Agnosia

Agnosia is a rare neurological disorder that impairs peoples ability to recognize objects or people. It can affects many different parts of the brain, but usually a person that has agnosia will only be affected in one part of the brain. There is no cure for agnosia but treatments and methods for for coping with agnosia very from person to person and depending on the form of agnosia a person has.

Agnosia


Agnosia is the inability to recognize the import of sensory impressions; the varieties correspond with several senses and are distinguished as auditory, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, and visual. After a head injury, agnosia can occur suddenly.

Types
There are many different types of agnosia. The three major types of agnosia are visual agnosia, auditory agnosia, and tactile agnosia. Visual agnosia is the inability to recognize familiar objects by sight, usually due to a lesion in one of the visual association areas. Also called object blindness and psychic blindness. Tactile agnosia is the inability to recognize familiar objects by touch. And finally auditory agnosia is the inability to recognize or differentiate between sounds.

Causes and Symptoms
Agnosia is caused by the damage to the parietal, temporal, or occipital lobe, which control memories of familiar objects, sights and sounds. Specifically, agnosia is caused by damage to pathways that connect primary sensory possessing areas

Symptoms of agnosia depend on the area of the brain that has been damaged. Damage to the parietal lobe can impair a persons ability to recognize common objects that have been placed in the hand opposite to the damaged part of the brain. However if that person is just looking directly at the object, they should be able to recognize it immediately. This is usually a symptom that occurs after a stroke. If the damage is to the occipital lobe, a person would not be able to identify familiar objects such as places and even other peoples faces. In this case, people have to rely on their other senses to help the recognize certain objects.

Treatments
Some cases of agnosia can be treated with surgery, antibiotic, or in the case of a brain tumor, radiation. Most cases require purely therapeutic methods to help the patient cope with their condition. Some of these therapeutic strategies include structural approaches such as organizing clothes to help with identification, verbal explanations of objects, helping the patient to better use their other senses to allow the to identify objects, and utilizing small specific features on peoples faces to help with identification

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