5 ms·

The man who mistook his wife for a hat (1983)

217 points by lermontov 11y ago

Retra 11y ago
And people think that their brains are so different from computers...
- yathern 11y ago
  Part of the article actually uses this as in exact example of how brains are different from computers. Granted, it's from 1983. The man in question essentially missed the forest for the trees - unable to perform any visual abstraction or familiarity, while still having strong abilities to identify the individual features of an object. At the end of the day, brains are, indeed quite different from computers. The closest things that I'm aware of are neural nets, which can be subject to biases and confusion in a similar way to human brains - rather than a CPU.
  - seiji 11y ago
    neural nets, which can be subject to biases and confusion in a similar way to human brains - rather than a CPU. That's a slight abuse of comparisons. Saying an ANN is not like a CPU would be like saying your stomach is not like a refrigerator. An ANN is a universal approximator / universal modeler. A (turing-complete) CPU is a universal simulator. There's no native "CPU algorithm" to exploit or sample against for any knowledge retrieval.
roubachof 11y ago
http://www.michaelnyman.com/music/recordings/show/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat http://www.michaelnyman.com/music/recordings/show/the-man-wh...
smsm42 11y ago
It is a part of an excellent book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f... which is recommended for anyone who is interested in how the brains work. Interestingly enough, the article above links to Blindsight book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) which is also excellent and discusses somewhat related topics, though in a fictional setting.
- stephentmcm 11y ago
  For anyone looking for a great hard-scifi read Blindsight and it's sequel Echopraxia are actually brilliant reads.
  - louithethrid 11y ago
    Finnished the book Blindsight four days ago. Fascinating read.
  - geon 11y ago
    Available for free (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) here: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Thanks! I'm reading Blindsight now, and love it. For many years in one of my careers, I was a synthesist. But the term never occurred to me. Would have been good marketing. So it goes.
- yuchi 11y ago
  The book is one of my biggest trauma from my childhood. My mother was studying psychology and it was one of the books that most changed his view on the topic, and I was interested. Reading it, though cannot remember all of it, really gave me the feeling of how fragile such a complex system can be and how incredible are its recovering abilities. The “man who mistook his wife for a hat” is just one of the cases analyzed.
qCOVET 11y ago
Since we are on the subject of brain, does anyone know of a good article on how memory is stored and retrieved? I am always intrigued by the biologics of it ... if its purely electrical, how are these charges stored and isolated away from the rest of neuronal activity ... alternatively, what if life has chosen some bizarre quaternary structure of DNA to store the memory ...
- pugio 11y ago
  It's not very well understood yet, but one of my favorite layman pieces on recent research is at: http://www.wired.com/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/ http://www.wired.com/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/ Somewhat tangentially (but I can't resist), this excellent story by Ted Chiang explores the transience of memory, and the role technology might play in sustaining it: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_o...
  - qCOVET 11y ago
    Thank you ...
- lqdc13 11y ago
  There's this recent review: http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-etal%20(2012).pdf http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-etal%20... But whenever I read these, I always think they might be getting it largely wrong. In fact, they themselves admit to it being partially speculative information. I am by no means an expert, but I was neuroscience major in undergrad, and back then (~5-7 years ago) it wasn't known exactly for sure how it works besides the fact that a part of hippocampus interacts with other parts of the brain and that certain things are reinforced with more learning. Most of the well known and still relevant studies in the field look at people that have a particular part of the brain damaged and how it affected them. Obviously, there aren't too many of such patients. There are also studies in mice and other animals, but their brains work differently sometimes and other times there are a lot of unrelated variables. To give you an idea of where the field was a few years ago: I was a research assistant in a neuro-psych lab and we were giving animals drugs in large amounts and then checking whether the cells in a specific region of the brain are damaged. If the CA1 area of hipoccampus was damaged, we could say that it potentially affects memory formation. That was checked by the ability of a rat to solve puzzles it previously solved. Very crude, unfortunately.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
socceroos 11y ago
