As an aspiring artist myself, I was particularly struck by the subjects of visual agnosia presented in the readings for this week. In particular, I was awestruck by the right brain limitations of Dr. P in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The “judgment,” as Dr. Sacks calls it, was completely comatose in Dr. P’s brain, essentially making him a computer. Recognizing only the strong schemata that objects have, (while describing the glove, Dr. P poured over the details of the glove: “A continuous surface…infolded upon itself. It appears to have…five outpouchings…a container of some sort?”) Dr. P could not name anything presented in front of him unless he was able to deduce the meaning from his observations. Dr. Sacks notes that when it comes to vision, Dr. P was “lost in a world of visual abstractions,” thus explaining the progression of paintings hanging in Dr. P’s home (Sacks 15). Whether or not this was truly artistic development or visual agnosia, we will never know, but it still hard to fathom a world without the influence of the right hemisphere of the brain.
Reading this story, coupled with the work of Kenneth Heilman, I was reminded of the lessons of one of my drawing instructors from a few years ago. His entire class was based on the mechanics of the brain, and how to truly learn to observe and create a drawing that is natural, one must remove all “influence” of the left brain on one’s work. In almost every one of his classes, he stressed the fact that the left side of the brain has schemata like images of everything in our lives. For every hand, the left brain has an image of a hand that affects the pure observation of drawing a hand. The same is true for the shape of eyes, or of how the nose looks. Our right brain is the side of the brain that can distinguish the differences in the left brain images “provided” in our mind, as well as make them apparent in our visual re-construction of them on paper.
Dr. P no longer had the influence of the right brain in his life, losing his “judgment,” and ultimately turning him into a computer. It is hard to imagine a life without being able to judge the natural and recognize the differences between objects we have known all our life.
Above all, the most intriguing aspect of Dr. P’s impairment was his “life music;” the only thing keeping him going. Dr. Sacks points out that music is very mechanical and can drive one in a way that visual roadblocks cannot inhibit. Therefore, Dr. P was able to live his life to some normality. However, Music, although mechanical, is also very artistic and creative, something that could arguably emanate from the right side of the brain.
When I read Sheckley's short story "Warm," I immediately saw parallels between Anders' experience and Sacks' Dr. P. The key distinction between them seems to be that while Dr. P. seems happily unaware of his impairment, Anders’ experience is one of growing dissociation from the normal. He is acutely aware of seemingly awakening to an “alien … viewpoint” in opposition to “normalcy.” Perhaps Dr. P. would have had a similar sensation if he were able to discern the change in his perception. This parallel is especially clear in the way both men see – or, rather, don’t see – people and faces. A close relative is only recognizable by a pronounced, isolated feature for Dr. P. and Anders sees a friend at a party as just “the indignant flesh attached to the tie.” Of course, the other key neurological difference between the two men is that Anders can still actually understand the meaning of a human “gestalt” (in fact he can now comprehend it with stark clarity) but loses his feeling for it, his sense of its inherent value, while Dr. P. has no loss of feeling – he is deeply moved by the fragrant red rose, once he identifies it from smell – but he has lost the capacity to process the visual information that would trigger an emotional reaction. I wonder, if we could diagnose Anders with a stroke (ignoring the Twilight Zone-like existential journey that loops him back inside his own head) what area of his brain might be damaged that would inhibit him from emotional attachment to what he can still perceive and understand? He does not lose the faculty of judgment like Dr. P, but he loses the ability to personally buy into what his judgment reveals.
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