Special Cases
A seventy-four year old man named "M" had a special case of auditory agnosia. "M" suffered from, "unilateral left posterior temporal and parietal damage", (Saygin, Leech, & Dick, 2010, p. 107) including Wernicke's Area. These areas of the brain are associated with language processing. He had a stroke when he was 62 and went through intensive speech therapy for twelve weeks to help him recover. He was able to regain his language capacity, but when tested at age 74, he had great difficulty in recognizing non-verbal environmental sounds. He did not have either verbal comprehension deficits nor peripheral hearing problems (p. 107). His condition was very rare because auditory agnosia for nonverbal sounds is usually associated with the right side of the brain. "M" was able to identify familiar Christmas songs and some animal sounds. When he heard music, he couldn't distinguish individual instruments or voices, but he knew it was music. fMRI scans show that after the stroke, his brain re-wired itself through neuronal compensation to account for the damage.
Read more about this topic: Auditory Agnosia
Famous quotes containing the words special and/or cases:
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)