Rare condition makes woman recognize all faces as familiar

Jenny Parry experienced years of social stress and embarrassment from repeatedly misidentifying strangers as acquaintances.

In the quiet architecture of the mind, the line between recognition and invention is thinner than we imagine. Jenny Parry, a woman whose world shifted after a severe migraine seven years ago, has lived with a rare neurological condition called facial hyperfamiliarity — her brain insisting, with full conviction, that every stranger is an old friend. Researchers at the University of York have now traced this disorienting experience to an overactive dialogue between the visual system and the hippocampus, where memory and perception lose their proper boundaries. Her case invites us to ask what it

Rare condition makes woman recognize all faces as familiar

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