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This paper summarizes the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and questions the perceptual issues described. This paper explores Sacks’s studies on the musician, Dr. P, and showcases the severity of his visual agnosia through various examples that focus on his inability to recognize faces and objects. This paper utilizes these examples from Dr. P to question the explanatory gap. Would it be a barrier? Or would understanding how Dr. P’s brain works be enough to understand how he visualizes the world? This paper also focuses on how the inability to perceive stimuli in meaningful ways can affect all aspects of a person’s perception.
Reaction Paper 1: Review of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a HatImagine looking at yourself in the mirror and being unable to recognize that person staring back at you.
Same goes for your family members and friends. This would make it difficult to navigate life, right? This severe visual agnosia was demonstrated in Oliver Sacks’s (1985) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat through a talented musician, Dr.
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P. This paper analyzes this book and focuses on perceptual barriers Dr. P experienced as a result of his visual agnosia.
Literature Summary and Review
Dr. P was unable to recognize faces and objects despite having normal vision. His auditory sense compensated for this lack of visual perception, enabling him to recognize others by their voices. To a limited extent, if an individual had a unique facial feature, such as a mustache, it somewhat helped him distinguish the person due to its abstract nature.
Otherwise, he had no sure way of identifying those with whom he interacted because his brain did not allow him to see a familiar face and associate it with someone he should recognize (Sacks). The initial discovery of Dr. P’s condition came about during an ophthalmologist appointment which revealed issues with the visual parts of his brain, prompting a referral to a neurologist, Dr. Sacks. During Dr. Sacks’s evaluation of Dr. P, he noticed that Dr. P studied individual facial features of Sacks rather than the face as a whole (Sacks). When testing reflexes, Dr. Sacks took off Dr. P’s shoe to scratch the bottom of his foot with a key. When left to put his shoe back on, Dr. P misjudged his shoe for his foot and failed to put it on himself. As if that was not already unexpected behavior, Dr. P later attempted to take his wife’s head off and put it on like a hat. After these incidents, Sacks concluded that there were gross misperceptions occurring in Dr. P’s brain (Sacks).
Upon further testing, it became certain that Dr. P’s visual issues were more complex than previously thought. Dr. P easily identified abstract shapes, such as a dodecahedron, but facial recognition was nonexistent for him. While watching a love scene in an early Bette Davis film, he failed to identify the people and their portrayed emotions because they were indistinguishable to him (Sacks).To test if Dr. P could not identify the actors just because of unfamiliarity with the film, Dr. Sacks showed him pictures of his family. He was unable to recognize portraits of his family, colleagues, and himself (Sacks).In addition to the inability to perceive faces, Dr. P was unable to recognize objects. When Dr. P was given a rose, he did not know it as such at first glance. Through the observation of individual features, he was able to construct this object in his head. For example, Dr. P states,“About six inches in length,’ he commented. ‘A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.’ ... ‘It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own.’ ... ‘I think this could be an inflorescence or flower.’” (Sacks 10). Based on technical details, Dr. P hypothesized what the object could be instead of relying on perceptual heuristics to conceptualize what the object should be.In addition to facial and object recognition issues, Dr. P had difficulty identifying places on his left. When Dr. P was asked to imagine a familiar place, he was only able to recall what he saw in his right visual field. He omitted the what was on the left visual field regardless if he switched orientations (Sacks).
Dr. Sacks noted the deterioration of Dr. P’s mind when observing his paintings. “He had indeed moved from realism to non representation to the abstract, yet this was not the artist, but the pathology, advancing towards a profound visual agnosia, in which all powers of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, all sense of reality, were being destroyed” (Sacks 12).
While he had severe agnosia, music helped him have an idea of what he was supposed to be doing. Dr. P used music in his everyday life to understand visual associations which did not come naturally to him. He had different songs for respective activities, like eating and dressing. Dr. Sacks realized it was important for Dr. P to continue using music in all aspects of life.Discussion
Dr. Sacks’s experience with Dr. P showed the subjective effects of a severe case of visual agnosia. This paper summarizes these effects, but there may be some topics Dr. Sacks could comment on that may contribute to the content.Perceptual ExplanationI am curious how Dr. Sacks would explain Dr. P’s perception of his surroundings. If top-down processing is influenced by past experiences, would Dr. P ever be able to perceive due to no past experience with recognizing objects or faces? Even if his brain was somehow “fixed”? Hard Problem of ConsciousnessI am curious to know how Dr. Sacks would explain the hard problem of consciousness in regards to Dr. P. Even though we know how Dr. P’s brain is flawed, it is impossible to understand how Dr. P visualizes the world. Would Dr. Sacks think others could understand how it feels to be Dr. P just by understanding how his brain works? Or is the explanatory gap so vast that we would need to actually experience his world to know how it felt to be him?Perceptual LocalizationI am curious to know how Dr. Sacks would explain Dr. P’s localization of perception. There is damage to Dr. P’s fusiform face area because of his prosopagnosia, but how much damage is there to his parahippocampal place area? Dr. P can recognize some places but omits anything on the left side. Are these damages often seen together?Conclusions
In order to understand how visual agnosia affects others, it is necessary to compare Dr. P’s experiences with others to validate the symptoms and increase understanding of visual agnosia. Dr. P is an example of the explanatory gap because his perception is different than most and everyone experiences the world differently. We cannot know how Dr. P visualizes the world merely because we know how his brain works.
Review On The Book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" By Oliver Sack. (2024, Feb 18). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/review-on-the-book-the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat-by-oliver-sack-essay
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