"I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my butthole." ...caught me by surprise. On a more serious note, I can draw comparisons with the subject of this piece. Nowhere near the same scale of degradation, but bits and pieces. Perhaps it's normal to have a certain margin for error where you can exhibit similar symptoms.
- bmmayer1 11y ago
  Ahem. Buttonhole.
- marincounty 11y ago
  The actual quote, "I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. ‘About six inches in length,’ he commented, ‘a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.’ ‘Yes,’ I said encouragingly, and what do you think it is, Dr P.?’ ‘Not easy to say.’ He seemed perplexed. ‘It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own ... I think this could be an inflorescence or flower.’ ‘Could be?’ I queried. ‘Could be,’ he confirmed. ‘Smell it,’ I suggested, and he again looked somewhat puzzled, as if I had asked him to smell a higher symmetry. But he complied courteously, and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life." In all honesty, after reading about the doctor; I know why he didn't want to let the world know about his sexuality; he didn't want his personal life interfering with his professional life. I always thought I was pretty liberal, and open minded person, but once I learned of his sexuality; I read his work in a different light. I am ashamed of it, and I hope I can grow from the preconcieved assumptions? Assumptions that were on a subconcious level? I found myself questioning why he wrote mini-essays on literally every patient? I found myself thinking, "Did he write the elaborate patient summaries for the patient's sake, or was their some other compulsion at play? No-not necessarily sexual, just questing the man--wrongly! Wow--I thought I was better than this? Anyways, I'm sorry he died, and I'm honestly not sure how he will be ranked in history among his peers. Will it be the brilliant doctor, or just another well meaning, average--Practicioner, who used his profession, and patients to get out of back breaking work? I understand his passion for writing, but there's a part of me that wonders--if he really cared about his patients, or did he used them as a muse to further his writing? I am sicken to admit this, but because I know about his personal life; my wild assumptions are wrongly running wild! Yes, they are, and I am ashamed of it. I a middle aged man who needs to learn so much more! Anyone who has followed my posts, know I am no fan of most MD's, except my own of course. Actually, one I have is in on it for the right reasons! The other's I have known; well I just hope they didn't stop learning after med. school, and realize doing the right thing is better than harming a patient for money? I hope? Oh, I hope? I will get pummeled for this post, but this is my Goodbye. Yes--it's an easy away to dodge the questions, but I'm done. When I researched the parent post(still not sure of the Internet lingo), I found it immediately indexed on Google--word for word! It was wrong--it is "buttonhole", but this guy's rude post is there forever. This guy made a terrible joke, but should it live forever? I finally realized/conceptualized how Noting Is Forgotten on HN. There Is No Annonymity On The Internet. How far off Is the day a post is tied to an IP address, and that address is published for all to see? We all know just how easy it is to obtain a IP. Goodby All. I really enjoyed my time here! Those suffering from mental illness, even slight--it gets better with age. I have no reason to lie. And while the doctor's death is tragic, he lived a long, good life. His patients are the ones we should be grieving for? I hope the next generation of doctors make these patients lives easier? In reality, so little progress has been made to Dr. Oliver's patients? So little? It's beyond sad?
Excluse 11y ago
I recently went to see Woz speak in Massachusetts and he claims he suffers from an affliction similar to this (the inability to recognize faces).
- smsm42 11y ago
  The condition is prosopagnosia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia and the wiki page says Saks himself suffered from it. It is not that rare, though many people that have it just think they are "bad with faces" or have bad memory when recognizing faces (even though otherwise their memory may be excellent). Many people that have it learn to "route around" it by explicitly memorizing facial cues (hairstyle, facial features, hair color) or other cues (clothing style, voice, body characteristics, etc.) and going off context ("if I meet this person in the office, this is one of my coworkers"). If the person is encountered out of context and in unusual attire/situation, they may not have enough clues to trigger recognition - so if somebody you know doesn't recognize you on the street, maybe they are not necessarily rude or avoiding you but maybe just have some prosopagnosia. :)
  - itsybitsycoder 11y ago
    Yup, one of my professors in college had this and she would use a different variation of her name in each facet of her life so that when she met someone out of context, she would know where she knew them from.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mirimir 11y ago
Old memories! Around the same time, I read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff (1987).[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Thi...

