2023-11-10 16:41:39
Imagine that you are walking down the street and suddenly a person approaches you to greet you warmly, or you hear a sound and you don’t know how to differentiate it. These symptoms and recognition disabilities are agnosia, which is defined by the Merk manuals, as “the inability to identify an object through one or more senses.”
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This disease can be divided into several specific types, the best known being prosopagnosia, which gained relevance in the media because Brad Pitt has revealed in several media outlets that he suffers from this disease.
According to the German Joachim Bodamer, who conducted the first clinical study and documented and defined it in 1947, prosopagnosia is “the selective interruption of the perception of faces, both one’s own and those of others.”
“It is not a disease, but a symptom or syndrome that can correspond to causes of various origins and that occurs, above all and more frequently, in older adults with vascular problems that produce dementia attacks,” the Colombian psychiatrist explained to EL TIEMPO. Alfonso Rodríguez.
“It is a very rare syndrome, so rare that almost all diagnosed cases are published in specialized journals. It appears when an injury occurs in specific brain areas. There are no global epidemiological data, much less in Latin America,” neurologist María Antonieta Bobes, from the Cuban Center for Neuroscience, told this newspaper.
People may have talked for many years with others, but have difficulty remembering it.
Brilliant Minds, a portal specialized in neuroscience, emphasized that “sometimes, it seems to us that acts like looking at what surrounds us and recognizing that a table is a table, or that a door is a door, are natural and simple processes.” However, there is a complexity around these functions that do not work correctly in certain people.
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Is there any cure?
In certain situations, visual agnosia causes people not to recognize themselves in front of the mirror.
According to scientists at the Spanish Neurological Institute ‘Neuro RHB’, this type of condition “is a specific type of visual agnosia that is characterized by the inability to recognize faces that are familiar to us and, even in the most severe cases, the patient can not recognizing oneself in a mirror or in a photograph.
According to the Institute, “those affected can identify a face as such and know that there is a difference between two faces, but they cannot distinguish who it is.”
Experts indicate that there is no type of medical treatment for this disease. The only thing that specialists propose is mental training in which the subject can recognize the most particular aspects of the people closest to him or the individuals who accompany him in everyday environments.
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This disorder can be transmitted hereditarily and its effects may manifest during adulthood or during early childhood.
Likewise, prosopagnosia is divided into two types: apperceptive, in which the patient cannot differentiate one face from another; and the associative one, which does allow some faces to be distinguished, but does not allow them to be associated with people he knows, as happens to Brad Pitt.
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