Rare condition makes faces forgettable

Australian academics are helping a woman discover why she cannot remember faces. The team at Queensland, Macquarie and La Trobe universities were approached by the woman, who cannot recognise people to whom she has already been introduced, although she was able to teach herself to identify faces after six months of repeated viewings. Her condition, prosopamnesia, is very rare. The researchers think she cannot mentally encode the faces. They believe the disability occurs because of problems during neural development and could be inherited as some of the woman's family also have the condition.