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Effects of prosopagnosia
Effects of prosopagnosia
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Prosopagnosia Diogo Soares Physiological Psychology April 27, 2014 Heather Joppich Prosopagnosia Dr. P was an accomplished singer, a gifted painter, and a teacher. It was while teaching at school that the first onset of problems began. Dr. P would sometimes not recognized students faces when they presented themselves, although he was able to discern who was who by hearing their voice. Dr P. increasingly failed to see faces, and even saw faces that were not there. Initially, Dr. Sacks did not understand why this charming and educated man had been referred to him, although there was something rather odd with the way Dr. P oriented his eyes while addressing him. It seemed that, while talking and looking at Dr. Sacks, Dr. P focused on individual features—like his ears, nose, or chin—instead of looking at his face as a whole. It was while performing a routine neurological examination that the first queer experience took place. Dr. P made the strangest of mistakes, confusing his foot for his shoe. Dr. Sacks continued examining Dr. P. His vision seemed fine but he had rather curious responses to certain images presented to him. He picked up different individual features like a shape or color, but could not see the image as a whole. However, what bewildered Dr. Sacks was when Dr. P, suddenly assuming the session was over, grabbed his wife´s head and tried to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! Dr. Sacks saw Dr. P again in the comfort of the latter’s home to get a better sense of Dr. P´s visual processing. Identifying different shapes of solids, the suits of a pack of cards and various well-known cartoons were no problem. However, Dr. P could not identify the actors or their facial expressions in a ... ... middle of paper ... ...l attributes, or clothing to recognize others. Face blindness is thought to be the result of abnormalities, damage, or impairment in a fold in the brain that appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory—the right fusiform gyrus. Face blindness can be caused by a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases. While no treatment for this disorder yet exists, there are certain methods of therapy that can be used. It is possible to manage the disorder by using alternative cues to recognize other people. Future research and studies of types of face blindness will produce a better understanding of the specific locations and important roles of brain areas involved in ordinary facial perception and recognition. Such breakthroughs may lead to treatment methods and one day to a possible cure for face blindness.
Bordo, Susan. "Beauty (Re)discovers the male body." Bordo, Susan. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ninth Edition. Bedford/St.Martin's, 2011. 189-233.
The story of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" is quite an interesting story that opens the reader of the book into a world of confusion: Dr. P.'s world. The man, described in the story, is an accomplished doctor, in fact a teacher at an accomplished music school who seems to be fine on the outside, but with further analyses in Dr. Sacks' office, he mistakes his foot for his shoe. This is an astonishing mistake that intrigues the doctor and the reader to know why he mistakes objects for other objects. He then later, as he and his wife are preparing to leave; Dr. P. grabs his wife's head and tries to pull it off as if it were his hat. Later, Dr. Sacks pays a visit to the couple at their home to try and further understand the situation. Dr. Sacks questions him with cartoons, with people on the television, and even resorting to the pictures on his very walls. Dr. P. only recognizes a few faces out of the faces that hang on his very walls. This is quite shocking to the doctor; Mrs. P. then ca...
In Psychology, there are a wide range of disorders, all of which disrupt a person’s life at varying levels. As a result of this, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is used to diagnose a person with a certain disorder and determine the extent to which the disorder affects their ability to function in society. However, the DSM-IV does not address all of the disorders that people can be troubled with. There are four axes to the DSM-IV: axis I which takes into account clinical disorders, axis II looks at personality disorders, axis III diagnoses acute medical conditions, axis IV is psychosocial and environmental factors and axis V determines a person’s ability to function in society. Agnosia is one of the many disorders that cannot be classified under the any of the axes of the DSM-IV although it is a brain disorder. A specific type of agnosia that has recently been heavily represented in the media is prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is a mysterious disorder as the etiology is unknown and there is much variance to the disorder by the individual. As the degree in which this disorder affects the lives of people cannot be determined using typical methods, to what extent does prosopagnosia affect a person’s life?
Neurologically, the amygdala (which associate emotions to recognized faces) might be affected. The neural disconnection creates in the patient a sense that the face he/she is observing is not the face of the person to whom it belongs. Therefore, that face lacks the familiarity and recognition usually associated with it, which results in “derealization” and disconnection from the environment. If the patient sees his/her own face, he/she might perceive no association between the face and his/her sense of “Self”. Medicine indicates that Cotard's syndrome is associated with lesions in the parietal lobe and brain atrophy, especially of the median frontal
Acquired prosopagnosia refers to when the onset of prosopagnosic symptoms occur after brain trauma, resulting in damage to the cortex of the brain from hitting the inside of the skull (Bodamer, 1947). It can also refer to the initiation of symptoms after brain tissue dies (ischemia) such as from loss of blood supply like from a stroke, or a neurodegenerative disease (Villa et al., 2013, pg. 375).
