Reading Room

Faces in Flux

When Vision Fails and Monsters Appear

StudioRich Blog / August 21, 2025

Tags: , , , , ,

Faces in Flux

When Vision Fails and Monsters Appear

What if the faces around you suddenly turned demonic—eyes too big, smiles stretched, textures melting off like bad claymation? This isn’t a horror film—it’s prosopometamorphopsia, a rare neuro-visual disorder where perception fractures, distorting human faces into terrifying hallucinations.

In her New Yorker feature “How a Rare Disorder Makes People See Monsters”, journalist Shayla Love explores this eerie condition through the stories of people like Werbeloff and Sharrah, whose everyday encounters became monstrous.

“The rest of the world looked normal—but the faces didn’t.”

The article blends neurology and narrative like a lucid dream unraveling. These aren’t optical illusions. They’re deeply felt disturbances of identity, rendering loved ones unfamiliar, and strangers terrifying. It’s a disorder with no known cure—only adaptation and coping.


Eye icon Sound as Companion to Visual Breakdown

For us at StudioRich and HollowBookCo, the article resonates like an ambient chord progression unraveling into noise. What’s more lo-fi than the brain misinterpreting its most intimate signals? We began composing a sonic response: a track that captures faces breaking into fragments, recognition turning into surreal loops.

Music Note icon Listen soon: We’re adapting this feature into a sound piece—part ambient distortion, part perception poem.

In the meantime, pair the reading with:


Brain icon What Makes This Story Sing?

  • Loop icon Science meets surrealism — grounded in neurology, but rich with gothic overtones
  • One eyed monster icon A mirror turned monstrous — it plays with identity, horror, and misrecognition
  • Speaker icon Highly musical — the sensory collapse invites sonic representation

It’s not just a medical case. It’s a philosophical glitch, and an audio-visual mystery that aligns perfectly with our ethos: sound + visual culture crossovers.


Filed Under:

#VisualBeatLoop • #PerceptionDistortion • #ReadingRoomLoop

Faces in Flux cover