217 points by lermontov 11y ago

Retra 11y ago

And people think that their brains are so different from computers...

yathern 11y ago
Part of the article actually uses this as in exact example of how brains are different from computers. Granted, it's from 1983. The man in question essentially missed the forest for the trees - unable to perform any visual abstraction or familiarity, while still having strong abilities to identify the individual features of an object. At the end of the day, brains are, indeed quite different from computers. The closest things that I'm aware of are neural nets, which can be subject to biases and confusion in a similar way to human brains - rather than a CPU.
- seiji 11y ago
  neural nets, which can be subject to biases and confusion in a similar way to human brains - rather than a CPU. That's a slight abuse of comparisons. Saying an ANN is not like a CPU would be like saying your stomach is not like a refrigerator. An ANN is a universal approximator / universal modeler. A (turing-complete) CPU is a universal simulator. There's no native "CPU algorithm" to exploit or sample against for any knowledge retrieval.

roubachof 11y ago

http://www.michaelnyman.com/music/recordings/show/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat http://www.michaelnyman.com/music/recordings/show/the-man-wh...

smsm42 11y ago

It is a part of an excellent book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f... which is recommended for anyone who is interested in how the brains work. Interestingly enough, the article above links to Blindsight book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) which is also excellent and discusses somewhat related topics, though in a fictional setting.

stephentmcm 11y ago
For anyone looking for a great hard-scifi read Blindsight and it's sequel Echopraxia are actually brilliant reads.
- louithethrid 11y ago
  Finnished the book Blindsight four days ago. Fascinating read.
- geon 11y ago
  Available for free (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5) here: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
- mirimir 11y ago
  Thanks! I'm reading Blindsight now, and love it. For many years in one of my careers, I was a synthesist. But the term never occurred to me. Would have been good marketing. So it goes.
yuchi 11y ago
The book is one of my biggest trauma from my childhood. My mother was studying psychology and it was one of the books that most changed his view on the topic, and I was interested. Reading it, though cannot remember all of it, really gave me the feeling of how fragile such a complex system can be and how incredible are its recovering abilities. The “man who mistook his wife for a hat” is just one of the cases analyzed.

qCOVET 11y ago

Since we are on the subject of brain, does anyone know of a good article on how memory is stored and retrieved? I am always intrigued by the biologics of it ... if its purely electrical, how are these charges stored and isolated away from the rest of neuronal activity ... alternatively, what if life has chosen some bizarre quaternary structure of DNA to store the memory ...

pugio 11y ago
It's not very well understood yet, but one of my favorite layman pieces on recent research is at: http://www.wired.com/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/ http://www.wired.com/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/ Somewhat tangentially (but I can't resist), this excellent story by Ted Chiang explores the transience of memory, and the role technology might play in sustaining it: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_o...
- qCOVET 11y ago
  Thank you ...
lqdc13 11y ago
There's this recent review: http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-etal%20(2012).pdf http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-etal%20... But whenever I read these, I always think they might be getting it largely wrong. In fact, they themselves admit to it being partially speculative information. I am by no means an expert, but I was neuroscience major in undergrad, and back then (~5-7 years ago) it wasn't known exactly for sure how it works besides the fact that a part of hippocampus interacts with other parts of the brain and that certain things are reinforced with more learning. Most of the well known and still relevant studies in the field look at people that have a particular part of the brain damaged and how it affected them. Obviously, there aren't too many of such patients. There are also studies in mice and other animals, but their brains work differently sometimes and other times there are a lot of unrelated variables. To give you an idea of where the field was a few years ago: I was a research assistant in a neuro-psych lab and we were giving animals drugs in large amounts and then checking whether the cells in a specific region of the brain are damaged. If the CA1 area of hipoccampus was damaged, we could say that it potentially affects memory formation. That was checked by the ability of a rat to solve puzzles it previously solved. Very crude, unfortunately.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

socceroos 11y ago

"I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my butthole." ...caught me by surprise. On a more serious note, I can draw comparisons with the subject of this piece. Nowhere near the same scale of degradation, but bits and pieces. Perhaps it's normal to have a certain margin for error where you can exhibit similar symptoms.

