“People with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, cannot easily tell faces apart, even if they belong to people they know well, and so often see their friends and family as strangers. The condition is usually associated with brain damage, for example from a stroke, but numerous anecdotal reports have suggested that it also runs in families.

Now a team led by Thomas Gr?ter at the Institute for Human Genetics in M?nster, Germany, who is a prosopagnosic himself, has found concrete evidence of its genetic basis. ‘I realised I had prosopagnosia quite early on in school,’ Gr?ter says. He has trouble recognising faces of people he knows and sometimes thinks he recognises strangers.” (New Scientist)