The man who mistook his wife for a hat Read Online Free PDF Page B

well-and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also. If this is missing, we become computer-like, as Dr P. was. And, by the same token, if we delete feeling and judging, the personal, from the cognitive sciences, we reduce them to something as defective as Dr P.-and we reduce our apprehension of the concrete and real.
       By a sort of comic and awful analogy, our current cognitive neurology and psychology resemble nothing so much as poor Dr P.! We need the concrete and real, as he did; and we fail to see this, as he failed to see it. Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia essentially similar to Dr P.'s. Dr P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable-of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
       It was always a matter of great regret to me that, owing to circumstances beyond my control, I was not able to follow his case further, either in the sort of observations and investigations described, or in ascertaining the actual disease pathology.
       One always fears that a case is 'unique', especially if it has such
       extraordinary features as those of Dr P. It was, therefore, with a sense of great interest and delight, not unmixed with relief, that I found, quite by chance-looking through the periodical Brain for 1956-a detailed description of an almost comically similar case, similar (indeed identical) neuropsychologically and phenomeno-logically, though the underlying pathology (an acute head injury) and all personal circumstances were wholly different. The authors speak of their case as 'unique in the documented history of this disorder'-and evidently experienced, as I did, amazement at their own findings. * The interested reader is referred to the original paper, Macrae and Trolle (1956), of which I here subjoin a brief paraphrase, with quotations from the original.
       Their patient was a young man of 32, who, following a severe automobile accident, with unconsciousness for three weeks, '. . . complained, exclusively, of an inability to recognise faces, even those of his wife and children'. Not a single face was 'familiar' to him, but there were three he could identify; these were workmates: one with an eye-blinking tic, one with a large mole on his cheek, and a third 'because he was so tall and thin that no one else was like him'. Each of these, Macrae and Trolle bring out, was 'recognised solely by the single prominent feature mentioned'. In general (like Dr P.) he recognised familiars only by their voices.
       He had difficulty even recognising himself in a mirror, as Macrae and Trolle describe in detail: 'In the early convalescent phase he frequently, especially when shaving, questioned whether the face gazing at him was really his own, and even though he knew
       *Only since the completion of this book have I found that there is, in fact, a rather extensive literature on visual agnosia in general, and prosopagnosia in particular. In particular I had the great pleasure recently of meeting Dr Andrew Kertesz, who has himself published some extremely detailed studies of patients with such agnosias (see, for example, his paper on visual agnosia, Kertesz 1979). Dr Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape. As with Dr P., and as with Macrae and Trolle's patient, it is especially the animate which is so absurdly misperceived. The most important studies of such agnosias, and of visual processing in general, are now being undertaken by A. R. and H. Damasio (see article in Mesulam [1985], pp. 259-288; or see p. 79 below).
       it could physically be none other, on several occasions grimaced