Mysteries of the Mind

עמוד:77

Booklet Page 48 : Presenting a case Case l When Seeing Is Not Believing : Face Recognition David Silvera was a normal , healthy young man in his 20 s when he was involved in a serious car accident . David was badly injured in the head and on his right side . He was in a coma for five weeks and lost his right arm . While he was in the coma , an fMRI brain scan found that a very small area of his brain had been damaged . When he finally regained consciousness , David ' s mental abilities seemed to be fine . He could speak and read and seemed to be normal in every way . But his doctors and family noticed that there was one very odd thing about him : he did not recognize members of his family or his personal belongings . David ' s mother became upset when she heard him refer to her as " that nice lady" while he was speaking to his doctor . According to David , his father was also a fake . David did not believe that his apartment was really his . He claimed that it looked like his apartment , but it was not his . David was suffering from a brain disorder called "Capgras Syndrome , " which causes a very odd type of memory dysfunction . While David was able to recognize faces - one of the many functions of memory - he was unable to feel the emotions that go along with such recognition . Research into how memory works has found that when we remember people ' s faces and important events , we not only store images in our memory , we also store emotions . However , the brain stores pictures of faces and events and the emotions that go with them in two different parts of the brain . If there is damage in the part of the brain that connects these two areas , the visual and the emotional , it can result in a person thinking that familiar faces are not who they seem to be . In David ' s mind , the only explanation for this odd feeling was that the people he was seeing were not real - they were fakes . Interestingly , when David spoke to his parents on the phone , he had no problem believing that they were really his parents : when he heard familiar voices , he could also feel the warm emotions that signaled they were real . This proved that David ' s auditory memory was not affected . It is rare cases of brain dysfunction like David Silvera ' s that help neurologists understand how the complex functions of the brain actually work . David's case has inspired doctors to carry out further research on memory and recognition .

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