Anosognosia and Confabulation?

[Animus]

I've been entertaining an idea recently and think this would be a good place to bounce it. For those who aren't familiar with anosognosia, it is a clinical term referring to a rare phenomena wherein a person is unaware of a cognitive, perceptual or physical deficit. The term was coined by Joseph Babinski and a classic case of it is Anton-Babinski Syndrome. An ABS patient is cortically blind and cannot actually see anything through their primary visual pathway. There is a second pathway which passes through the superior colliculus. This second pathway is obvious in patients with blindsight, who know intuitively contrasts and movements to some degree even though they are cortically blind. In ABS patients however they are completely unaware they have a deficit at all and believe they can see perfectly.

What is amazing about these cases is that it reveals that an otherwise rational and aware person can be entirely ignorant of such a major deficit! How can a person not actually see but believe they do? Researchers explain this by confabulation. This is the view that the brain makes stuff up and adds perspective to memories. It is a theory used to explain false memories. But how is it that the person cannot work out rationally that they cannot see? Are these people not aware at all? Or is this some kind of split-brain phenomena, wherein a person says something different than what the other half their brain is thinking? Or is this the best approximation or conception of what we call ego? "There is nothing wrong with me, there is something wrong with you!"

What if a person suffers a cognitive deficit due to a stroke? Perhaps a ministroke that deprived them of some higher cognitive abilities. There are cases of people not being able to understand faces (proposognosia) and animals, but what about rationality?

It is interesting to note that alcohol attacks the rational mind, the rational brain and causes physical damage to it. Alcohol essentially works by temporarily inhibiting the inhibiting brain so that the gates open up on the more primitive drives. This leads to a lot of problems as I'm sure we have all observed in bars and at parties, perhaps we have also been actors. Then it is a quite sobering fact that alcohol is widely consumed in mass quantities. Is it not the ego concreting itself in the pleasures of material things that here ultimately destroys the spiritual mind?

[Philosophaster]

Interesting topic. Anosognosia is a fascinating phenomenon, and could perhaps be used as a wedge for a skeptical argument -- what if people in general are not only deficient in reasoning, but unaware of their own deficit?

[Animus]

I think part of the work of philosophy is to make us aware of our inherent deficits. Men like Dan Dennett show us how our visual perception fails us. Magicians like Penn & Teller show us how our expectations can mislead us. James Randi makes the argument that often children do not have the same expectations and consequently are harder to fool, because much of a magicians work depends upon the audience making false assumptions.

As Jean Piaget first demonstrated, children younger than 3 years of age do not expect an object persists when it is obscured from their vision. When an object is out of their field of view, its as if it stopped existing. So when a magician pretends to conceal an object in their hand, the adult viewer expects the object to be concealed in the hand of the magician, whereas the child thinks it simply disappears and is not surprised when the magician reveals an empty hand.

[volta]

This is another great topic. How can our species advance until we can recognize that we are able to talk ourselves into believing certain things because we want to believe them? (Or worse yet, what if our species advanced because we were able to do this?) We obviously have a built in "safety switch" which prevents us, to varying degrees, from acknowledging truths which we find painful for any numbers of reasons (but typically because they clash with our perception of the world and us in it).

Anosognosia is just an extreme version of "positive thinking" isn't it? And there's certainly no shortage of that in the world. It should be considered a basic human element when describing our species along with warm-blooded. If people are able to talk themselves into any manner of things like "my husband/wife isn't cheating on me" despite all evidence to the contrary, then the skies the limit for self delusion. Who are you to tell me I'm blind, you lousy optometrist? It's like that Monty Python scene where the guy gets his arms cut off and says "it's just a flesh wound". Always look in the bright side of life (he says sarcastically)

-- what if people in general are not only deficient in reasoning, but unaware of their own deficit?

Surely this has to be the case for at least 99.9999999999999% of people, doesn't it? We all think we have a much better grasp on reason and logic than we do, especially when it comes to somewhat ordinary thought processes. Books like Tipping Point and Blink show just how weak our reasoning is, because our senses deceive us, we can't predict the future, we are governed by tiny events beyond our control etc.... If we were truly stripped of all our self deception and delusion, most people wouldn't bother to get out of bed in the morning. So... as humans, we appear to have developed an innate ability to trick ourselves into seeing patterns and reasoning in everyday life where none exist to provide us with a sense of well-being which is required to function. How would our world would function without the self-delusion. Would it fit Hobbes description of nasty, brutish and short or would it be utopia? Never mind, I don't think we have much chance convincing a few billion people to take up a critical examination of the human thought.

[Animus]

Another interesting branch of Neurophilosophy or Psychophilosophy is Identity Disorders like "reverse intermetamorphisis" wherein the subject identifies themselves with someone else all-together. In one case recounted in Metzinger's "Being No One" the subject Rose saw her grandfather when she looked in the mirror.

Some interesting reading on this:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:_7w ... =clnk&cd=7

Or Metzinger's book is good too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=COYWQ_ ... &ct=result

[JohnEDPMalin]

Animus:

You have answered your own questions.

Thank you for introducing me to this concept of 'anosognosia': it is Greek: ana- "without" + nosos "disease, illness" + gnosis "knowledge"; its extreme examples are blindness and paralysis. Pouring cold water in the ear seems to be a treatment for it.

I did a Wikipedia search to get the above notions for you Animus.

It is sort of like those who do not know they are missing a limb; mirrors are used to cure this attention deficit in consciousness.

As all you have asserted, it does illustrate our capacity for self-deception, especially, when we have been extremely emotionally traumatically hurt.

People living under cruelty and torture, also, engage in self-deception to protect their identity space or self-definition of whom or what they are (taught by culture).

So the brain capacities here do not shock me; it is merely the extraordinary length the human mind will go to prove itself right and the world wrong. The brain has the capacity to block sensory content that would wound our pumped-up emotional well-being state.

Does the group remember the scene in Dr. Frankenstein, when the humpback asserts "What humpback?" Here we see his obvious humpback, but he is in denial of it.

So this little dilemma falls into the category of missing phantom limbs, left-right binocular vision and other oddities of the human brain.

The comments above about magicians is very revealing. You can create an experience by clappers, incense, smell (fumigation or perfume) to frame an expectation, then proceed with your illusion by delusion.

Are these observations useful to the group?


Respectfully,


John E.D.P. Malin

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