May 18th, 2010
Not too long ago, I was reading a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Written by Oliver Sacks (a professor of neurology and psychiatry who also wrote about the effect of music on the human brain in a book called Musicophilia), the book is a collection of accounts of patients suffering from various right-hemisphere brain disorders that the author came across during his many years of psychiatric work.
I found most of the short stories fascinating, and a few of them terrifying. One chapter told the tale of an older woman who had songs “playing” uncontrollably in her head all the time. The titular story described a man who, although he could see just fine, had a condition where his brain couldn’t take multiple visual cues and combine them into concepts; he could see a nose, eyes and a mouth, but he couldn’t comprehend what a face was, and could only recognize people’s identities after he heard them speak.
One of the more frightening stories was about a woman who spontaneously lost her sense of proprioception, which basically meant she no longer felt as though her own body was an extension of herself. Formerly a very athletic person, the patient could now only walk if she was looking at her own feet, could only use her hands if she had them in her visual field. A frightening prospect, even if it’s unlikely to happen to any of the rest of us.
But the scariest of all was the story of a man who suffered from amnesia to the extent that he hadn’t formed new memories in decades. Much like the movie Memento, you could have a conversation with him, leave the room for ten minutes, and then return only to find that he had no recollection of meeting you before.
