Cgsc 1001 - the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Everyone perceives perception differently, such that Oliver Sacks found in some of his patients as explained in his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. His patients have an odd way of how they handle things due to their dysfunction of cognitive ability, to the point where they don’t notice they have any abnormalities, believing they are normal human beings. Throughout his book we learn of such perceptions, how varied these perceptions can be, from a patient being unable to identify landscapes and portraits due to a lack of visual processing to a  set of twins having no sense of mathematical intelligence, yet able to process prime numbers up to digits of 20 within seconds (Sacks,1985). In order to understand the target example, determining how different perceptions work differently based on the sensory type, by focusing on the base example.

Madeleine J. was an intelligent 60 year old blind woman with cerebral palsy who was admitted to the hospital in 1980. She also has spasticity and athetosis in her hands, which caused her hand movements to act sporadically. Due to the lack of use of her hands throughout her life, she could only sense touch and pain, the most basic of the senses through the use of her hands. Madeleine did not have the need to explore, nor to try and identify objects that were given to her, yet her hands were perfectly capable of doing so. She had a large impairment of perception, until Dr. Sacks experimented, had her nurses have her wait longer than normal to feed her, to the point where she got impatient and hungry to reach out and grab a bagel. This marked her first manual perception, recognizing the bagel, which lead her hands wanting to explore more of the world. Madeleine then went on to become the Blind Sculptress of St. Benedict’s, sculpting simple objects, to more complex human figures with clay (Sacks,1985).

Humans and animals have the ability to transform informational energy and environmental energy into electrical energy which allows humans and animals alike to convert this type of energy into cognitive processes and experiences through sensations, and thus create perceptions. This is the process of acquiring energy from the surroundings through sensory receptors through the somatosensory system, which extracts energy from chemical, eletrco-magnetic, mechanical and thermal information to create sensations. The sensations gained from the surroundings causes humans and animals to perceive interpretations of these sensations differently. There are six types of senses the somatosensory system uses, these include; auditory, visual, haptic, gustatory, proprioceptive, and olfactory. Focusing on the haptic perceptive experience which determines the sense of touch.

Madeleine had an issue with her haptic perceptive experience due to her lack of use of her hands throughout her life. While being able to identify the elementary senses, she was unable to determine what objects were until she was forced to do so. When Dr. Sacks asked her to identify his hand, she could not, due to the incapableness of her sensory receptors to distinguish the information of the object in front of her. Her sensory receptors activated once she decided to pick up the bagel by recognizing that she was hungry, allowing her to finally acquire the haptic perceptive experience she had never had during the sixty years she has been alive for. By picking up the bagel, her receptors interacted correctly with the information presented before her, which was converted into electrical energy due to the compatibleness of the informational and environmental energy surrounding her. This electrical energy allows neurons in the brain to communicate with the sensory system, which creates individual perceptive experiences allowing her to assess the environment in multiple ways.