10 Incredibly Strange Brain Disorders

 

You're used to relying on your brain. Whatever else happens, your personal lump of gray matter will take in the world, and respond to it in a fluid and predictable way. But actually, whatever your brain does is made up of many successive mental steps — and if just one of those steps fails, you'll find yourself behaving very differently.

Here are 10 weird and highly specific brain conditions, and what they each show us about the human brain.

10. Astasia-Abasia Patients Are Always On the Verge of Falling

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.

9. Anosognia Patients Are Unable to Recognize Their Own Injuries

Anosognia arises in conjunction with other injuries — generally strokes and blindness. People who have lost the ability to control one half of their body will say that they just don't want to move that part of their body. They'll say that that half of the body is really working normally, after all. When doctors show that it isn't working, they'll say that the body parts that the doctors are pointing to belong to someone else, or even that they have three hands, arms, or legs, and are moving the ones that the doctors don't see. There was even a case of a woman who had gone almost completely blind but insisted that she could see normally - cobbling together a 'vision' of what was happening around her from glimpses on the undamaged parts of her eyes, from memories, and from any sounds that she could hear around her.

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