DE CASTRO, Princess Antonette G.

SY1125

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, fought to regain
his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned, whereas Dr. P. was not fighting, did not
know what was lost, did not indeed know that anything was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was
more the damned the man who knew it, or the man who did not?
In my opinion, the more damned is the one who knows but still fighting, because the more
innocent you were, the more youll keep on living you normal life as if nothing would go wrong. Based on
what I have read, Dr. P. is diagnosed with a profound visual agnosia. Visual agnosia is the inability of
the brain to recognize or understand visual stimulus. An individual with visual agnosia has otherwise
normal visual functioning and can see, but is unable to interpret or recognize what they are seeing. Visual
agnosia is often due to bilateral damage in the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe in the brain.
Commonly, patients can describe objects in their visual field in great detail, including such aspects as
color, texture and shape but are unable to recognize them. Similarly, patients can often describe familiar
objects from memory despite their visual problems. Agnosia means "loss of knowledge" in Greek. There
are two major types of visual agnosia are apperceptive and associative visual agnosia. Failure in highlevel object recognition despite normal vision is apperceptive visual agnosia. Associative visual agnosias
are categorized by inability to identify objects due to impaired access to stored semantic information
about the objects.
As for the case of Dr. P. I think he have both types of visual agnosia . He fails to recognize
objects despite of clear vision like what he did to the rose and the gloves, he describes it clearly and he
cannot categorize objects just like what he had done when he mistook his wife as his hat. As a person,
we have five senses that God had given to us. I believe that God will never abandon us that is why he
equipped man with five senses. So even if we lose one, there are still four. Even though Dr. P. cannot
identify things and often to mistook things, he used his very gifted sense of hearing to continue his
journey. Everything is possible to him as long as he makes it a song. Dr. Ps illness were very visible
through his paintings, all of his earlier work was naturalistic and realistic, with vivid mood and
atmosphere, but finely detailed and concrete. Then, years later, they became less vivid, less concrete,
less realistic and naturalistic, but far more abstract, even geometrical and cubist. The last paintings
become nonsense, mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint.
Today, I think if Dr. P. is still alive, he is probably living a normal life that he had all the time with
his music and paintings and his wife. In my own understanding of what I have read, visual agnosia has
no cure or doesnt have a cure yet and there are no ways to prevent visual agnosia yet. I totally agree
with Dr. Sacks to what he has found right and what he had prescribed with Dr. P. that he is a wonderful
musician and music is his life. Music is his life, music has been the center since the beginning, he just
have to make it a whole of his life. Music for him had taken the place of image. He had a body-music,
this is why he could move and act fluently as he did but came to a total confusion sometim es. Music as
pure will.
Dr. P., a man who had wholly lost the world as representation, but wholly preserved it as
music and will.