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

 

脸盲症（face blindness）指难以辨认或分别人的容貌的状况。

 

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 siblings¹ as strangers and struggle to discern which child is theirs at school pick-up time.

 

来自哈佛及其他地方的研究人员发现，有相当一部分人都患有脸盲症，而且这个数目是惊人的。这些人完全无法辨识脸部容貌，以至于经常对熟人视而不见，看电影时也跟不上情节。在一些极端案例中，他们会把自己的兄弟姐妹误当成陌生人，到学校接孩子时经常无法判断哪个孩子才是自己家的。

 

The syndrome², known medically as prosopagnosia, was long thought to be a rare neurological curiosity that resulted from brain damage.

 

这种综合征的医学学名为prosopagnosia，长期以来一直被看作是罕见的神经科奇症，且由脑损伤引起。

 

Research has begun to suggest that most face-blindness stems from genes³, rather than brain injury, and that it is far more widespread than previously⁴ suspected, with up to 2 percent of the population affected⁵ to some degree.

 

不过，有研究显示，大部分脸盲症不是脑损伤引起的，而是由基因导致的；另外，其发病规模也远远超出之前的预测，全球人口中有2%的人都患有不同程度的脸盲症。

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