Neurological Deficit

A person with no repertoire of memory for she had never used his hand since she was born. She had never fed himself, never used the toilet by himself for over sixty years. This person, even though she has elementary sensory in his hands, has no power to integrate these sensation to the level of perceptions, an existential dilemmas with a pair of unless hands.

Oliver Sacks, a renowned neurologist had uncovered this mystery as he argued that this blind but intelligent lady could have been over protected and inactivated her hands all over her life. By surprise, Oliver suggested to the nurse to show less than the usual alacrity in feeding this woman. Amazingly and gradually, this woman is able to move her hands.

2nd Case from Oliver Sack's student, Dr.Jonathan Cole in (A Man who mistook his wife for a hat (1998):

"Many patients with phantoms suffer 'phantom pain' or pain in the phantom. A patient with persistent phantom leg pain, anaesthesia of the spinous ligament with Lignocaine caused the phantom to be anaesthetised briefly, but that electrical stimulation of the spinal roots produced a sharp tingling pain in the phantom, whist stimulation of the spinal cord higher up reduced the phantom pain".

3rd Case

The labyrinth in the inner ears consists of semicircular canals containing liquid which monitor the motion of the body. However, the balance of the body is controlled by the integration of 1) Labyrinthine, the proprioceptive and the visual.

A patient can still be in a balancing mode even the labyrinthine element to be lost before proprioception and the visual because this triple system, can compensate for others as long as our vestibular and the proprioception systems are still intact. We will not be tilted even we close our eyes.

Proprieception is able to compensate the defects from inner ears, the labyrinths.

4th Case

Global aphasia could render patients incapable of understanding words, but nevertheless, they would understood most of what said to them. This is partly because natural speech does not only consist of words, but it consists of utterance, which is suffused with tone, expression, facial, emotion, and body language. Though understanding of words can be destroyed, one cannot lie to aphasia as the expression that goes with words, the spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked.

On the contrary, Agnosia patients who have lost their expressive, emotion, feelings, timbre, and the entire character qualities but words are perfectly maintained. For example, a patient may lose the ability to detect if a voice was angry, cheerful or sad. One has to compensate this word expression deficit by looking at the faces of the people while they talk.

Agnpsias are associated with disorders of the right hemisphere while aphasias are associated with the deficit in right hemisphere.

5th Case

A disease of excess, an opposite of deficit, are inherently hyper active, generative, and monstrously as well. It can be over-growth, abnormal, over excited, tended to disintegration and uncontrolled, over-powered by impulse, image and will, possession by a physiology gone wild. Oliver quote in one of his studies:

'I have too much energy...Everything is too bright, too powerful, too much. It is a feverish energy, a morbid brilliant'