
The man who mistook his wife for a hat (1983) - lermontov
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v05/n09/oliver-sacks/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat
======
smsm42
It is a part of an excellent book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat)
which is recommended for anyone who is interested in how the brains work.

Interestingly enough, the article above links to Blindsight book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_\(Watts_novel\))
which is also excellent and discusses somewhat related topics, though in a
fictional setting.

~~~
stephentmcm
For anyone looking for a great hard-scifi read Blindsight and it's sequel
Echopraxia are actually brilliant reads.

~~~
geon
Available for free (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) here:
[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

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roubachof
[http://www.michaelnyman.com/music/recordings/show/the-man-
wh...](http://www.michaelnyman.com/music/recordings/show/the-man-who-mistook-
his-wife-for-a-hat)

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qCOVET
Since we are on the subject of brain, does anyone know of a good article on
how memory is stored and retrieved? I am always intrigued by the biologics of
it ... if its purely electrical, how are these charges stored and isolated
away from the rest of neuronal activity ... alternatively, what if life has
chosen some bizarre quaternary structure of DNA to store the memory ...

~~~
lqdc13
There's this recent review:
[http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-
etal%20...](http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-
etal%20\(2012\).pdf)

But whenever I read these, I always think they might be getting it largely
wrong. In fact, they themselves admit to it being partially speculative
information.

I am by no means an expert, but I was neuroscience major in undergrad, and
back then (~5-7 years ago) it wasn't known exactly for sure how it works
besides the fact that a part of hippocampus interacts with other parts of the
brain and that certain things are reinforced with more learning.

Most of the well known and still relevant studies in the field look at people
that have a particular part of the brain damaged and how it affected them.
Obviously, there aren't too many of such patients.

There are also studies in mice and other animals, but their brains work
differently sometimes and other times there are a lot of unrelated variables.

To give you an idea of where the field was a few years ago: I was a research
assistant in a neuro-psych lab and we were giving animals drugs in large
amounts and then checking whether the cells in a specific region of the brain
are damaged. If the CA1 area of hipoccampus was damaged, we could say that it
potentially affects memory formation. That was checked by the ability of a rat
to solve puzzles it previously solved. Very crude, unfortunately.

~~~
darkmighty
Aren't there any working 'survey' models of different functions of the brain
trying to integrate those findings?

------
Excluse
I recently went to see Woz speak in Massachusetts and he claims he suffers
from an affliction similar to this (the inability to recognize faces).

~~~
smsm42
The condition is prosopagnosia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia)
and the wiki page says Saks himself suffered from it. It is not that rare,
though many people that have it just think they are "bad with faces" or have
bad memory when recognizing faces (even though otherwise their memory may be
excellent). Many people that have it learn to "route around" it by explicitly
memorizing facial cues (hairstyle, facial features, hair color) or other cues
(clothing style, voice, body characteristics, etc.) and going off context ("if
I meet this person in the office, this is one of my coworkers"). If the person
is encountered out of context and in unusual attire/situation, they may not
have enough clues to trigger recognition - so if somebody you know doesn't
recognize you on the street, maybe they are not necessarily rude or avoiding
you but maybe just have some prosopagnosia. :)

~~~
itsybitsycoder
Yup, one of my professors in college had this and she would use a different
variation of her name in each facet of her life so that when she met someone
out of context, she would know where she knew them from.

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mirimir
Old memories! Around the same time, I read _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things:
What Categories Reveal About the Mind_ by George Lakoff (1987).[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Thi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things)

------
Retra
And people think that their brains are so different from computers...

~~~
yathern
Part of the article actually uses this as in exact example of how brains are
different from computers. Granted, it's from 1983.

The man in question essentially missed the forest for the trees - unable to
perform any visual abstraction or familiarity, while still having strong
abilities to identify the individual features of an object.

At the end of the day, brains are, indeed quite different from computers. The
closest things that I'm aware of are neural nets, which can be subject to
biases and confusion in a similar way to human brains - rather than a CPU.

~~~
seiji
_neural nets, which can be subject to biases and confusion in a similar way to
human brains - rather than a CPU._

That's a slight abuse of comparisons.

Saying an ANN is not like a CPU would be like saying your stomach is not like
a refrigerator.

An ANN is a universal approximator / universal modeler. A (turing-complete)
CPU is a universal simulator. There's no native "CPU algorithm" to exploit or
sample against for any knowledge retrieval.

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socceroos
"I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an
extravagant red rose for my butthole."

...caught me by surprise.

On a more serious note, I can draw comparisons with the subject of this piece.
Nowhere near the same scale of degradation, but bits and pieces. Perhaps it's
normal to have a certain margin for error where you can exhibit similar
symptoms.

~~~
bmmayer1
Ahem. Buttonhole.

