9 July 1933 - birthday of Oliver Wolf Sacks, a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author. He believed that the brain is the "most incredible thing in the universe." He became widely known for writing best-selling case histories about both his patients' and his own disorders and unusual experiences.
He noted in a 2001 interview that severe shyness—which he described as "a disease"—had been a lifelong impediment to his personal interactions. Sacks believed his shyness stemmed from his prosopagnosia, popularly known as "face blindness", a condition that, coincidentally, he also studied in some of his patients, including the titular man from his work The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. This neurological disability of his even prevented him from recognising his own reflection in mirrors. Sacks' eldest brother Marcus also had prosopagnosia.
Prosopagnosia is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognise familiar faces, including one's own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision making) remain intact.
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| Medial surface of left cerebral hemisphere. (Fusiform gyrus shown in orange) |
The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus, which activates specifically in response to faces. The functionality of the fusiform gyrus allows most people to recognise faces in more detail than they do similarly complex inanimate objects. The right hemisphere fusiform gyrus is more often involved in familiar face recognition than the left. It remains unclear whether the fusiform gyrus is only specific for the recognition of human faces or if it is also involved in highly trained visual stimuli.
Reference - Wikipedia
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