.

Sometimes the disease manifests itself only for a few days. But although more than three years have passed, Victor Sharrach still suffers from it. But unlike other patients, he can still see normal faces when they are two-dimensional, on a screen or on paper.

This unique feature allowed Antonio Mello and other researchers from Dartmouth College (USA) to create the first images almost as realistic as photographs reflecting the perception of faces by people with PMO, they explained in a study published on Friday in the medical journal The Lancet . .

To create these images, the researchers asked Victor Scharr to compare photographs of the faces of Antonio Mello and another person on a computer screen with the distortions he saw on their real faces. Previously, such a comparison was difficult because when other people with the same disorder looked at any image of a face, they saw a distortion.

Living with prosopometamorphopsia is “much more traumatic than these images convey,” says Victor Sharra. “The face actually moves and talks,” he adds.

Researchers do not know the cause of the disease, only that “something happened in the brain”

The exact cause of this disorder remains unknown. Jason Barton, a neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the new study, told AFP it was a “symptom” with multiple causes. In most of the cases studied by this researcher, “something was happening in the brain in correlation with this abnormal experience.”

Indeed, Victor Sharra has a traumatic brain injury as a result of an injury sustained while working as a truck driver in 2007. But according to Antonio Mello, this was not related to his disorder, as MRI images revealed lesions in the hippocampus, a part of the brain “not associated with the imaging network”.

To date, 75 cases of prosopometamorphopsia have been described in the scientific literature. However, over 70 patients have applied to the researchers’ laboratory over the past three years.

According to Antonio Mello, the disorder’s terrifying symptoms mean it is often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia or psychosis. Victor Sharra only discovered PMO after sharing his experience in a virtual support group for bipolar patients. It was a great relief: “it meant I wasn’t psychotic.”

The 59-year-old, with perfect eyesight, now wears green-tinted glasses that reduce facial distortion. Red strengthens them, he added.

In addition to color, depth perception plays a role. Although Victor Scharra does not see distortions on flat screens, according to Antonio Mello, they began to appear when researchers gave him virtual reality equipment.

Patients are at risk of developing mental disorders that they do not suffer from

The American has adapted to his strange world in three years, but sometimes in a place like a supermarket, a crowd of demons still seems “overwhelming”.

Because these patients know their vision is distorted, many wonder if they should reveal their perception to others at the risk of appearing insane.

Antonio Mello told about a man who for years did not admit to his wife that his face seemed distorted. Victor Sharra decided to share his experience so that others can avoid being hospitalized for mental illnesses that don’t really exist, as well as the trauma he experienced.

With so little knowledge available, many people with PMO may be diagnosed with schizophrenia or other similar hallucinatory conditions and placed on antipsychotic drugs or even committed to psychiatric clinics.

Science now knows that people can develop PMO after a brain injury, tumor or infection, or after a seizure, such as in epilepsy, Mello says.

Sharra suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder

Sharra was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager and had mental health issues that worsened as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving in the US Marine Corps.

“We were in Beirut on October 23, 1983, when they bombed our barracks. And whenever something goes wrong in my life, my biggest battle is suicidal psychosis – that’s the first place my brain goes,” he said.

To cope, Sharra has long been part of an anti-suicide support group on Facebook. Increasingly fearful of what was happening to him after the distortions began, he posted his symptoms online.

“I feel like I’m shutting down. Like I’m dying inside. Every face I see off the screen seems angry, distorted and crazy. I mean it literally looks like something out of a John Carpenter movie,” he wrote in January 2020.

In Casper, Wyoming, Kathryn Morris volunteered with the same suicide support group. Having worked in schools for the visually impaired for more than 30 years, she was familiar with how people sometimes see visual distortions based on how their brain perceives different colors and intensities of light.

“I saw his post and thought, what should I do? I can give him a hand and maybe I can help him, but I don’t want to give him false hope,” said Morris. “I told him that he has to promise me one thing – as long as we work together, he is not allowed self-harm,” she said.

Solution for glasses with green lenses

During his studies, Morris knew that such distortions could be caused by a certain part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is responsible for perceiving faces, recognizing objects and reading. Light is disfiguring, so the solution, she thought, might be to find a certain color or intensity of light that might reduce his symptoms.

“I bought one of the multi-colored bulbs with an app that Catherine could control from Wyoming,” Sharra said. “Then I went on a video call and did a bunch of my own tests,” he said.

He made her look in the mirror while she changed the colors of the light. “When I found the wrong color of light, a red light that increased the distortion, I saw how it happened. He started having a full-blown panic attack. He pulled away from the screen and the look on his face was pretty horrified,” Morris said.

“I told him to close his eyes and remember it wasn’t real, his brain was playing tricks on him,” she said. “Then I turned the light on green and asked him to open his eyes. He did, the distortion went away And he just sat there crying, like a child,” said Morris.

Excited by their success, Morris ordered a pair of glasses tinted the right shade of green. Knowing that Sharra would soon see his remaining daughter and meet his grandchildren for the first time, he sent them by express delivery. “And they arrived the morning she met her granddaughters,” she said. “She got to meet them for the first time, and they looked fine.”

Article photo: © Michael Turner | Dreamstime.com