Anosognosia: An Anomaly Among Neurological Disorders.
Anosognosia, a neurological disorder that causes the patient to be unable to recognize the existence of another disorder that he/she suffers from, has attributed to the topic on the relationship between the mind and body. It has spawned some curiosities relating to how the mind and body interact, and most of all, it has contributed to the barrel of psychological questions still left unanswered. The research on anosognosia as of today has taken on the neurological approach to hopefully explain this anomality, however, it seems that the answers do not concretely remain on the neurobiological level; some experiences resulted in the logic of Freud's psychoanalytical approach. In result, a mix of the two approaches seem to explain more clearly the relationship between the mind and the body, although there are still more questions than there are answers.

The neurological approach that Vilayanur Ramachandran (a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego) took when experimenting on his patients who suffered from strokes helped create his theory of an abstract device in the brain which he referred to as the "anomaly detector." It appeared that his patients who suffered damage to the right parietal cortex were the only ones who had developed anosognosia. Gradually, Ramachandran came up with the idea that the "anomaly detector" whose role is to play the devil's advocate (by revealing the anomality to the suffering individual) is located in the right hemisphere, and is in a sense, asleep in the patients who have right hemisphere damage, and therefore is inactive, unable to yield the left hemisphere from forming confabulations, denying the patients the truth of their paralysis. This idea of the sleeping "anomaly detector" has brought Ramachandran to pursue other tests on anosognosiacs. These new experiments, however, tend to lean towards the psychoanalytical approach. Thus, Ramachandran started out with the neurological approach and anosognosia led him to take a psychoanalytical approach to find out more about the relationship between the mind and body.

Dreams, well-theorized as the mind's activity to review materials during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep play the main key to Ramachandran's next test. If dreams are indeed "truth sessions - an honest review of events occurring in one's life, than the anosognosiacs have a chance of being able to dream undeniably about their paralysis. Ramachandran figures that it could be possible to get his patients to come to terms with their paralysis when waking them during their sleep and asking them to describe what they had dreamt. This falls along the line similar to Freud's method of free association. Through anosognosia, Ramachandran was able to compare his theory of the "anomaly detector" to Freud's abstractions of the superego, the ego, and the id; that the mind has defense mechanisms to protect the ego and to maintain its stay in the "comfort zone" thus denying true information that appears as threatening, too much for the ego to take.

If anything, anosognosia has built a bridge covering the chasm between the neurological approach and the psychoanalytical approach, relating the functions of the brain (the body) to the abstract, immaterial mind that Freud heavily explored in his case studies. This particular study has helped validate the questionable psychoanalytical approach by referring back to it after reliable neurological experiments. However, nothing is certain, and everything will remain to a degree, uncertain since the "abstract" is so difficult to define and so easy to postulate ideas that can very well be false.

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