| Shayla Love
New Yorker contributor A couple of days before I met Victor, a source in my reporting on prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO—a neurological condition that causes people to see faces as distorted—I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and considered my own face. Victor, like others suffering from PMO, saw the visage of every person around him as contorted and demonic. I might have had mixed feelings about my face throughout my life, but I felt unsettled that I was about to spend time with someone who would not see it as I do. The face is where we read others’ expressions, how we infer what they think or feel, or what they’re paying attention to. We have sayings such as “to lose face” or “two-faced,” which imply that faces are critical to authenticity. When you “deface” something you destroy it. This is why PMO is such a captivating condition: it’s a reminder that seeing faces is not a given, but an active process—one that can be interrupted by an accident or illness, or potentially disrupted since birth. There have been artists who knew this intimately, who made paintings reminiscent of the distortions caused by PMO, such as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso. “The longer you work, the more the mystery deepens of what appearance is,” Bacon said. Gertrude Stein wrote that Picasso stopped his practice of figurative painting in part because of a loss of faith in what the eyes saw. Scientists are learning about how we all perceive faces by studying those few who have lost their ability to do so. Often, it’s not until the breakdown of some taken-for-granted process in the body that we recognize how special that process is. Before meeting Victor, I said a small goodbye to my face in the mirror, knowing that, for a short while, it would change in the eyes of the beholder. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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