http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-4/
*V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: * Denial that a body part, in this instance, an arm, belongs to her. It’s part of the same spectrum of disorders. So the wonderful thing about her is that she has a great sense of humor and was really articulate and intelligent. So I asked her, “Can you move your right arm?” and the usual list of questions, and she said “Yes, of course.” I said, “Can you move your left arm?” She said, “Yes.” “Can you touch my nose?” “Yes, I can touch your nose, sir.” “Can you see it?” “Yes, it’s almost there.” The usual thing, O.K.? So far, nothing new. Her left arm is lying limp in her lap; it’s not moving at all; it’s on her lap, on her left side, O.K.? I left the room, waited for a few minutes, then I went back to the room and said, “Can you use your right arm?” She said, “Yes.” Then I grabbed her left arm and raised it towards her nose and I said, “Whose arm is this?” She said, “That’s my mother’s arm.” Again, typical, right? And I said, “Well, if that’s your mother’s arm, where’s your mother?” And she looks around, completely perplexed, and she said, “Well, she’s hiding under the table.” So this sort of confabulatory thing is very common, but it’s just a very striking manifestation of it. No normal person would dream of making up a story like that. But here is the best part. I said, “Please touch your nose with your left hand.” She immediately takes her right hand, goes and reaches for the left hand, raising it, passively raising it, right? Using it as a tool to touch my nose or touch her nose. What does this imply? She claims her left arm is not paralyzed, right? Why does she spontaneously reach for it and grab her left arm with her right hand and take her left hand to her nose? That means she knows it is paralyzed at some level. Is that clear? [53]<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-4/#ftn53> *ERROL MORRIS: * Yes. Presumably, if she didn’t know it was paralyzed, she wouldn’t try to lift it with her right hand. *V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: * And it gets even better, she’s just now told me that it’s not her left arm, it is her mother’s arm, so why is she pulling up her mother’s arm and pointing it at my nose? What we call belief is not a monolithic thing; it has many layers. *ERROL MORRIS:* Like a deck of cards. But it again raises the question of whether this phenomenon is real? Isn’t that Babinski’s question? This is true of your work on anosognosia — the idea of trying to devise a set of experiments to determine whether someone is pretending to not-know something. Are they feigning a lack of awareness? Are they truly oblivious? Or is that knowledge buried somewhere in the brain? Do we live in a cloud of belief that is separate from the reality of our circumstances? *V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: * Absolutely, and overall, fortunately, it’s a positive cloud in most of us. If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified. *ERROL MORRIS:* Indeed. *V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: *It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be. ------------------------------ Ramachandran has used the notion of layered belief — the idea that some part of the brain can believe something and some other part of the brain can believe the opposite (or deny that belief) — to help explain anosognosia. In a 1996 paper [54]<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-4/#ftn54>, he speculated that the left and right hemispheres react differently when they are confronted with unexpected information. The left brain seeks to maintain continuity of belief, using denial, rationalization, confabulation and other tricks to keep one’s mental model of the world intact; the right brain, the “anomaly detector” or “devil’s advocate,” picks up on inconsistencies and challenges the left brain’s model in turn. When the right brain’s ability to detect anomalies and challenge the left is somehow damaged or lost (e.g., from a stroke), anosognosia results. In Ramachandran’s account, then, we are treated to the spectacle of different parts of the brain — perhaps even different selves — arguing with one another. We are overshadowed by a nimbus of ideas. There is our physical reality and then there is our conception of ourselves, our conception of self — one that is as powerful as, perhaps even more powerful than, the physical reality we inhabit. A version of self that can survive even the greatest bodily tragedies. We are creatures of our beliefs. This is at the heart of Ramachandran’s ideas about anosognosia — that the preservation of our fantasy selves demands that we often must deny our physical reality. Self-deception is not enough. Something stronger is needed. Confabulation triumphs over organic disease. The hemiplegiac’s anosognosia is a stark example, but we all engage in the same basic process. But what are we to make of this? Is the glass half-full or half-empty? For Dunning, anosognosia masks our incompetence; for Ramachandran, it makes existence palatable, perhaps even possible. ------------------------------ [53] Oliver Sacks provides (also from “A Leg to Stand On”) a particularly dramatic example of a patient trying to throw his arm out of bed. “. . . the patient at Mount Carmel who ‘discovered’ his long-lost brother in his bed. ‘He’s still attached to me!’ he said indignantly. ‘The cheek of it! Here’s his arm!’ holding up, with his right hand, his own left arm.” [54] See V.S. Ramachandran, The evolutionary biology of self-deception, laughter, dreaming and depression: some clues from anosognosia, Medical Hypotheses, November 1996, 47(5):347-62. This idea of the right brain as the “devil’s advocate” is further discussed in Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain. I hope to return to these fascinating ideas in a forthcoming essay. -- You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole. -AMBEDKAR http://venukm.blogspot.com http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. 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