Alright so I’ve been holding on to this for a while now, but I feel like I finally have a good
enough connection with you guys that I can bring this up… I’m pretty sure my dad has been replaced
by a synth. Okay wait, seriously, hear me out…
[Intro music]
So when I was a kid my dad was like, the mean one, right. If you did something wrong,
you didn’t want him to find out – he didn’t beat me, but he had this like
“I’m disappointed” look that could burn right through your soul. But once I became an adult
it was like a complete 180. All of the sudden he was super nice to me and I could never quite
figure out why. Until I started looking through his old Facebook pictures. I mean,
look at this one, this is me and him at my basic training graduation in 2004… I mean,
maybe he’s wearing contacts or the light is doing something with his eyes. But I definitely
don’t remember them looking like that before. But then I noticed the same thing in other
pictures. But he is getting older so maybe he had eye surgery and I just didn’t know. I mean,
we don’t tell each other everything. But the weird thing is, he’s like, 80 years old now or something
and he just keeps getting stronger. Isn’t that the opposite of what’s supposed to happen? He’s
also just plain way nicer and happier than he was before, and it seems like he’s developing
some sort of skin condition in these most recent pictures. I don’t know, that’s supposed to happen
when you get older, right? That’s normal? Apparently the only way to find out for sure
though is to loot his body post-mortem so we’ll just have to wait to find out…
Alright, so you might have thought that little skit was funny, but this is an actual, documented,
and studied syndrome known as Capgras Delusion. Officially, it’s when you think that a close
friend or family member – or even a pet – has been replaced by an identical clone or imposter. It
was first documented by a French psychologist, so it’s probably pronounced something like Caup-grah,
but whatever, I’m American. Cap-grass. While it is most common in patients with
paranoid schizophrenia, there’s been a rise in its prevalence – or at least identification – in
people with no prior psychiatric disorders. They developed it through some sort of brain injury,
like a car accident or neurodegenerative disease, such as Alzheimer’s or Herpes Encephalitis.
Thanks to advances in brain imaging techniques in the last twenty or thirty years, we’re now
pretty sure of the exact anatomical cause. It happens in patients with paranoid schizophrenia
because their brains are simply wired differently. When it’s caused by a brain injury it’s because
certain normal connections are damaged or severed. Before we can talk about how this delusion works,
first we need to sort out how normal facial recognition works.
When you see a face, that information is sent to the Fusiform Face Area, which is located
in the inferotemporal gyrus. For those of you not familiar with brain anatomy, that’s on the
bottom-ins… You know what? This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. And these are the
fusiform gyrii, where the face areas are located. You have two of them, one in each hemisphere,
the left one is for recognizing unfamiliar faces, and the right one is more for recognizing familiar
faces. So when this happens…
I know your face.
It’s because the right Fusiform Face Area has been activated. There are some people with an extremely
rare disorder known as Prosopagnosia – which means that all faces look unfamiliar to them,
regardless of how many times they’ve seen them. If you think that you’re “bad with faces,” you do not
have this disorder. But if you did just said to yourself “wait, people can recognize faces?” You
might want to go get tested. When people with prosopagnosia are shown a picture of their own
children, who they raised for decades, they wont recognize them. There’s only a few documented
cases, so odds are, you don’t have it. Anyway, when you see a familiar face,
and the right Fusiform Face Area is activated, a signal is sent to the Amidala- amygdala – and
you get a little emotional response. In the case of friends or family members,
hopefully it’s a happy response. That’s how it should work. But people
with Capgras Delusion develop it because the connection between the right Fusiform Face
Area and the amygdala has been damaged or severed. So they see a face, they recognize it, and then…
nothing. The brain knows something is wrong with this situation so it will try to rationalize it.
I mean… he sure looks like my dad… but there’s just... something… different. I can’t quite
put my finger on it. He must be a clone. You may laugh at that, but if you were to
develop the same brain injury, you would probably come up with the same rationalization. However,
that conclusion can result in some serious consequences. There have been a few rare
cases where someone with Capgras Delusion decided to kill the clone or imposter,
links in the description. However, most people with Capgras Delusion do not turn into murderers.
There’s one more thing that makes this delusion even stranger – it only affects vision.
You go downstairs, call on the phone, and say “David, hi” and on the phone he will
know he was his dad. On the phone he never ever had this problem. So on the phone he’d
always recognize as his father. No problem. When he saw him in person he would say you
look like my father but you’re not my father. When a patient with Capgras Delusion talks to
the imposter over the phone, the familiar voice triggers the appropriate emotional response.
This shows the patient is not crazy. Why would he be crazy in person but not on the phone? The
answer is there’s a separate pathway that goes from the auditory cortex, the hearing
part of the temporal lobe, to the amygdala, and that pathway was not damaged in David by
the car accident. Therefore when he listens to his father on the phone there is no delusion.
However visual information always overrides auditory information in the brain. So even
though they’re hearing the same voice, when they see the person, they still think it’s an imposter.
While there have been a few signs of hope in repairing these pathways, mostly the
treatment involves therapy and acceptance, that the imposter really is the loved one.
[Knocking at the door] So do not worry, your family has not been
replaced by clones or synths. There is nothing to worry about. Go about your lives. Everything
is fine. And hopefully now, you know better. Hey guys if you enjoyed that video or you learned
something, make sure to give that like button a click; if you’d like to see more from me I put out
new videos every weekend so make sure to upgrade that subscribe button to the romance level. Also
make sure to check out the Reddit and follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Once you’re done with that,
there’s another settlement that could use your help. But in the meantime, if you’d like to watch
one of my older videos, how about this one?
[Outro music]