身邊有這么一些人，看見熟人都會張口喊一句“那誰！”然后盯著人家半天叫不出名字。這世界上還有那么一些人，他們無法辨認別人的容貌，就算是每天相見的熟人，他們也認不出來。如果說前者是一時語塞，后者卻是實實在在的一種病癥。

Face blindness refers to difficulty recognizing faces or telling faces apart.

臉盲癥（face blindness）指難以辨認或分別人的容貌的狀況。

New findings from researchers at Harvard and elsewhere suggest that a surprising number of people are face-blind, so bad at recognizing faces that they routinely snub acquaintances and have trouble following movie plots. In extreme cases, they may greet siblings as strangers and struggle to discern which child is theirs at school pick-up time.

來自哈佛及其他地方的研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)，有相當一部分人都患有臉盲癥，而且這個數(shù)目是驚人的。這些人完全無法辨識臉部容貌，以至于經(jīng)常對熟人視而不見，看電影時也跟不上情節(jié)。在一些極端案例中，他們會把自己的兄弟姐妹誤當成陌生人，到學(xué)校接孩子時經(jīng)常無法判斷哪個孩子才是自己家的。

The syndrome, known medically as prosopagnosia, was long thought to be a rare neurological curiosity that resulted from brain damage.

這種綜合征的醫(yī)學(xué)學(xué)名為prosopagnosia，長期以來一直被看作是罕見的神經(jīng)科奇癥，且由腦損傷引起。

Research has begun to suggest that most face-blindness stems from genes, rather than brain injury, and that it is far more widespread than previously suspected, with up to 2 percent of the population affected to some degree.

不過，有研究顯示，大部分臉盲癥不是腦損傷引起的，而是由基因?qū)е碌模涣硗猓浒l(fā)病規(guī)模也遠遠超出之前的預(yù)測，全球人口中有2%的人都患有不同程度的臉盲癥。