01: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Dr. P was a talented musician who started having trouble recognizing the faces of his students. When he started developing diabetes he went to a doctor who told him that nothing wrong was with his eyes and referred him to a neurologist.

The neurologist noticed that during their conversation, Dr. P was focusing on every part of his face rather than his face as a whole. He also noticed that Dr. P was seeing him by listening rather by seeing him. The patient also had a hard time putting his shoes back thinking that the shoe is his leg and vice versa. And finally when he was leaving he grabbed his wife’s head mistaking it to be his hat. After watching a love scene on the TV and making couple of simple tests the Dr. Diagnosis was that there was nothing wrong with his temporal lobes, but that his visual cortex was damaged, which didn’t only lead him to have hard time recognizing faces and facial expressions it also “affected his visual memory and imagination”. The disease also affected Dr. P perception of life making him see everything as if it was an abstract, the disease made his brain perceive pictures of its surrounding as cues not as concept as a whole.

In a normal human the visual processing starts in the retina moving to the thalamus then the visual cortex, but in Dr. P case the cortex got damaged and it was replaced by hearing and songs, which kept him away from losing grasp of reality.