Phantoms In The Brain

Phantoms In The Brain will make you smarter about your own mind by sharing what scientists have learned from some of the most interesting experiences of patients with neurological disorders.

Imagine your sister just returned home from the hospital. You’re excited to see how she’s doing. But when you visit her, you discover something strange. Her hair and makeup are only done on one side. The other is a ratty mess.

This happened to a woman named Ellen, who has a condition known as hemineglect. Patients with this problem are not only blind to everything on one side, it’s as if that side doesn’t exist at all.

We don’t know a lot about what’s happening in the brains of people like Ellen. But cases like hers always happen after a stroke in the right parietal lobe, which is an area of the brain that helps with perception.

Unfortunately, there are over 30 areas of the brain that deal with perception, so it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. But the benefit of when things go wrong, like in Ellen’s case, is that we can learn more about how the brain works.

For those with hemineglect, what’s most likely happening is that the normal “searchlight” brain function that tells us what’s happening around us on each side is damaged.

Because some other processes still work, however, it’s more likely that the brain does know what’s around us but it just can’t let us know for some reason.

Denial is a purely psychological issue, right? There’s no damage to the brain there, it’s just all in people’s thinking patterns, right? Actually, for some extreme cases, damage to the brain is the main reason for denial, not a psychological disorder. Take Mrs. Dodd for example. She began to get frustrated with her doctors for telling her that her left arm was paralyzed. But she believed it worked just fine, even though she’d had a stroke in her right hemisphere that paralyzed her entire left side. To her, everything worked just fine. It baffled her, when the doctor asked her to touch his nose with her left hand, why he insisted that her arm wasn’t moving. She just knew she was touching him, even though in reality she wasn’t. Severe cases of denial like this are called anosognosia, which almost always happens when patients have had a stroke to their right hemisphere. Curiously, the opposite problem of obsessing over sickness occurs in those who’ve had a stroke in the left hemisphere. While some disorders like this one may have some grounding in psychology, the truth is we just don’t know enough about neurology to know for sure. Who knows, maybe in the future…