bmmayer1 11y ago
Ahem. Buttonhole.
marincounty 11y ago
The actual quote, "I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. ‘About six inches in length,’ he commented, ‘a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.’ ‘Yes,’ I said encouragingly, and what do you think it is, Dr P.?’ ‘Not easy to say.’ He seemed perplexed. ‘It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own ... I think this could be an inflorescence or flower.’ ‘Could be?’ I queried. ‘Could be,’ he confirmed. ‘Smell it,’ I suggested, and he again looked somewhat puzzled, as if I had asked him to smell a higher symmetry. But he complied courteously, and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life." In all honesty, after reading about the doctor; I know why he didn't want to let the world know about his sexuality; he didn't want his personal life interfering with his professional life. I always thought I was pretty liberal, and open minded person, but once I learned of his sexuality; I read his work in a different light. I am ashamed of it, and I hope I can grow from the preconcieved assumptions? Assumptions that were on a subconcious level? I found myself questioning why he wrote mini-essays on literally every patient? I found myself thinking, "Did he write the elaborate patient summaries for the patient's sake, or was their some other compulsion at play? No-not necessarily sexual, just questing the man--wrongly! Wow--I thought I was better than this? Anyways, I'm sorry he died, and I'm honestly not sure how he will be ranked in history among his peers. Will it be the brilliant doctor, or just another well meaning, average--Practicioner, who used his profession, and patients to get out of back breaking work? I understand his passion for writing, but there's a part of me that wonders--if he really cared about his patients, or did he used them as a muse to further his writing? I am sicken to admit this, but because I know about his personal life; my wild assumptions are wrongly running wild! Yes, they are, and I am ashamed of it. I a middle aged man who needs to learn so much more! Anyone who has followed my posts, know I am no fan of most MD's, except my own of course. Actually, one I have is in on it for the right reasons! The other's I have known; well I just hope they didn't stop learning after med. school, and realize doing the right thing is better than harming a patient for money? I hope? Oh, I hope? I will get pummeled for this post, but this is my Goodbye. Yes--it's an easy away to dodge the questions, but I'm done. When I researched the parent post(still not sure of the Internet lingo), I found it immediately indexed on Google--word for word! It was wrong--it is "buttonhole", but this guy's rude post is there forever. This guy made a terrible joke, but should it live forever? I finally realized/conceptualized how Noting Is Forgotten on HN. There Is No Annonymity On The Internet. How far off Is the day a post is tied to an IP address, and that address is published for all to see? We all know just how easy it is to obtain a IP. Goodby All. I really enjoyed my time here! Those suffering from mental illness, even slight--it gets better with age. I have no reason to lie. And while the doctor's death is tragic, he lived a long, good life. His patients are the ones we should be grieving for? I hope the next generation of doctors make these patients lives easier? In reality, so little progress has been made to Dr. Oliver's patients? So little? It's beyond sad?

Excluse 11y ago

I recently went to see Woz speak in Massachusetts and he claims he suffers from an affliction similar to this (the inability to recognize faces).

smsm42 11y ago
The condition is prosopagnosia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia and the wiki page says Saks himself suffered from it. It is not that rare, though many people that have it just think they are "bad with faces" or have bad memory when recognizing faces (even though otherwise their memory may be excellent). Many people that have it learn to "route around" it by explicitly memorizing facial cues (hairstyle, facial features, hair color) or other cues (clothing style, voice, body characteristics, etc.) and going off context ("if I meet this person in the office, this is one of my coworkers"). If the person is encountered out of context and in unusual attire/situation, they may not have enough clues to trigger recognition - so if somebody you know doesn't recognize you on the street, maybe they are not necessarily rude or avoiding you but maybe just have some prosopagnosia. :)
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  Yup, one of my professors in college had this and she would use a different variation of her name in each facet of her life so that when she met someone out of context, she would know where she knew them from.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mirimir 11y ago

Old memories! Around the same time, I read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff (1987).[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Fire,_and_Dangerous_Thi...