Brain Problems

There are a number of neurological and brain disorders that raise important questions for philosophical theories of mind, and that any responsible and comprehensive theory will have to be able to account for:

Anton–Babinski syndrome is a rare symptom of brain damage occurring in the occipital lobe. People who suffer from it are "cortically blind", but affirm, often quite adamantly and in the face of clear evidence of their blindness, that they are capable of seeing. Failure to see is dismissed by the sufferer through confabulation. It is named after Gabriel Anton and Joseph Babinski.

Auditory and visual hallucinations. Experiences of ghosts, out of body experiences, sleep paralysis, lucid or vivid dreams, apparitions particularly of recently deceased loved ones (bereavement hallucinations), sounds, voices, and sensations of a presence are quite common in the population. Studies report that around 15% of subjects report having heard a voice or voices alone.

Balint’s Syndrome: patients have optic ataxia, or in-coordination of hand and eye movement, and simultan-agnosia, or the inability to perceive more than one object at a time, even when they are in the same place.

Blindsight—have no conscious awareness of any visual stimuli—they will even insist that they are blind. But when tested they show cognitive awareness of visual stimuli.

Capgras Syndrome—a loved one has been replaced by an impostor.

Cotard delusion or Cotard's syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuro-psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.

Déjà vu is doing something or experiencing something that is new, but having the strong feeling that you’ve done it before.

Disassociative states. Patients have brief bouts of amnesia with lapses in memory, personality traits, and normal behaviors.

Fregoli Delusion is a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise. The syndrome may be related to a brain lesion, and is often of a paranoid nature with the delusional person believing themselves persecuted by the person they believe is in disguise.

Jamais vu is the sensation of experiencing a familiar situation as completely new and unfamiliar.

Mirror prosopagnosia—patients cannot process mirror spatial relations, think that someone is following them around

Phantom limb pain. Many amputees report having pain, aching, itching or other sensations in limbs that have been lost.

Prosopagnosia causes an inability or impaired ability to recognize faces.

Sydenham's chorea causes rapid, uncoordinated and jerky movements of the face, feet, and hands. It is caused by strep infections and rheumatic fever, and shows up most often in young girls many months after infection.

Apophenia--the perception of connections between unrelated phenomena, or patterns where none exist.

Parkinson's Drug causes compulsive gambling, binge eating, compulsive shopping.