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this up… I’m pretty sure my dad has been replaced by a synth.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Officially, it’s when you think that a close friend or family member – or even a pet – has been
replaced by an identical clone or imposter.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
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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]
