A rare disorder makes people see monsters

Interesting 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.

I'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.

A visual novel that is quite related to the content of the article:

Koncolos

VNDB: https://vndb.org/v34195

Steam: 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."

There 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_effe...

For 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.

Anecdotal 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.

Sorry 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"?

Incidentally, 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-...

Tangentially 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.

This 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.

It'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.

I 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.

I'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.

I 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

For some reason, this phenomenon is one of my greatest fears, but I don’t actually have this condition

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.

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.

Prosopometamorphopsia: face change shape vision. Isn't it reassuring when you can put a name to your condition?

If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark that is all you will ever see.

Encountering this article title while using a screen reader must really be something else

Or is it the sunglasses?

(ref to They Live)

Maybe they are a demigod child of a Greek deity.

I initially read this:

“A rare disorder makes people sea monsters”

I have a disorder that makes see monsters sea monsters.