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10 incredibly strange brain disorders

#1
Magical Realist Offline
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5874229/10-incred...-disorders

"Astasia-Abasia is also known as Blocq's Disease, after Paul Blocq, the French doctor who first described it. It's the inability to stand or walk properly, but there's more to it. At first, a person with this condition appears very drunk. Patients lurch when they try to stand or walk. Patients seem dangerous to themselves. They overbalance extravagantly, always catching themselves at the last moment. But that's the condition — they always catch themselves.

People with Blocq's Disease almost never hurt themselves. They only fall when a doctor, a loved one, or a soft place on the ground is available. Often this condition is in response to stress. The most famous case of this happened in the 1960s, when not one but two cadets at West Point came down with the condition, doctors believe as a response to the pressure of training at the prestigious school."
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#2
C C Offline
Quote:2. Anhedonia Patients Can't Take Pleasure in Anything

The globus pallidus is the part of the brain that regulates when we get rewarded with a little burst of pleasure chemicals. Sometimes that burst can be in response to a pleasurable event, or a reward for doing something that we deem necessary, or even just the cessation of pain. Anhedonia happens when damage to the globus pallidus shuts off the reward system entirely. Often this is seen in recovering drug addicts - especially meth users. Sometimes strokes also do damage to the globus pallidus. Those strokes that do hit that part of the brain are associated with greater and longer depressions than those that don't. But anhedonia doesn't have to be a 'global' response, cutting out all pleasure. It can take single pleasures away from people, too. There was one case in which a 71-year-old musician, stopped feeling a pleasure response when he listened to music. Although he had listened to music he enjoyed before he had a small stroke, afterwards he felt no emotional response to it whatsoever.

I remember a woman suffering from extremely deep clinical depression remarking that nothing in her life seemed significant or satisfying anymore. Her house, hobbies, job, husband, children, etc had suddenly all become ungratifying. It's amazing how a concept like "reward" or any concept can affect the interpreted existence of an object or activity. Something "extra" was being applied which might have been considered beforehand to be an inherent property of that target of attention.

There's even a clinical condition where the cognitive-evaluative dimension of pain can be lost, along with the affective-motivational dimension. The sensory-discriminative dimension of pain is still there, but the conception of the pain as being unpleasant and the urge to escape it becomes absent. [Of course, opiates may induce similar but this is minus such.]
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