The Body Has a Mind of Its Own by Sandra Blakeslee

Author:Sandra Blakeslee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588368126
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

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Not long after Bisiach led his patients through the Piazza experiment, he visited a lawyer who was also suffering from neglect. Facing the man, Bisiach asks him to describe his office while seated at his desk. No problem, the lawyer says, and proceeds to mention, in rich detail, his reading light, a painting, and every object on the right side of the room. Bisiach brings him around the other side of the desk and asks him to again describe the office. Now the lawyer describes his favorite piano, old tapestries, and other objects that were previously on his left. In the lawyer’s world, space on the left side of his body has vanished. It has vanished so completely, he isn’t even aware that it should be there. Meanwhile, his awareness of space on the right side has expanded.

Imagine how this feels. You wake up in the hospital and you’re told you’ve had a stroke. You have lost awareness of the space on the left side of your body. Everything and anything that takes place in that space escapes your notice. You ignore people on the left side of the room, eat only the food on the right side of your plate, read only the right side of the newspaper page. If you shave, you just scrape or buzz the right side of your face. If you put on lipstick, you apply it to the right side of your mouth only. You neglect all sights, sounds, touches, and even smells on the left side of space.

Your neurologist gives you a pencil and paper with a horizontal line drawn on it and asks you to bisect the line with an X. You mark the midpoint way off to the right. Next he asks you to draw a daisy. You make a nice stem and fat round center. But you only draw petals on the right side. When you draw a clock, all the numbers, one through twelve, are bunched on the right side of its face.

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