Alexia: The Brain and Its Odd Disorders

I've always been intrigued by mental disorders. They are so strange. Some of my favourite books are of mental disorders, such as Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Richard Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes. This interest in oddities slammed into reality two years ago when my mother had a brain tumour operated on and came out of the surgery with left neglect. I was left with the horror to realize that I was seeing a condition I had read about theoretically now realized in the flesh. Oh how I wish my interest had remained purely theoretical. But the real world has a way of intruding into our theoretical interests. The world is cruel and indifferent to our sense of justice or fair play. Mental disorders are unwelcome but that doesn't stop them from seizing some people and leaving them ravaged.

Here's an interesting video from NPR on alexia:



There are so many other interesting mental conditions:

• I have an interest in autism and love the books by Temple Grandin that unveil the world of autism.


• The book Born on a Blue Monday by David Tammet gives insight into synesthesia and life as a high-functioning autistic savant syndrome.


• The idea that you could have a stroke and suddenly no longer recognize people, prosopagnosia, is frightening. My mother suffered this impairment after brain surgery.


• The oddity of Tourette's syndrome is interesting, i.e. you can be a surgeon and continue in your career despite having uncontrollable tics, or that you could suddenly be given to cursing or gesturing obscenely because you suffer from coprolalia. Bizarre but true.


• The sad world of H.M. a sufferer from severe epilepsy who underwent surgery to remove most of the hippocampus and consequently lost his ability to retain any new semantic memory or episodic memory. He retained the working memory structure and the ability to store procedural memory, but in effect he lived 55 years as an amnesiac.


• The tragedy of aphasia that has so many strange forms: inability to speak while still comprehending, speaking abut without comprehending, ability to write but not speak or to speak but not write, and so on. This condition shows how complex the mind is because it separates out faculties that we see as seamless.


• The strange world of bipolar disorder. Kay Redfield Jamison's book Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament looks at interesting historical figures and the question of whether "artistic" or "creative" types are abnormally afflicted by bipolar disorder.