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12 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

Turning Images to Music

funny and laugh uproariously. A few minutes later, you could tell the same joke and he would find it just as funny as the first time. For him, every time was the first time, because he had lost the ability to record long-term memories. The syndrome is wonderfully depicted in the film 50 First Dates starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Another patient with specific stroke damage was unable to recall the names of fruits but, oddly, could still name vegetables. Interestingly tomatoes presented a particular problem. He had probably never known how to catalogue them so they were partially remembered in both areas.

There are many such medical cases. In Oliver Sachs’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, the author relates the tale of a man with visual agnosia who could not reliably name familiar objects, including his own wife! He had a perfectly loving relationship with her but simply could not name her from a picture. Sachs, Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine, provides many such fascinating stories, along with their medical backgrounds.

The fruit and vegetable case suggests our brains are organized like a filing cabinet. When we damage a part of the brain, it’s like losing a drawer: All the information stored in that drawer is lost. Quite a few experiments contradict this model and indicate many tasks are distributed around the brain. The curious case of blindsight is one such example. People with a damaged visual cortex can often recognize objects despite reporting they have no sensation of vision. Show them a shape and they will report they can see nothing. Ask them to name the shape and they might even get a little irritated by the question; they are blind after all. But, ask them to guess the shape and they will get it right every time. Seeing is more

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