Topic: Some of the best diseases and brain disorders.
+Anonymous A — 13.5 years ago #19,950
1. Anosognosia. Someone with anosognosia is physiologically incapable of realizing they have a disability. If they're paralyzed and a doctor asks them to move their arm, they’ll notice their arm not moving and just make up reasons for why it's not moving, like “I just did” or “that’s not my arm, that's my daughter's arm that just happens to be attached to my shoulder." But they’re not in denial. Patients with strokes on the left side of their brain almost never suffer it, even though the left side controls the right half of the body in about the same way the right side controls the left half. It's literally physically impossible for their brains to understand that they can’t move. Some people think this disorder is a failure of rationality, meaning the part of the brain that changes its mind when presented with new evidence in the right hemisphere is somehow malfunctioning. Realize what this means: it's perfectly possible that you, right now, could be severely disabled but are neurologically incapable of realizing it. That's sort of disturbing. 2. Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome. This one's pretty self-explanatory. It's when people experience sudden death, usually during sleep. It deserves to appear on this list mainly because of the awesome name. I mean, is that the coolest name for a disease ever, or what? It would totally work in a movie. An assassin is trying to get past some security guards on his way to kill a dictator or whatever, and he sneaks into the hospital and steals a doctor's uniform and says to him, "General, I'm afraid your test results show that you have Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome." "Oh really?" he says. "What are the symptoms of - "diaaaaaghh!!!" *thud* as the assassin cuts off his head and runs away into the night. That'd be a cool movie. But anyway, people say it's caused by a defect in a sodium channel in the heart that causes it to experience electrical spasms during sleep, which kills you. It also deserves to be here because it inspired the movie Nightmare on Elm Street, and because many people who actually survive the heart spasms report that they were attacked by demons. Yep.
3. Mirror-touch synesthesia. This one is basically the key to world peace. Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when you do something, and when you see others do that same thing. I drink something, they fire; I watch someone else drink something, they also fire even if you don't move. It's been suggested that mirror neurons are essential for empathy and for developing a theory of mind. But mirror-touch synesthesia causes you to literally feel the pain that someone else feels that is in your line of sight. For instance, if you have it and you see someone else get punched in the nose, you feel the exact same pain they do. If you watch someone get stabbed in the chest, you'll scream in agony too. Also if you see someone experience pleasure, you'll feel it as well. It's basically hyper-empathy. It'd be literally impossible to hurt anyone within your visual field if you suffer from this "disorder", and you'd actually be biologically compelled to be as friendly as possible. If there was a virus that somehow infected everyone with this, world peace would happen within five minutes.
4. Echopraxia. Related to mirror neurons. It's what happens when they go bad. Normally they just fire quietly to themselves when they see someone else doing something, but in victims of echopraxia, the signals run down the motor nerve to the muscles and force the body to follow suit. So that means echopraxiacs are compelled to mimic actions they see others performing. That would suck.
5. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. This is a disorder in the parietal lobe which is in charge of your spatial awareness and your perception of external things relative to your body. You perceive everything as much smaller or larger than it actually is. In a room, a door knob can appear to be the size of the door itself. The flat floor can appear to slope upwards and then completely drop off. The walls can seem to close in one moment and move outwards to the horizon the next. Etc. Your visual perception is so altered that you can completely lose grasp of reality. You'll be confused by practically everything you see. This can be caused by migraines and acute fever (and of course LSD).
I can think of a lot more, but now I'm bored of writing all this. What are some others you know?
+Anonymous B — 13.5 years ago, 3 minutes later[T] [B] #243,581
Interesting, thanks for posting.
+ducky !LZ0E5ojVGY — 13.5 years ago, 44 seconds later, 4 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #243,582
i like number 3
+Domestos Fortress — 13.5 years ago, 16 minutes later, 20 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #243,599
i think it is
+Anonymous E — 13.5 years ago, 32 seconds later, 20 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #243,600
Ass Burgerz
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