"You may look like her but you are not my Mother!"

The fusiform face area of the brain processes the face perception

• Follwing research by the noted neuroligist Subramanian "Rama" Ramachandran it has been shown that  in the rare Capgras syndrome a person will become convinced that close relatives are impostors, thinking that the real mother (say) is some sort of fraudulent twin.

• The sufferer’s eyes are working perfectly and have no difficulty recognizing the relative, when she viists him at the hospital, but there is a stubborn conviction that this is not really her.
• Ramachandran explains this oddity as arising from a lack of nerve connection between the face recognition part of the brain and the amygdala, which deals with emotional response: since the perceived individual does not arouse the usual affective response, she cannot be the real mother, so the brain manufactures the notion that she must be an impostor. The explanation of the syndrome is thus anatomical, not psychological—a disruption in the normal neural connections.