The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

I've been reading through a book recently, called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is a collection of short essays about people with rare neurological conditions. For many of these people, their brain deteriorates to the point where they have trouble interpreting reality correctly.

The first story, which the book is named after, is the story of Dr. P. He has a condition where "not only did Dr P. increasingly fail to see faces, but he saw faces when there were no faces to see: genially, Magoo-like, when in the street he might pat the heads of water hydrants and parking meters, taking these to be the heads of children; he would amiably address carved knobs on the furniture and be astounded when they did not reply."

This sounds funny, but the crux of the condition is that Dr. P. is able to sense everything perfectly, but loses the ability to sort visual sensory input properly - he must rely on certain outstanding characteristics, like an unusual nose, to recognize people. As the title suggests, he loses the ability to recognize his wife by sight, though he still remembers her personality and recognizes her voice perfectly. Not only this, but he loses the whole idea of facial recognition, and fails to even try. A more extreme example, mentioned only in passing, was of a patient who became blind after a thrombosis but also forgot what sight was, and had no memories of ever seeing anything.

The second story deals with a man who has almost perfect retrograde amnesia - he cannot remember anything after 1945, even though the story takes place decades later. The author reflects on what this means for the patient, venturing into the moral and spiritual realms. If you can't remember what you were doing five minutes ago, do you have a continuous identity? Do you have a soul? Is our status as "human" dependent on our memory?

These questions resonated with me, and with the questions raised by our recent reading of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel is set in the distant future, but I think it's worth remembering that even now, people exist who are turned into "androids" of sorts just through accidents of brain damage. I think that Philip K. Dick, with his schizophrenia, was acutely aware of this. It's my belief that severe enough neurological conditions, ones which cause a disconnect from reality and a lack of empathy, are able to take away people's status as "human." I'm interested if anyone disagrees; is "humanity," perhaps also defined by the idea of a "soul," a fundamental quality bestowed upon the beginning of a human life?

Also, here's a link to a pdf of the book. I'd recommend it to everyone, especially those interested in the medical field. I had trouble not just copying and pasting the whole preface into a blog post, it's really relevant to a lot of topics that we've been discussing.