The New Yorker:

A mysterious neurological condition makes faces look grotesque—and sheds new light on the inner workings of the brain.

By Shayla Love

In 2007, Jason Werbeloff, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in Johannesburg, South Africa, spent months in bed with a severe case of mononucleosis. Every part of his body—his joints, his skin, his swollen throat—was in pain, and he passed the time staring at the concrete ceiling of his room. Television gave him a headache; he tried to read but often forgot the names of characters by the end of each page. He saw no one except his mother, who occasionally stopped by with groceries.

After he recovered, Werbeloff was eager to be around people again, and he spent a night clubbing. In the shifting red light, he looked at a friend’s face and realized that the right side looked odd. It seemed to stretch outward, like Silly Putty being pulled, and a dark, rough patch was visible around the friend’s right eye. Werbeloff blinked and looked away, and his friend’s features briefly returned to normal. Then the distortions appeared again. “That is when people got ugly,” Werbeloff told me.

In the weeks that followed, Werbeloff started to notice similar unsettling changes in everyone he looked at. “If they were smiling with their teeth very visible, then, on the right-hand side, the canine tooth would elongate,” he told me. Even his own face in the mirror looked malformed on the right. He had long known that his ability to recognize faces was so poor that it bordered on prosopagnosia—face blindness—but now he wondered whether he suffered from something else. He worried that he harbored an unconscious dislike for almost everyone he met.

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