A pioneering treatment for people who have face blindness has been discovered by accident.
Optometrist Ian Jordan has developed the first treatment for the condition which hampers the ability to recognise faces and facial expressions.
The method uses lighting to change the way people process what they see and was found accidentally by Mr Jordan while he was treating someone for another sensory condition at his practice in Ayr.
Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, afflicts about 2.5 per cent of the population and around half the number of people who are on the autism spectrum.
Those with the condition either have damaged or underdeveloped “visual perception pathways”. This means some of the information the brain needs to make sense of what the eyes see is missing or distorted.
The condition, usually present from birth, can occur after brain trauma.
Mr Jordan’s newly-discovered treatment involves lights comprising 16 million colours which can change how the eyes process information. Some colours are filtered out and others are enhanced, allowing the brain to receive all the information it needs to distinguish one face from another. Once a colour is found which normalises the patient’s sight, Mr Jordan can then prescribe suitable lenses.
The treatment is “a real breakthrough”, he said.
“This will be life changing for those with prosopagnosia because, up until now, there hasn’t been any way to treat it, just techniques and strategies to deal with the consequences.
“Some people are able to piece together a person’s identity by recognising the way they walk, or the sound of their voice. But the prospect of meeting and having to identify new people, either socially, at work or at school, can be very distressing, particularly so for those on the autistic spectrum.”
One patient, 17-year-old Isabelle Thorald, travelled from Lincolnshire to be treated by Mr Jordan.
She said: “Without the glasses, people look quite scary to me because their faces are distorted. I can only see one feature at a time, so if I focus on someone’s eye for example, their other eye looks like it’s up where their eyebrow should be.
“And although I can see their mouth, it’s wider on one side and they look a bit like the Joker from Batman. So everyone looks quite menacing, and it’s difficult to read people’s expressions because all their features are twisted up.
“When I put the glasses on though, everything looks a hundred times better.”
Mr Jordan will present his findings at the Treating Autism 7th Biomedical Conference and Exhibition in London today.