Notes On The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
I enjoy reading this book; I feel deep attachment with the actual events. Some notes I made a few months ago ..
1. My notes: Does the fault lie with the visual categorization in the brain? Synapses broken or some synapses are not differentiated?
Pg 12
By large, he recognized nobody, neither his family, nor
his colleagues, nor his pupils or himself. He recognized
the portrait of Einstein, because he picked up the characteristic
hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one
or two other people.
In the absence of “obvious markers”, he was utterly lost (he can recognize one signals or stimulus, but not many stimulus”- interesting here). But it was not merely the cognition, the gnosis, at fault; there was something radically wrong with the whole way he proceeded. For he approached these faces- even of those near and dear- as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold them. No face was familiar to him, seen as a “thou” being just identified as a set of features, an “it”. And with this went his indifference, or blindness to expression.
A face, to us, is a person looking out- we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face. But for Dr. P, there was no persona in this sense- no outward persona, and no person within.
2. My notes: Why is it crossing? It’s not really crossing, it is inter-related. .. If one of the brain side is damaged, we still can function by the other side’s morphology or other interaction? And so it seems to me...
Pg. 13-14
He saw nothing as familiar. Visually, he was lost in a
world of lifeless abstractions. Indeed he did not have
a visual world, as he did not have them face-to-face.
Hughlings Jackson, discussing patients with aphasia, and
left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost “abstract”
and “propositional” thought- and compares
them with dogs. Dr. P, on the other hand, functioned precisely
as a machine functions. It wasn’t merely that he
displayed the same indifference to the visual world as
a computer- but even more strikingly he construed the
world as a machine construes it.
He listed the buildings on his right side, but none of those on his left. I then asked him to imagine entering the square from the south. Again he mentioned only those buildings that were on the right side, although these were the very buildings he had omitted before. Those he had “seen” internally before were not mentioned now; presumably they were no longer “seen”. It was evident his visual field deficits, were as much as internal as external, bisecting his visual memory and imagination.
(to be continued)
