The Sharia case is very special. Unlike other people with PMO, when he sees faces on flat screens, they look normal.

This allowed Milo and other researchers at Dartmouth College in the United States to create the first “realistic” images representing how people with PMO see faces, according to a study published on Friday (22) in the scientific journal The Lancet.

To create the images, the scientists asked Sharah to compare images of Milo and another person as they appeared on a computer screen with the distortions he saw in their real faces.

For other PMO patients, faces in photos also appear distorted.

Life with the PMO “is much more traumatic than pictures can convey,” Sharah said.

He adds: “What people don’t understand when they see these pictures is that this face in real life moves with its expressions or with words,” which reinforces the strangeness caused by these distortions.

The exact cause of prosopometamorphopsia remains unknown.
Jason Barton, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia, who was not involved in this study, believes that PMO is “a symptom, not a disorder,” and therefore can have multiple causes.

In most of the cases Barton investigated, “something happened in the brain that was associated with the onset of this abnormal experience.”

Shara suffers from a brain injury resulting from an accident she suffered while working as a truck driver in 2007.

But in Milo's assessment, this was not related to PMO because an MRI showed that the lesion was in Shara's hippocampus, a part of the brain “not associated with the face processing network.”

To date, only about 75 cases of PMO have been reported in the scientific literature. But Milo said more than 70 patients have contacted his lab in the past three years.

He added that the frightening nature of the condition means that it is often “misdiagnosed as schizophrenia or psychosis.”