Remember that iconic scene from Mission Impossible, where Tom Cruise takes the mask off his face and reveals, that with the help of some cunning technology, he fooled everyone into thinking that he was somebody else?
Figuring out who you are as a person, and finding the self-confidence to act authentically around others, is a challenge. By the same token, getting to know other people, discovering who they really are, may not be so easy either. At times, we might get an impression, that a person we are interacting with is not his or her real self, that they are merely pretending to be someone they are not. In everyday life this may be less spectacular than in a Hollywood movie, but it can be just as disturbing.
Now, imagine that you are having that impression nearly constantly. That is the experience of patients suffering from Capgras Delusion. Also known as the Impostor Syndrome, it is a very rare neurological disorder, where a patient falsely believes that someone they know in their life is a fake, as if they had been replaced by a lookalike, a perfect double. It is named after a French psychiatrist, Joseph Capgras, who first described it in 1923. The disorder is most commonly diagnosed in patients suffering from schizophrenia or dementia, but it can also result from brain injury.
A famous neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran, described one such case study of David, who suffered from a head trauma in a serious traffic accident. After he recovered, David often got the impression, that his mother or his father are not real, that they are impostors. In case you are wondering, this wasn’t a visual impairment, nor was it a problem with recognizing faces as such. Capgras delusion is distinct from another neurological disorder, prosopagnosia, otherwise called “face blindness”. In addition, this patient would occasionally claim that his family house has been somehow “switched”, and although it looks just the same, it is not. Interestingly, he would have less trouble recognizing their parents on the phone.
So what was the problem? As it turns out, the brains of patients with Capgras delusion have normal activity in the temporal cortex, in the area responsible for facial processing. However, the connection to the limbic system, responsible for emotions, is severed. This means that a patient like David would visually recognize the face of his mother or father, but this wouldn’t evoke any emotions in him. That would feel strange and suspicious, leading him to the paradoxical conclusion, that they are in fact impostors. In contrast, the neural pathway between auditory cortex (responsible for hearing) and the limbic system is intact, therefore the impostor delusion would not apply when David would talk to his parents on the phone.
If we can learn something useful from this peculiar syndrome, it is this: when we perceive others as authentic, we assess the facts about them, but also our emotional response. So maybe, if you want to be yourself, and not feel like an impostor, make sure you live your life true to your emotions.