Webster dictionary defines synaesthesia as “a subjective sensation or image of a sense other than the one being stimulated” (Wyld,1963). Synaesthesia is a condition that causes someone to have associations of usually color with certain everyday things, such as numbers or letters. There are several different types of synaesthesia that will be discussed in this paper digit-color synaesthesia, odor-color synaesthesia, and person- and music-color synaesthesia. A common effect that is discussed when talking about synaesthesia is the McCollough effect. This effect is a wonder of humans and their visual perception where colorless gratings appear to have a color.
Gamer, M., Schmitz, A. K., Tittgemeyer, M., & Schilbach, L. (2013). The human amygdala drives reflexive orienting towards facial features. Current Biology, 23(20), R917-R918. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.008
Most of the population doesn’t get a certain taste in their mouth when we hear a certain music note and we don’t see certain letters in colors. But for people with forms of synaesthesia, they experience many of these mixing of senses. Typically synaesthesia starts in early childhood and is consistent as the person ages. It is known that the experiences occur with no conscious effort. There are two common forms of synaesthesia, color–graphemic synaesthesia, where specific numbers and letters or words, written and/or spoken, provoking a reaction to seeing different colors. And the second being, color–phonemic synaesthesia, the spoken form. There are reports that state that there are many types of inducers (the stimulus that triggers the synaesthetic experience) and concurrent (the synaesthetic experience itself).
Visual agnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize familiar objects (Farah, 1990). Object recognition is the ability to place an object in a category of meaning. Most cases of visual agnosia are brought about through cerebral vascular accidents or traumatic brain injury typically inhibiting sufficient amounts of oxygen from reaching vital body tissues (Zoltan, 1996). There are a vast array of impaired abilities and deficits associated with individuals diagnosed with visual agnosia. These impairments vary considerably from individual to individual (Farah, 1990). Some patients cannot recognize pictures of things such as trees and birds, despite being able to describe such objects or recognize them through other senses such as sound and touch. Other patients demonstrate an inability to recognize faces of friends and family members (Goodale, 1995). The functional impairments experienced as a r...
One night as he is working late, he is called to the Chief Executive’s office. The Chief bestows his confidence and trust in him by giving him the responsibility over a crucial case and announces his promotion as Senior Associate. After the announcement has been made, one of the senior executives notices an AIDS lesion on Andrew’s forehead. He asks Andrew about it. Andrew was momentarily disturbed by the question, then quickly explained that he had bumped his head.
Evolution has evolved our brains into complex machines capable of computing the most intricate mathematical equations that compose our universe. Yet this highly functioning and introspective device is often subject to disease and injury. Prosopagnosia, or the inability to process facial recognition data, commonly known as “face blindness,” is a complex and highly involved disorder that pertains to multiple bilateral regions of the brain. Correctly identifying facial emotion is imperative for the survival of any sentient being and we continually strive to understand how and why some brains are unable to engage this simple mechanism. This research paper looks at prosopagnosia and its effects on processing facial emotion. It will cover the complexities of this disorder, as well as reviewing other neural abnormalities to illustrate how each part of the brain helps or hinders the processing of input data.
As previously mentioned the anatomy had a great deal to do with how sensibility was addressed. In the comprehension of the cult of sensibility, an awareness of the effects of the nerves in one’s body is imperative. As such, sexual organs had a strong impact on the sensible individual’s thought process. Inasmuch as most novels from the period do not delve into the particulars of the impact of one’s private parts, the charged interactions between characters drew from their particular
From the outside looking in, people might see a series of peculiar expressions, an odd distraction, and an unparalleled eye connection, but they see you nevertheless. Although in return, why couldn't you do the same? You frantically scour their physical features: their ears, their hair, “the way they move”, anything that distinguishes them. Their image seems clear in person, but the moment they leave, their face becomes a mismatched puzzle as the details become hazier within seconds. Prosopagnosia, commonly known as face blindness, is a condition where part of the brain that recognizes familiar faces fails to develop due to brain injury or a genetic condition. This condition is an obstacle in which both Finn, the protagonist in the novel Bone
The eye is an extremely diverse organ, ranging in complexity across and within animal phyla. Here, a comparative approach is taken to outlining the diversity of the eye forms within vertebrates and invertebrates. The eye morphology of a variety of organisms was examined. Eye function, and placement on the body was also considered. Here, variation in eye form is discussed in relation to the environment the organism is adapted to. It is shown that an organisms eye morphology functions optimally for the ecological niche it occupies. Evolutionary analysis is used to account for the emergence of the different eyes. Convergent evolution is used to justify the similarities in eye types seen in organisms of different species. This analysis begins with the simplest of eye forms composes of single cells, present in the zooplankton larvae. Such primitive forms are identified in mollucs, annelids, cnidarians, and are then compared to more advanced eye forms contain lenses. This comparative approach provides a breadth of examples of vertebrates and invertebrates, making visible, the diversity of eye morphology within the animal kingdom.
Lenticular- common in those with diabetes; high blood sugar causes the lenses to change shape