9 examples of how people with different disorders see the world (10 photos)

We are accustomed to thinking that all the people around us perceive reality almost the same. However, this is not true. Firstly, the human brain is capable of creating illusions on its own, for example, the “déjà vu effect.” Second, head trauma, concussion, stroke, and mental disorders can lead to an inability to process sensory information—agnosia. It sounds scary, but let's try to understand how a person with a distorted sense of reality sees everything around him.





1. Prosopagnosia



This image may be scary, but it is how people with prosopagnosia remember other people's appearances, and sometimes their own. This is a facial perception disorder that affects the ability to recognize appearances, due to injury to the lower right occipital region of the brain.

2. Astigmatism





Sometimes it happens that people are not even aware of the existence of this disorder: many people suffer from congenital astigmatism, a vision defect caused by deformation of the lens, cornea or eye, which leads to the loss of the ability to see clearly.

3. Stroke



This image is simulated to give us a rough idea of ​​how a person after a stroke might see the world around them. Everything seems very familiar to him, but he cannot recognize anything. A stroke is a disruption of the blood supply to the brain, which is manifested by symptoms such as confusion, drowsiness, stupor, headache, vomiting, loss of consciousness, dizziness, and so on.

4. Akinetopsia



It is a neuropsychological disorder that results in the inability to perceive movement. A person perceives moving objects as a series of pictures that appear one after another and leave a blurry trace. Movements that are too fast are not noticeable at all. Akinetopsia occurs as a result of mechanical damage to the brain, stroke, or as a result of brain surgery.

5. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome



This syndrome distorts the perception of surrounding objects, their shape, size, space. Most often, micropsia affects people suffering from schizophrenia, organic brain damage or epileptic seizures.

6. Capgras syndrome



A person with this syndrome believes that someone in his family or himself has been replaced by an identical impostor. He can claim that he did nothing wrong, but that his double, who is exactly the same as him, did it. Initially, visual information is sent to the part of the brain responsible for recognizing objects, including faces. And the amygdala is responsible for the emotional reaction to this information. Damage to the fiber connecting these two parts of the brain causes the syndrome.

7. Synesthesia



This is a neurological phenomenon in which different sensory systems, such as visual and gustatory, are “coupled” and both respond to the same stimulus. For example, a person sees something purple and at the same time feels the taste of grapes. This occurs due to increased neural connections between areas of the brain responsible for different sensory systems.

8. Pareidolia



If you see a face in an iceberg in a photograph, then you suffer from pareidolia. A vague and indistinct visual image is perceived as something clear and definite: figures of people and animals in the clouds, in the starry sky or anywhere else. The brain, noticing familiar features in an object, immediately interprets the image as something more specific, such as a face.

9. Dyslexia



Dyslexia is a learning disability that affects literacy. People with this disorder have difficulty forming syllables, may perceive letters in the wrong order, and may have difficulty writing. The causes of the disorder may be hereditary or an uneven distribution of neural connections between the hemispheres of the brain.