Actual Freedom – Definitions

Definitions

Anosognosia


Anosognosia:

Anosognosia is a neurological disorder that causes the patient to be unable to recognize the existence of another disorder that he/she suffers from (the word comes from the Greek ‘nosos, ‘disease’ + gnosis, ‘knowledge’; an-/a- is a negative prefix). So, patients can be agnosic for colours, ‘colour agnosia’; agnosic for objects, ‘object agnosia’; agnosic for faces, ‘prosopagnosia[1]’ (from Greek prosopon, ‘face’ + agnosia, ‘inability to recognize/identify’) etcetera.

Originally the term referred only to a situation where brain damage leaves the person partially paralysed yet they are completely unaware of their deficit and will deny that anything is wrong with them – it generally occurs with extensive damage to the right hemisphere, leaving the left half of the body extensively paralysed, whereas the same pattern of damage to the left hemisphere will result in similar paralysis to the right half of the body although there is no lost awareness of disability – but has, in popular usage, come to cover such things as what the term alexithymia, for instance, more properly refers to.

[1]agnosic for faces, ‘prosopagnosia’:

[Jane Goodall]: ‘I suffer from an embarrassing, curiously humbling neurological condition called prosopagnosia, which, translated, means I have a problem in face recognition. I used to think, that it was due to some mental laziness, and I desperately tried to memorize the faces of people I met ... Quite by chance, when talking to a friend, I found out that he suffered from the same problem. I could not believe it. Then I discovered that my own sister, Judy, knew similar embarrassment. Perhaps, others did also. I wrote to the well-known neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. Had he ever heard of such an unusual condition? Not only had he heard of it—he suffered from it himself. And his situation was far more extreme than mine’. (pp. xiii-xiv, ‘Reason for Hope’; Goodall J, Berman P (2000); London: Thorsons. ISBN 0722540426).


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